Open Door Days

A proposal for a missing community function

I graduated high school without having hiked or camped once — but with a pretty clear sense of my preferences in opera. (I still love Verdi). I carried in my head a tremendous amount of trigonometry, but no idea how to repair a car — that was to be left to some fairly catastrophic experiments in my 20s. I was even familiar with Louis XIV’s unusual bathing practices, thanks to a raconteur of a history teacher, but there was no time to receive any meaningful sex education.

You have to admit — the sheer degree of randomness in what we teach kids is pretty remarkable.

I learned a lot about Louis XIV, but some other topics maybe should have been higher on the list! Credit: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Public Domain

Some of that randomness comes from parents, and that is to be expected when there are just one or two adults doing most of it (though it’s worth asking why we concentrate parenting in just a few people). I happened to be born to two classical musicians, hence the beautifully random exposure I had to opera at an early age.

But a lot of this randomness is neither necessary nor helpful. Some of it comes from a grand misunderstanding. Schools think that families are offering their kids exposure to the world, so they can focus on the required academics. And parents often think that schools have got all learning covered, so they can focus on the hard job of supporting a family.

Both tend to be missing an ingredient: community. But that’s jumping the gun a bit. Let’s unpack this a little.

First, let’s look at what happens in schools. In my own education and from what I see in middle and high schools around the US, most classes are formal, pre-planned, and heavy on academic requirements. There usually isn’t a time when students are offered a taste of many different things, with the chance to choose what they’d like to go further into. There’s no “survey course”, no function dedicated to offering exposure without requirement.

I know that’s a generalization, and of course some schools have found a way to let in some more variety. I recently visited a school district where the middle schools have an elective period for faculty to offer their hobbies or passions, and students can choose which to try out. Beautiful! This is a step in the right direction.

But let’s imagine a few more steps, activating the resource that schools systematically overlook, as they face pressure to try to contain every educational function in one building. That resource would be the community around them.

When I was first out of college, I started a nonprofit to try and provide a bit of this. It was called Spark, and the idea was to be a matchmaker between disadvantaged middle school students and professionals who had a job that intrigued them. They could pick anything and try it for somewhere between a few weeks and a few months, visiting a workplace after school in a mini-apprenticeship. They could even join again and pick a new field. Try being a doctor this month, an accountant the next.

As you can imagine it was a total blast to see what happened as a result. Students worked alongside architects, pilots, police officers, just about every job you can imagine. Our data showed that they became significantly more motivated in school, and ultimately were more likely to graduate from high school.

But we noticed a problem fairly early on, even in this program that was about exposure and playful introductions. If we asked new students what job they wanted to explore, sometimes we had the feeling that they were choosing from a very short mental list. We didn’t want to judge those choices, but when we began to notice that the same handful of careers (I recall teacher, doctor, and hair stylist were strangely well-represented!) we started to wonder — is it possible they just don’t know about many other careers?

Over time, we found ways to introduce students to more options before they chose their first apprenticeship. We invited older students who had completed apprenticeships to share with younger students, and created curriculum to offer them a range of options. It gradually dawned on me that I had a huge blind spot, maybe by age, maybe by privilege — when we set out, I thought middle schoolers were aware of lots of jobs in the world. They were not. And when they gained that awareness, not surprisingly they made much more varied choices, and I believe were more likely to find something that really excited them.

You can see where this is all going. I think that adolescents are under-exposed to the real world.

Photo of a Spark student during an aviation apprenticeship, circa 2005. I thought there was no chance we could find a pilot willing to donate their time — and thankfully I was utterly wrong, because the first person we called agreed to do it!

After all, in the span of human history, the middle to high school years were when young people took on real responsibility in their community, likely discovering their value as they contributed it, able to easily discern the relevance of their work. Now we’ve formalized these functions, and packaged them all up into “school”, which even in the best cases is not as fascinating, varied, or dynamic as any healthy “real world” community. Meanwhile, parents are often so busy working (no judgment here — I am one of them!) that they wishfully tell themselves that school can cover most or all of their child’s learning needs.

School would ideally be a launchpad, a safe base of operations, but it has become the entire container of a student’s learning experience.

So where is this all going? I think that we need to re-introduce adolescents to the community resources around them. This may sound silly or obvious, but I don’t think it’s often done. It could look like apprenticeships, as with the program I started. I believe those are one of the most under-utilized and powerful tools for learning we have. It could look like expert guests in classes, drawn from the community. Whatever it is, it should be driven by student choice.

Here’s one way I’d love to see it happen: What if there were a community expectation that everyone, no matter what your job, should spend a few hours per year to tell young people about it? Not just the parents in the school, though that’s a natural starting point, but also could skew things, for example with parental income level determining which jobs are showcased. What if this were a community responsibility?

I love the tradition of “Open Studio” events, where artists all over a city open their studios and sell works on the same weekend. I always wish I could teleport myself around the city to see all the beauty on offer. What if we borrowed this idea, and set aside a few days per year when workplaces around a city were opened to young people? You could walk in and see what a commercial kitchen is like, how a programmer codes, what it’s like to walk into a big corporate office, how a fire station functions, or whatever else you might be curious about. I’m sure someone can come up with a much better name than “Open Door Days”, but that’s what first came to mind!

I have to imagine that a town or city with Open Door Days would be a healthier and more connected place. Better still if students helped to organize it. Connectedness would grow, both between generations and among adults. Kids would be sparked by workplaces, ideas, people, and future dreams that hadn’t animated them before. Adults who are not parents might feel more bought-in to the collective responsibility of raising children. And while the logistics would be complex, the costs could be minimal.

At heart, this idea captivates me because I believe in two things. First: kids are inherently, exceptionally good at learning — better than you or I, and that’s a good thing! And second: the world beyond school walls holds an abundance of rich learning. We can worry less about stuffing it all into school, or about the content we want to pour into kids’ heads. Instead let’s focus more on facilitating adolescents’ entry to the real world. We need them to get hooked by something, and then to have the time to plunge into a short or long-term obsession with that idea, topic, team, workplace, vision, etc. And then to try again. To keep playing, to keep experimenting with their identity, with what they love, with what the world has to offer.

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In Other News…

• Challenge Accepted funded! Big BIG thanks to all of you who supported the Kickstarter campaign for my next book, Challenge Accepted. This one is all about how to help middle schoolers get out and do things in the world, with playful guidance through 50 challenges — like how to become a babysitter, start a microbusiness, resolve a friendship conflict, camp overnight, rescue an animal, and much more. The book is now well on its way through the production process and should be available online and in stores this August!

• The Ox and The Ferrari. I took a glance at the statistics for my posts last year, and was surprised to see that one post — The Ox and the Ferrari — had far more readers than anything else I wrote in 2024. If you’ve subscribed since I posted it last spring, you can check it out here. It gives another piece of the argument above, about how we accidentally end up coercing kids to do things they would do better on their own.