The Ox and the Ferrari

Why we accidentally slow kids down — and how to change

Let’s say your passion is to make falafel and hummus. What could be better than a lightly fried ball of chickpea dough and spices, in the most wonderful dip ever invented? You’re so passionate about it that you decide to open a small shop to offer what you love to others. Soon, you have a loyal following and a viable business. Others are nourished and delighted by your passion. Life is good.

Credit: Wade Austin Ellis

Now let’s imagine that in an earnest effort to improve the populace, it is determined that all residents must dine at your café. It’s good for them, the authorities argue. You start to receive many more customers. But shockingly, many of them behave quite badly. Some throw your food on the floor. As they’re disrespectful to you, you begin to grow distrustful of them. In fact to you, honest café owner, people in general start to seem less trustworthy. Perhaps they need some “tough love.” Maybe you could put them in some kind of detention, or make them clean the squashed falafels off the floor.

Education could be a lot closer to the first example — a sharing of a particular human genius with those who are curious and drawn to it. But right now, education is much closer to the second example. We coerce everyone to have a certain type of food at a certain time of day. As they naturally resist this coercion, which is what humans do, things go from bad to worse. Coercion destroys the quality of our relationships.

In this weirdly coercive café, not only do we become mistrustful of others (forgetting that they never chose to come here, anyway), we begin to go against our own natural motivations. Your coerced customers start to have unpleasant feelings about eating. This is what happens in school — coerced to learn in certain ways, kids decide they don’t like learning. If that’s what it means to learn, they’ve had more than enough of it when the bell rings to end the school day. The most natural impulse in the world, curiosity, is foiled.

We have a problem. And I will do my best to suggest some ways out. The problem is not just that we coerce kids constantly — it’s that we don’t notice we are doing it anymore.

I believe that in future generations, if things go modestly well, people will look back on this era of education with a bit of shock. What we routinely do to kids — put them in schools and programs all day, with minimal time to move their bodies or socialize let alone follow their natural curiosity, where we impose a notion of what is “normal” that is ungrounded in science and enforced via heavy rewards and punishments — will be seen as downright medieval. It’s a kind of trauma that is so common that we can’t notice it. After all, trauma refers to unusually severe harm. What is severe and common is just seen as, well, life. Until people start to think differently. I’d bet anything that in the future, we will.

And to be clear, the people in the system are not to blame for this. We’re all dragged along by the inertia of industrial-style schooling, invented in the late 1800s when factories were all the rage, and when children were treated with much less regard than we aim for today. The question is: how do we change?

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Step 1: Make it Conscious

The first step to undoing this, I believe, is simply to notice. Notice how often we coerce kids. We tell them what to eat and when. When to wake up and when to sleep. What to learn, and how to prove to us they learned that thing we asked. When to stop focusing on one topic and switch (as in when the bell rings) to the next. When they can spend time with friends. And on it goes. Notice how you do this, and notice what happens when kids fail to respond as you wish. Do you blame the coercion, or do you blame them? Let’s admit it — we usually blame them. Let’s allow the possibility that it may not be entirely fair.

I take as ground truth that every behavior you see from a child is their honest best solution available to a problem at hand. The child is not the problem. Sometimes their solution is. And often, the environment we put them in is the problem.

Step 2: Find Small Steps

There are rare schools out there that offer less coercive environments, and there are many parents who look for this by choosing to homeschool, unschool, worldschool, etc. Honestly, I’m finding myself more and more drawn to those paths. But I recognize the privilege in even considering that. And I know I have a tendency to go to a logical extreme, which sometimes makes me forget about the small steps that are ready now. You don’t necessarily have to pull your child out of school. You could take small steps that start to create moments of freedom, choice, and agency.

After all, recall the recent study by Peter Gray et al showing correlations between declining childhood independence and the increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders in teens. Most young people need choice and agency as a key ingredient in their well-being. And with this well-being comes their natural curiosity and intrinsic motivation.

So, how do we offer more choice and agency? Small steps, remember. Could your child design a summer adventure? Could you make a short list of friends, aunts, or uncles who have a skill they could offer, and invite your child to choose one to learn from and hang out with as a special weekend routine? Teachers, could you reframe projects to allow more space for students to come up with solutions that you did not expect? Could you ask them for a list of topics they want to learn about, and find links between those and the upcoming units you have to teach? Could you slightly shorten a learning sequence in order to allow a learn-anything or students-teaching-students day?

I know that to some this will come across as naïve, or simplistic. Of course it’s true that greater student agency won’t solve all of our problems. We need physical and psychological safety, the presence of loving relationships, and essential ingredients I’ve written about for life design, like variety and self-reflection. But I’m writing this because when I look at current schools, I see a deeply unhealthy degree of coercion instead of student agency. I think we need to wake up to these coercive systems, and meet the fundamental need that students (actually all of us) have to feel some control over our own time and focus. Only then, I believe, can students access their genuine curiosity and their full learning potential.

