Love in Learning

Why It Is Missing and How You Can Get It Back

When are we going to change the schools?

For the last thirty years, I’ve given presentations on how the power of human nature is that each human’s nature is unique. How each of us has different loves and loathes and strengths and passions, and the best way for us to grow is to channel our uniqueness into something productive.

And it’s a rare day when someone does not come up afterward and say some version of, “Why don’t we do this with our kids in school?”

Each of us knows we are unique, that there is no one in the world quite like us, and we instinctively feel that school should be a place that talks to us about what makes us unique, that helps us understand it, and honor it, and apply it toward our own learning. We want to let school in, let the lessons get under our skin, and feel ourselves growing into the best versions of ourselves, from the inside out, as it were.

For most of us, though, school does not feel like this—and the impact this has on who we are as adults is profound. School feels like something being done to us. It doesn’t get to know us much at all, throws facts and lessons and exams and grades at us, and leaves us to withstand the onslaught. School can soon become something to beat back, something to fight against and win, a strange land of unnatural customs, bizarre rituals, and endless judgment.

We try to learn just enough of this alien world to survive, to climb the rungs put in front of us, always keeping our heads low, our eyes down on our assignments and quizzes, so that we can secure for ourselves the precious passports out of this world: a good GPA, high scores on the ACT and SAT, and the right listing of extracurricular activities.

Sadly for us, our climb out of school just leads to college and a job, both of which turn out to be built around the same bizarre set of rituals: learning as information transfer, someone else judging our performance, someone else identifying our gaps and telling us to plug those gaps in order to improve our performance rating and so get promoted.

This whole procession—from primary school through high school, college, and work—pressures us to separate us from ourselves. Little wonder that students drug themselves up to push their anxiety down; parents go to ridiculous, even illegal lengths to give their kids the right scores and credentials; organizations fail to engage even 20 percent of their workforce. The entire ecosystem appears rigged against each one of us.

In 2019 I got an unwanted front-row seat to what this pressure does to parents, and to their kids. I’m still trying to make sense of what happened, as are my kids, and I imagine we will be doing so for the rest of our lives. I share it with you now not because I have all the answers as to what exactly caused this scandal. Nor to pass judgment on those who were involved.

I share it simply because the intensity of the pain created in me an urgency and a passion to make change. I’m hoping that my and my kids’ experiences might create similar feelings in you. Because yes, absolutely, we need to come together—as students, parents, teachers, and administrators—and demand change in our schools.

“What’s Going to Happen Now, Dad?”

We love our kids more than life itself, don’t we. When they feel pain, we feel it fifty times over. I had pain as a child. I’m sure you did too. Much of my pain I strategically buried or found a good bunker for. I’m sure you did too. We figure it out and keep going. But when we see our children in pain, it’s almost unbearable. You’re sliced open, raw, and for many of us it is then and only then that we ask for help.

My son is my utter everything. My firstborn. I pulled him up next to my heart to hold him for the first time on a frigid New York morning in March 2001. It was so beautifully disorienting, holding a life we’d created. He was a little ball of magic, grasping on tight to his umbilical cord as he cried and squirmed and wiggled. And I was full like never before. Bursting. A human I had never known instantly became the human I loved most.

What I wanted for him then is what all of us want for our kids: to have a chance to express the very best of himself and to be seen for who he truly is, in all of his quirky magnificence. I wanted the world to know him.

Eighteen years later, again in March, I pulled him up next to my heart to hug him. Now he felt lifeless. His voice monotone and flat. He drew back, looked at me desolately, and walked away. The whites of his eyes were gray. He sat down on the wood floor with his shoulders turned in to his knees. It was as if he had no oxygen flowing through his lungs. Or maybe I had none.

That morning, March 12, 2019, I became the father of a son who had innocently found himself a headline in one of the biggest college cheating scandals of our time.

The call came in at 6:35 a.m. “Dad, are you at your house?” his voice shivered.

“Yes,” I replied.

“You need to come here,” he said. “Mom’s been arrested by the FBI.”

