The Problem
America isn't the bastion of freedom we pretend it is.
In nearly all structured environments, children are disconnected from their autonomy and sense of self. This results in a range of emotional and psychological patterns of disordered thinking. For instance, children who are drilled into a tightly-regimented education system that rewards learning benchmarks with grades might tie their self worth to a one-time score and make major life decisions in moments of low self-esteem.
This story plays out time and again with young children in reading or math. A child as young as eight or nine might fail a math test and decide that they are no good in the subject. The remaining years of schooling are occupied with fear about math. They avoid going the extra mile. After all, why bother? Math isn’t for them.
A similar script plays out for young children with reading. There are countless philosophies about how children best learn to read, but they all involve access to books and seeing models of fluent reading. For some children, reading is not grasped until age seven or even later. For other children, books become a home-away-from-home for them, a source of escape, entertainment, and security, at a much younger age. Whatever your child’s journey to reading looks like, schools are not designed to respect that journey. Instead, children are unfairly categorized and tracked based on their reading fluency and comprehension well before many children have opened their hearts and minds to books. Again, we see school become a source of anxiety for our late readers from whom an enormous amount is demanded in the way of reading texts. Having decided that reading is something they aren’t “good at,” that child will soon shy away from all humanities, cutting off their inherent human connection to our stories and our history.
These examples illustrate some of the damage that is done in formal schooling. Both cases are about the system’s interference with a child’s natural development. Schools are not designed to nurture this development and if we want our children to be hungry for excellence and liberty-loving, we must make major changes that support their individual development, accepting the spectacular variety of human personalities and abilities and letting our children unfold and grow in the directions that feel most natural to them.
Schools are not the only problem.
Schools are not the only problem, but as the place where millions of children spend most of their days, it is little wonder that we look to schools to examine the modern crisis of confidence and anxiety plaguing American children. They don’t feel at home with their talent. They are terrified to make mistakes. They don’t trust their own personal voice and opinion. These are not the ingredients for free people. We must un-do these negative thought patterns. We must seek a better way to raise children in this world.
High-achieving children must be driven by internal motivators. To do well must be valued by the child themselves. Without this team effort, the family alongside the child, no success can be sustained. If we teach our children to seek nothing beyond external validation like grades and test scores, we are setting them up for an unhappy life. An unhappy life is one where the human being is scared to put themselves out there, to forge meaningful interpersonal relationships, to hone and share their God-given talents. These are symptoms of a deep riff in how we think about children and childhood. They are symptoms of intellectual servants and a non-creative class of people. This is not freedom. Just because such unhappiness seems run-of-the-mill, doesn’t mean that it is just. In fact, it is the opposite of just. It is a state of servitude to systems of thought and physical institutions. That is not freedom.
Why do so many high-achieving children flounder as adults?
How many high-achieving children do you know who have grown up to flounder or struggle to launch into adult life? Most people can think of several examples. Where does this “failure to launch” originate? Many families with high-achieving children feel threatened by the ideas laid out in this book. These families have moved into the best school districts, invested in after-school activities like tutoring, music, or athletics. They have organized behavior and chore wheels in the house and prioritize homework and studying and college. Why would such carefully-raised children struggle to earn their sea legs once they leave college and find themselves, for the first time, outside of any structured institution?
I have a distinct memory of sitting in the Boston Copley Plaza library in the big green reading room. I was a few months post-Bachelor’s. I had decided that since I had chosen not to earn an English degree (a thing I always suspected I might do), I would spend the year post-graduation reading the great American canon. I sat down with my copy of The Souls of Black Folk and read it, cover-to-cover, in one sitting. I was enthralled and overjoyed by the writing and the new ideas. One thing nagged at me, however. I wasn’t a student anymore. Would anyone care that I had read this great book?
I, like so many other intelligent people, have been the victim of the American education and socialization system. That system set me up to only care about external motivators. Successful in high school and college, I graduated with such a meager sense of myself that I couldn’t even learn from and enjoy a book without wondering where my “atta boy” would come from. I had never been taught that learning is lifelong. I had never been taught that adults continue learning new skills all the time. I had been carefully-raised, but had I been carefully-raised to be free? No. I had been raised to achieve, to succeed, to never let them see you sweat. The result, unsurprisingly, was an unhappy life as I wrestled with the notion of learning for its own sake, because of internal motivation, throughout my twenties.
My schooling was top-of-the-line by any traditional standard. Why, then, was I so disconnected from my sense of self? From my autonomy? It happened because that is precisely what formal schooling is set up to do; to degrade the power of the individual and inculcate them into a system where they must appease the powers-that-be to achieve success. To undergo this process is not the choice of a free person. To do it during childhood, a time of monumental growth, discovery, experimentation, and vulnerability, is utter lunacy.
We send them out into the world without the very things that they need most.
With all the forces that be cueing in our children on how to behave and what to do and how to sit and when to speak, it is little wonder that we graduate young people into the adult world without the tools to be fully themselves. We send them out without what they need, precisely because we have cut them off from their brains, hearts, and bodies through the routine degradation of the child’s autonomy. By the time it is time to leave the nest, our children lack any relationship to the self, a confident voice, an agenda. We must re-establish these critical elements of human development if we want to raise truly free people.