Step 3: Peek Behind the Curtain

Like the great Wizard of Oz looming in front of us, our common stories about school convince us that there is one true path to a glimmering future of success — eager, obedient participation in school, with a series of academic credentials leading to an impressive LinkedIn profile, and soon, wealth and happiness follow.

And just like the Wizard of Oz, somewhere off in the corner behind that impressive mirage, there is a small man behind the curtain, frantically operating the controls. That small man is actually, I hate to say it — us. It’s our fear. Without a doubt it comes from love, from cherishing our children and wanting them to thrive. But in our fearfulness, we are like the manic Wizard of Oz anxiously pulling this lever — more math tutoring! — and this lever — professional college essay coach! — and so on. We turn these into big, looming moral statements to our kids and students, like the Wizard projecting his image in front of them.

Pay no attention the man behind the curtain!

So as a small step, what if you simply held this “story” — which tells us that urgent adult action is needed to protect our kids from the dangerous and competitive world — as one that is not entirely true? That’s the peek behind the curtain. And if you want to pull the curtain back farther, read books like Blakes Boles’ wonderful Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School, or Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep. Again you don’t have to suddenly become an unschooler. If you believe the story even a little bit less, you’ll be calmer, wiser, and less reactive when your kids or students question it too or don’t follow the perfect student path.

The Ox and the Ferrari

There is something else on offer when we start to change this story. Just as coercive environments destroy trust, they also lead us to underestimate kids. We begin to believe that unless we use a lot of extrinsic motivators, like publicly comparing students based on grades, or threatening them with future college admissions disasters, then they won’t actually move forward. I believe this is a collective illusion, something that only exists as a by-product of the environment we’ve created, and does not represent the natural state of children, who are exceptionally capable learners (putting us adults to shame!).

When we use these heavy rewards and punishments, it’s as if we are hooking an ox up to a car and dragging it down the road, having forgotten that the car can go on its own. And it’s not just any car — an intrinsically motivated child is the Ferrari of cars. Forgetting this, we just see the car moving as the ox drags it, and we feel relieved that at least some progress is being made. But my goodness, we have no idea how much potential is wasted. When a child is operating on intrinsic motivation, their resilience, learning capacity, and determination is so vastly different — the Ferrari will blow past the ox and be over the horizon in a flash.

Had to do it. Credit: DALL-E

(Side note — when switching from oxen to Ferrari, it’s important to note that some adjustment time is needed! Kids who have been in environments with heavy rewards and punishments may not instantly seize the opportunity and drive off in the Ferrari. They will need time and support to adjust and remember that they have their own passions, and generally the older they are, the more time they need to remember.)

Where we could go…

I believe our human potential is vast, vaster than we can imagine. Our capacity to feel, to connect, to think, to create are all worlds beyond what we know now. Our journey through life, especially childhood, tends to place limiters on us, boundaries that collectively form our shape as an adult. Much of this is natural and fine — no one can have a perfect childhood, no one will get to experience all of their infinite potential. That infinite potential is not for one individual anyway, it’s seen in life moving through all of us.

But sometimes, the limits our journeys place on us are severe, and worst of all, sometimes they go unnoticed. If today a child is beaten by their parents, it’s rightfully considered an outrage. But not long ago, it was considered normal. In both cases, an event occurred that hurt and limited someone. But a shift in our worldview allowed us to see a previously normal act as in fact a traumatic one. That’s progress.

Plenty of things that are normal today will be seen as traumatic in the future. It’s only our perceptions that will change. Right now, coercive schools are a shared trauma. But we don’t see them as such because the coercion is so commonplace, so accepted. The fact that kids have often shockingly little freedom, little choice or room for curiosity, is part of our normal reality. But it does not have to be that way.

Personally, I’d like to see this change as soon as possible. I have three kids who are in different stages of questioning their schools. How odd is it that a large portion of society — most young people! — constantly complain about their school experience, and yet we write this off as normal, or as whiny or hormonal. What if they’re right?

We can do better by them. Take the small steps. Try defaulting to yes when they want to try something. When in doubt, trust them. If you can’t quite trust, join them for a shared experiment to try what they want to try. It’s not about creating a utopian childhood. We’re all messy and imperfect. But healing begins simply when we listen to them more and offer them more choice in the adventure of their lives.

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In Other News…

• A Book: Often it’s in middle school that the mismatch between school systems and children becomes painfully obvious. Instead of labeling these years as terrible ones to “just get through”, these years are perhaps the most fruitful time to change how we parent and teach. For much more on this, check out my book, Finding the Magic in Middle School. And if you’ve already read out, I would be much obliged if you would leave a review!

• Summer Training: This July, a group of teachers from all over the US will gather in San Francisco for three days of intensive learning about how to become excellent advisors. This is the Advisory Facilitation training I co-lead at Argonaut. It’s about how to make advisory time awesome in school. It can be a place of unconditional belonging, where middle and high schoolers feel safe enough to speak honestly about what’s on their minds and can gain the social-emotional tools to navigate their adventure well. We have limited spaces still available if you’d like to join us — details here.