I stood there outside my garage about to head to work, trying to make sense of what I’d just heard. The jasmine on the garage walls was blooming, and I will forever associate their sweet smell with panic. My son’s words weren’t real life. Sure, my ex and I had had a high-conflict divorce, and yes, sadly, we didn’t speak to each other, but she was in no way a venal character. She was the opposite, a Captain Marvel type, ready and willing to step in and save the day, the anti-flake, the parent who knew everything. The idea that she would be arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation simply didn’t compute.

The fifteen-minute drive to their house feels like three hours and no time at all, as my palms slip on the shifter.

I pull up to their house, open my car door, look up, and catch the disapproving eye of the neighbor next door out walking his perfect brown labradoodle. The gate is hanging open and I trip over the front steps in my haste to get to the door. Hunched over, a wave of nausea hits me, and I stop. The labradoodle barks, and I straighten myself up with a big breath of air. I know I have to show strength in the face of whatever I am about to walk into.

My two kids are both sitting on the wooden floors in the hall. Maybe it’s because it used to be my home and hasn’t been for a while, or maybe it’s just that morning, but as I walk in it doesn’t feel like a home that people live in. It feels to me as though they are moving house, or as if someone has just died. I stay in the hall talking to them, but my sense is that if I opened any of the doors to the other rooms, I would find furniture covered up, books and cutlery in boxes, everything ready to be shipped out.

I hug both of them—my eighteen-year-old son and sixteen-year-old daughter—and then we sit back down on the floor, as if waiting for the movers. No one is saying anything.

After about thirty minutes, my son’s Twitter feed begins spitting out facts—scores arrested, a sting operation—and, a few thumb swipes later, the savvy teenager somehow finds the official government complaint document online. The three of us gather around his phone as he reads the incoming tweets and clicks around the complaint. I’ve left my glasses at home, so I rely on him to relay the news as he finds it.

“She’s mentioned in the complaint.” Pause.

“Not till page fifteen, though.” Pause.

“She’s charged with ‘honest services’ something. Maybe she was a witness.” Pause, as he reads on. Then, suddenly, both he and his sister gasp.

“What?” I cry out. “What did you read?”

“It’s the transcript,” he says. “Of her conversations with Rick Singer. She paid Rick Singer to have someone else take my ACT for me.”

Watching my son discover that his accomplishments are not his own—after all the pride he had shown months earlier in sharing his ACT score with me, with his friends, with my mom—guts me. Goodness knows what it does to him. I cry every time I relive that moment. Over the coming weeks, each implication of that one sentence will occur to each of us differently, and at different times, each new day bringing a new shard of pain, but at that moment every bit of it hits us all at once. My daughter takes herself away to the living room and crumples on the couch, while my son and I just stand there. I hug him.

“What’s going to happen now, Dad?”

I hug him closer. I find myself reassuring him, that his mom will be fine, that we’ll sort this out, that his life is not over. He looks at me and walks away into the sanctuary of his bedroom.

The truth is, I can’t be sure of any of those things. I’m doing all I can to keep it together for him. A helpless feeling. Around and around in my head, the questions: How will the world ever come to see him for who he really is? How could I have let this happen to him? How can I pull him through?

I want to tell the world that my son’s defining quality is his loyalty; that he is a stickler for rules; that from five years old he wouldn’t let me pull down the window shade next to our airplane seat because that shade just might belong to the seat in front of us; that he hates the limelight; that he is not a type-A striver; that his friends count on him to have their backs; that what I am proudest of is that so many of them asked him to stand up and speak for them at their confirmations or bar mitzvahs.

I want the world to know all of this about him. But standing there that morning in the hallway, I see the years stretching away, with him getting smaller and smaller, disappearing under the weight of the scandal. I find I cannot breathe.

Kids are surprisingly resilient though, aren’t they. It’s six months later. He and I are sitting in an auditorium with about fifty freshmen at the school that accepted him based on his first and valid ACT result. It’s orientation. The students and their parents, or in his case, him and me. The alarmingly peppy leader onstage asks each student to think of one thing to share with everyone else, something surprising, something you might be proud of, or not—something that’ll help us know you a little better.

