School Is Not Enough

Children need purposeful work to develop agency and self-possession. That education is unlikely to happen in school.

 
What is education for?

Despite the fact that the education of ourselves and our children takes up a great deal of our lives, few stop to ask that simple question. Simon Sarris’s new article challenges the dominant assumptions about how children should be educated, focusing instead on how children develop the agency needed to become successful adults. Current institutions, Sarris believes, are currently acting as impediments to that goal:

It is difficult to blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence. When meaningful work is an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression. It would be surprising if it was not. Unlike the past, where many smart children finished sooner, modern education endlessly ushers them towards an often farther and more abstract future—one so far away and abstract that some children become infected with the opposite of agency. They take on a learned helplessness and downplay that the future is a reality at all.

Raising agentic children is the prerequisite to having a society of agentic adults. Exposure to the serious work we currently reserve to adults will give them the confidence to become statesmen, innovators, and founders. Read Simon’s article to learn what that entails.

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