I sit there, paralyzed. What’s he going to share? That very morning the new Vanity Fair issue has come out with his mother on the cover alongside Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. As I wrack my brains, thinking of how I can intercede for him, maybe write a couple of suggestions on a scrap of paper and slide it over to him, suddenly it’s his turn. I straighten my back, survey the room with defiance, wait for the inevitable.

After introducing himself, he said, “I’m from Los Angeles. And what you might not know about me is … that I can bite my toenails. Not that I do it all the time. Just that I can.”

The room giggles. No one challenges him. No one sneers. He didn’t need me and my defiance. I sit back in my seat, and comfort myself with the knowledge that he will gradually find his way through this. He will find his voice.

All about the Brand

Our kids’ resilience doesn’t absolve us, though. The educational ecosystem we’ve built creates stress for our children—and parents—and fails to prepare them to contribute their best at work. It is time, now, to start to dismantle it, and gradually reassemble it into something centered on each child.

To do this, we’ll have to do two things: First, reveal what our schools are currently doing to hurt us so much, and pinpoint which practices must be removed from our schools for good. And second, in parallel, create a blueprint for a better system, something that all of us can rally behind and on which each of us can take action.

So, to begin, let’s just be clear and say that, yes, there are millions of brilliant and well-intended teachers in the world. You’ve been blessed with some, and so have I. I would not be the person I am without Mrs. Whitehouse’s passion for great literature, Mr. Hetherington’s dogged faith in my ability to learn Latin. These outstanding teachers are doing their level best to help each one of us learn and grow.

And yet they are doing so, in many cases, in spite of rather than because of our educational ecosystem.

To build a better system—for them and for us—we’ll need to start by answering this fundamental question: What is school for?

At the most basic level, school is for childcare. It was designed by the Germans in the mid-nineteenth century so that parents could be freed up to leave the house, and the children within it, and venture out to the factories and offices that were just springing up and that needed the physical presence of working adults. The industrial revolution took labor outside of the home for the first time, and so it required a system set up at scale to give parents the confidence to leave their kids for ten to twelve hours a day. School was that system. School was, and is, for childcare so that we parents are freed up to contribute economic output. School lets us go to work.

Of course, school did originally have a second purpose: namely, to educate the children so that they could grow up to add their own labor to the economy. Thus children were taught to read and write and do elementary mathematics, and then they were split into those who would go into the trades—these kids were moved quickly into practical apprenticeships—and those who would go into professional services, such as lawyers, doctors, engineers, financiers, and businessmen. This latter group was kept in school and taught how to think by exposing them to great works of literature, history, and philosophy.

This worked quite well for decades. An increasingly literate population could participate more in the country’s growing economy. They would not only know how to add their productivity to the country’s GDP, but also become much more prolific and educated consumers. Literate people bought more.

Today, as odd as it is to say, the importance of this purpose has diminished. Yes, it still makes sense to teach our children how to read and write, but beyond that, fewer and fewer of the skills and facts they’re being taught at school will help them excel in their chosen professions. Why? First, because the jobs they will be getting in ten years’ time when they graduate haven’t even been invented yet, so it’s impossible for school to be preparing them for these jobs. And second, because even those jobs that appear to be perennials, such as nursing, or auto construction and repair, or selling, or hospitality, are changing at such a rapid pace that companies’ greatest challenge is reskilling their current workers.

So, if this purpose has been outpaced by the speed of change in today’s working world, if school is no longer for preparing the students for their future careers, then what is it for? Why do we devote so much time and energy and money to it, and invest so much of our own parental prestige in how our kids perform in this thing called school? Why the proliferation of Facebook mummy and daddy groups, why the extreme professionalization of youth sports, why the billions spent on tutors and test prep, why the parents willing to shred their reputations and break the law in order to get their kids to succeed in this thing called school? What is school for that it can dominate us and ruin us, financially and morally, for decades?

The most banal of answers is this: school is for sorting. For sorting students into categories and levels of proficiency. You go this way, you go that way. You jump up here, you stay down there.

Who wants this sorting? The working world does. The working world’s companies and organizations are the customers of schools and colleges. They are what colleges and schools serve. They are the ones who use the “product”—the graduating students. They are the ones with the money—in the form of salaries, donations, and investments. They demand this sorting of students not least because it makes it easier to know where to go to recruit the right kind of employee. And so these organizations put big-time pressure on the colleges to presort each student so it’s clear which sort of student they can expect from each college.

Under pressure from the working world, colleges double down on their sorting mission. They have realized that each college must crystalize its brand, as in “which sorts of students we will produce for you.” In education, branding functions in exactly the same way it does in business: namely, differentiating products that, on their face, seem exactly the same.

What’s the difference in functionality between a Samsung phone and an iPhone? Nothing, except that Apple’s brand carries stronger positive associations than Samsung’s brand. What’s the difference between a Tesla Model 3 and a Polestar? In terms of mechanics, range, and safety, basically nothing. The only difference is the brand—Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is omnipresent, and you know exactly what he and his company stands for. Polestar, as yet, has zero brand credibility, and its sales will suffer until it fixes this. It doesn’t need to share the same brand as Tesla, it just needs to identify and then amplify a brand of its own.

Colleges work the same way. An engineering student graduating from MIT is exactly the same as an engineering student graduating from Cal Poly or Emory or the University of Vermont, and they know how to do exactly the same things. The board of trustees of MIT does not like this state of affairs, and so it tries to do everything it can to ensure that the brand of MIT stands for something memorable and specific. If MIT is going to continue to secure the tuition funding, the attention of the working world, and the alumni donations to its general endowment fund, then it must ensure that the letters “MIT” stand for a brand, in the same way that “Tesla” stands for a brand.

It’s not just MIT. Every well-run college knows that its purpose is to communicate to the working world what its brand is—what sort of students we produce here—and it must make every decision so as to reinforce its desired brand characteristics.

And look, there is nothing wrong with this fixation on brand. Every single organization needs to find a way to differentiate itself, and colleges are no exception. They should take their brand seriously.

The damage occurs because they’ve chosen to use our children as the raw material for their brand building blocks. It’s a branding ecosystem, a marketing machine in which the child is the mechanism, not the purpose. Their brand is the purpose. And this ecosystem is perceived to be so powerful, so real, so deterministic that if a child starts off with the wrong brand—the thinking goes—then they are unlikely ever to break themselves free and rebrand themselves.

This is why some parents contort themselves into such desperate displays in order to get their kid into the right kindergarten. Put them in a Tesla, and they are made for life. But let them climb into a Polestar, and they’re disadvantaged from the get-go.

Data for the Brand

Look at schools through this sorting/branding lens, and the point of all kinds of strange rituals suddenly becomes clear. Why is Cal Poly sending Myshel’s son a recruiting brochure?

And why is Myshel leaving it out on the kitchen island in hopes that he will see its headline, “YOU belong with us!” and pick it up and read it?

She leaves it there because she genuinely believes that Cal Poly might want him, and that if she can lure him into being interested in it, then she might have helped him climb into a Tesla.

But, of course, Cal Poly doesn’t want him. Well, it might, but it didn’t send the brochure to him for this reason. Nor did the hundred other colleges send their brochures for this reason. They want a low admissions percentage. Because this helps their brands. The more students who apply, the lower their admissions percentages will be, and the more they’ll be able to build their brands around how selective they are. They made these glossy brochures with images of leafy autumnal quads, and strolling, smiling students, each one more enticing than the next, promising that You are right for us, you belong with us, because then he will—maybe—apply to them, which will drive up their applicant numbers, drive down their acceptance rates, and thereby drive up their brand value.

Cal Poly will then release its acceptance rate to the US News and World Report college rankings list in hopes that this year the school will rise just a couple of spots. Go to the website, and you’ll see that acceptance rate is the very first piece of information the report offers you on Cal Poly—or any college. Last year, as it happens, Cal Poly’s acceptance rate was 30 percent, which US News and World Report was pleased to compare with that of UC Davis (41 percent) and UC Santa Barbara (32 percent).

This rankings list has great power over you and your kids. You may not be aware of this, but many college boards of trustees connect bonus levels for the college president and administrators to where the college lands on the US News and World Report list. Some colleges—think Ivy League, Stanford, Oxbridge—consider themselves above the demands of this list, but virtually every other college is acutely aware that this list functions as a brand monitor, precisely calibrating the relative brand strength of each institution.

Sure, anyone who knows anything about data knows that US News and World Report and the data underpinning it are hopelessly unreliable—guesswork masquerading as precision—but not only does it grab eyeballs, it also determines people’s bonuses.

So yes, colleges will do everything they can to generate as many applications as they can, knowing that they will accept very few, because then they might rise a couple of spots on the list, the working world will pay them more heed, the alumni will pay them more money, and they’ll be able to build that new library, or aquatics center, or rose garden.

And you know what else would add precision to their brand? If the high schools could find some way to quantify the academic prowess of their students. Hence the building of a grade point average system. Administered by high schools and then provided to colleges, GPA enables colleges to compare each student, to select only those with a certain GPA or above, and then to publicize the average GPA of their incoming freshman class.

This need to add precision to a brand also explains the existence of standardized general intelligence tests such as the SAT and the ACT. The research reveals that there is actually no such thing as general intelligence and that these tests do not predict anything in the real world, whether earning power, happiness, life span, or well-being. But the colleges aren’t using them for this reason. All they really want any of these tests to do is to have some predictive relationship to college GPA. This way, they can announce to the world that they—the colleges—have an average SAT/ACT score for their incoming freshman class of X, and that, as a result, they can anchor their college brand as one that will produce for you—dear working world—college graduates with an average college GPA of Y.

Yes, colleges know that GPA shows zero predictive relationship to subsequent earning power or happiness or well-being in real life, but, again, that’s not really their concern. Their concern is to present to the working world a coherent brand, and so their ability both to select their students based on SAT/ACT score and to publicize GPAs is paramount.

The fact that all these tests lead to the need for tutors and special test prep programs—all of which cost money—and that therefore their branding needs are tilting the floor ever more toward the most affluent parents, is regrettable, but, again, not really their concern. They are just defining the criteria for their student sorting process. If certain parents choose to spend thousands to help their kids meet these criteria, well, that’s their choice.

As a student, if you’ve ever wondered why this fixation with grades, why this need to suffer through or pay for SAT/ACT tutoring, why this arms race of college application creation, why am I putting myself through this, why does this feel like such a battle, why does this feel like I’m part of something that has nothing to do with me, an ecosystem that doesn’t care about me or understand me or even see me—good question. Middle school, high school, and college have not been designed to grow you. You and your beautiful uniqueness are almost irrelevant to the needs of the educational ecosystem you entered after kindergarten.

Take the stamps—magna cum laude, summa cum laude. How happy is the institution to brand you with these stamps—yet another source of branding data—and how damaging they can be for the individual student. When Myshel made magna cum laude, she got an honors cord, which she proudly wore at graduation. She worked so hard for that cord. She overscheduled herself, gave up eating, pulled all-nighters to complete assignments, amped herself up on amphetamines to stay alert in class, and hoped, above all, that her mom would see the cord and be so very proud.

In the real world, of course, her mom wasn’t proud. She was distraught. Her mom looked at her seventy-four-pound frame and crumpled. Stamps such as magna cum laude are like a medal bestowed on a young soldier by a general to distract the soldier from what’s really going on. While Myshel was striving for her stamp, what got lost was who Myshel really is. All the interesting things about her—what she loves, what piques her attention, when and how she learns best, what sparks her creativity, what shuts her down—all the stuff that would give her self-efficacy in the working world, and, frankly, that the working world should dearly love to know about her, all of that is hidden by the striving for the stamp. The stamp serves only the college, as the medal serves only the general.

And how about the GPA? As a parent, you get on your child every single week to maintain their GPA. You make them take extra AP classes to inflate their GPA. You stress out their teenage years and sour their social development so that they can preserve their GPA. They need this GPA, you tell them, so they can get into the right college.

But what is this GPA? From a data standpoint, it’s a mess. Have you heard of a thing called inter-rater reliability (IRR)? It sounds obscure, but for you and your child it’s a very meaningful concept. IRR refers to two raters’ ability to grade the same test in exactly the same way. If you give your child’s essay to one teacher and they grade it, and then you give it to another teacher and they grade it, do these two teachers arrive at the same grade? If they do, all is good. You have 100 percent IRR. But if they don’t, then your child’s grade is merely made up—unreliable data.

Some subjects have, on average, higher than 90 percent IRR: math, physics, some parts of biology, and chemistry.

Other subjects—in fact, most other subjects—languish below the 50 percent level. English, the parts of history that don’t involve memorizing dates, social studies, a foreign language, they all have less than 50 percent IRR.

Imagine that.

This means that a student’s GPA data changes significantly depending on which teacher is grading which paper. In the UK, researchers examined just how much. What they found was that in subjects where the IRR sank below 50 percent, more than one-quarter of all students would have seen their grades drop or rise one spot with another teacher—an A to a B, or a B to an A. And as a result, many of these students would have gotten accepted into very different colleges.

Which means that your child’s GPA is junk data. By telling our children it’s not junk, we’re messing them up. They know how important reliable data is—leveling up in video games is often based on reliable data, as is social network data—and yet we, almost from the get-go, tell them that the data that defines them and their future is reliable when it isn’t.

A GPA of 3.69—a data point that colleges will receive and will wind up publishing in order to define their brand—isn’t real data. It is designed and built so that high schools can service their customers, the colleges. But it’s not reliable. It’s not valid. And it reveals so very little about the child.

A Love + Work School Curriculum

If all this was an overstatement, if schools and colleges were genuinely interested in who each student is, then here’s what we should see:

• We should see classes and curricula focused on the student’s identity. Classes that help the student figure out how much of their identity is tied to characteristics they share with others, such as gender, religion, or nationality, and how much is connected to the uniqueness of their personality.
• There would be classes on how to use the raw material of a regular week of school to figure out what they truly love, or how they learn best, or when they are deeply in their element, or how they build the healthiest relationships. Not classes about a theory of learning, or creativity, or relationships, but about how you—this one beautiful, unique human—learn, or create, or build relationships.
• We should see classes that help the student cut through the complex social pressures of their teenage years to identify their own distinct voice, and then guide this student in how to cultivate their voice into something valuable for others.
• And while this student is learning about their idiosyncrasies and how to contribute them, they would also be learning about how to honor the idiosyncrasies of others. These classes would help the student demystify the apparent paradox of the need for racial and gender equality, with the fact that no gender or race is monolithic—there are more differences within gender, or within race, than between genders, and between races. These classes would help the student spot the clues to other people’s uniqueness, and would counsel the student on how to be a supporter, an ally, an amplifier of the uniqueness of others.
• There would be classes on how to make decisions, how to build resilience, how to join a new team, how to be on multiple teams, how to explain yourself to your new team members, how to talk about your strengths without bragging, how to talk about your loves without sounding self-involved.

We would see a decade-long curriculum all focused on how this student can develop mastery in what they love and how they can contribute these loves to others. Companies would benefit hugely from students learning in these sorts of classes—they’d be able to hire new recruits with much more self-confidence, self-efficacy, personal resilience, generosity, and ability to quickly collaborate with others.

But, more importantly, think about how these classes would benefit students. Learning about themselves, the galaxies that they and they alone contain, the responsibility that comes from this power, the assurance that emanates from this power—what a gift this would be to all those extraordinarily unique individuals who entrust themselves to our care.

If we were truly worried about the psychological health and development of each student, these are the kinds of classes we would see.

At present we don’t see any of them.

Occasionally, a college will have its students take StrengthsFinder or Myers-Briggs or some other assessment, but these are fun distractions—helium balloons at a birthday party. They are not part of a decade-long commitment to help each student develop mastery in themselves.

There is a better way. It can be a lot to think about because you don’t want to mess up your kids; in fact, you want to do the opposite. You want to help your kids thrive, and this ecosystem of schools and colleges is so powerful and so persuasive. But there is a way to push back, to pull down Oz’s branding curtain, as it were, and set your children and yourself up for a very different kind of education.

It’s not right to say that we are part of the problem. We are the entire problem, and only if we—all of us—make specific changes to this ecosystem will we start to do right by our kids.

A Love + Work School Manifesto

Here is a top ten list of changes for our kids. It serves as a manifesto for child-centered schools and colleges—presented in ascending order of difficulty. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. But rather, I offer it as a way to stimulate your own thinking about what actions you can take—as a student or a teacher or a parent—right now.

1. Stop Seeing Parenting as a Competitive Sport

We keep score with each test taken, each club joined, each summer program attended, each charity volunteered for, and the college acceptance serves as the finish line. In truth, parenting as a competitive sport has no finish line and no winners, only losers, most of them children.

2. Stop Projecting Your Own Fears onto Your Children

Some say that the parents who participated in the college cheating scandal did so because they were entitled. Maybe some did feel this way. But what rings truer to me is that they participated because they were frightened.

Know someone’s fear and you’ll know their need. Know their need and you’ll understand their behavior. These parents were frightened for their kids’ future, and so they needed to do something, anything, even cheating and lying, to make that future more secure. And in so doing, they not only committed themselves to a lifetime of lying to their kids, they also spread the deeper lie that fear is bad and any action that reduces it is justified.

The truth, of course, is that fear of the future is a sensible and adaptive part of the human condition. The challenge of life is not to reduce fear, but rather to feel it, understand it, and move through it. To admit your fears, to even love them, and yet to still act, to risk and fall and rise to risk again, this is the sign of health.

When we strive to reduce fear, we wind up fortifying fear, and weakening children.

3. Stop Reading the US News and World Report College Rankings

And demand that boards of trustees uncouple bonuses from a college’s placement on the list.

When we think about how to make change in the world, where is our biggest source of power and control? We have so much power in what we buy and consume. Why don’t we come together as a parent team? Doesn’t matter if you have a three-year-old or a sixteen-year-old. What we consume tells society what we deem important. If we stop buying, they stop making. These rankings were put together in order to sell subscriptions and advertising, but now they wield such power that colleges contort themselves to move up a couple of spots, and parents pressure their kids to apply to only the “best” colleges.

The truth is that the data underpinning these rankings is arcane, unreliable, and falsely precise, all noise, no signal, signifying nothing.

But it does make good copy. We are sacrificing our children on the altar of the US News and World Report rankings. Stop reading it.

4. Start Reading the Research

Which college you go to predicts virtually nothing about your subsequent success, and absolutely nothing about your psychological well-being.

The research is ongoing, of course, and all findings are provisional, but thus far two findings stand out: first, which college you attend does a poor job of predicting your earning potential and your long-term physical and psychological health.

And second, the demographic that is most helped by Ivy League attendance is minority students—a finding best explained by the fact that their college experience exposes them to new and powerful networks.

This makes a strong case for continuing with affirmative action to offer places to students with less socioeconomic advantage and to promote more diverse student bodies. It also reveals that any comfortably well-off, middle-class Caucasian parent who stresses out their child, or cheats on tests for their child, in order to push her into a “better” school is wasting their time. The “better” school won’t better her.

5. Start Pressuring Colleges to Get Rid of Standardized Tests

What precisely do the ACT and SAT scores predict later in life? Precisely nothing. They are a score on an arbitrary list of questions, and, as with the arbitrary list of questions on the IQ test, they are valid only as measures of a child’s ability to answer the questions that some test maker decided to include in the test.

Yes, there is a great deal of money to be made in the constructing and selling of these tests, but as a tool to reveal the uniqueness of a child’s mind, they are utterly useless.

Did I pay for my son’s test prep to ensure he was ready for the tests I find so useless? Yes. He studied and was tutored in the hope of a good grade, and he did get a good grade on his first and true attempt at the test. Was it the “right” score? Who cares. What’s more important is that there are millions of other kids who cannot afford the test prep. What do we do about them? Infuse tutoring into scholarships? Or maybe tax the tests and use that tax to fund government-run tutoring programs?

A better solution is to just get rid of the tests. Both of them, the SAT and the ACT, are the worst sort of pseudoscience. Many schools are beginning to move away from them, thank goodness. Let’s add speed to that retreat, throw our parental weight behind it.

And instead let’s rely on high school transcripts, personal essays, and interviews. Yes, these take longer both to acquire and to sift through, and offer little in the way of shortcuts, but sorry, college admissions departments, that’s precisely the point. We don’t want to sacrifice the vivid uniqueness of our children just so you can save some time in your admissions process. Just ask our children to submit their high school transcripts, to write essays describing themselves and their passions, and conduct actual interviews with them. Then make a qualitative decision based on what you’ve seen in each child. Nothing wrong with you using your judgment to make a qualitative decision. Far better than relying on the shortcut of fake data.

6. Start Banning the Use of Clubs, Activities, or Charity Work on College Applications

The listing of these activities was begun, presumably, to allow the child to present the full extent of who she really is, but they no longer serve that purpose.

They have become badges, applicant “flair” that she is coerced to pin to her application. Thus displayed, they favor the wealthy, as each one incurs a cost—the more esoteric, the greater the cost. If you are a nurse supervisor getting off your late-night shift, do you have the time or the energy or the money to sign your daughter up for that perfect volunteer project?

Even more alarming, these “badges” mask who the applicant truly is. Did the student really so love fencing, or coxswaining, or yearbook editing that he couldn’t imagine a world without it, or were these “loves” an artifact of his need to pretty up his application?

Let’s stop covering up our kids with badges. If they have a hobby or a special interest, have them write about it in their essay or describe it with passion in their interview.

7. Start Pressuring Middle Schools and High Schools to Develop Self-Mastery Curricula

These classes and courses should focus on three areas: 1) How each child can, over time and through their regular life at home and school, identify the loves and strengths that make them unique, 2) How each child can find ways to turn these strengths into contribution, loves into work, and 3) How each student can use their understanding of their loves and those of others to join and build highly collaborative teams.

The working world would fall over itself to support the development of this curricula. According to the ADP Research Institute’s most recent global study, 85 percent of all work is done on teams, so if schools actually made it a priority to teach a student how to know in detail what they bring to each team, and how to offer these loves in the most productive way, then the working world would cheer from the rooftops.

More importantly, though, each student will develop far greater self-assurance and confidence if we teach them that learning is less about acquiring and being tested on outside knowledge, and more about developing and contributing the uniqueness already present inside them.

The fact that no such curricula currently exist is both a huge productivity miss and a moral failing. Demand curricula change.

8. Invert the Classroom

Currently, the generally accepted method of teaching is to impart information in the classroom and then have the child do homework and assignments on their own. This makes sense only if the goal of middle and high school is to use each student to generate quiz, test, and assignment scores that can then be inputted into admissions forms and sent off to colleges.

But if the goal of school became to help each student identify and contribute their loves, then you would flip the classroom around. Each student would do their learning and reading by themselves at home, and then in the classroom the teacher would help each student refine their unique way of turning the new information, facts, or processes into actual work. Each student’s way of doing this—of solving a math problem, writing a paper, learning a language—is idiosyncratic. The classroom should be the place where the teacher pays attention to this idiosyncrasy.

Teaching thus will cease to be solely information transfer, and will instead become coaching of the individual student. This isn’t more work for teachers—with fewer assignments to grade, it will actually be less work. But in terms of helping the student grow, it will certainly be more effective work.

9. Get Rid of Grade Point Averages

From a data standpoint, they are an embarrassment. As currently calculated, a student’s GPA is junk data since it is generated from many different subjects, most of which have IRR levels languishing in the low seventies and below. Which means that these data sources are, in simple terms, bad data—and, as anyone with an ounce of statistics knowledge knows, if you combine systematically bad data with good data, you render all the summary data bad. Bad as in “it does not measure accurately what it purports to measure.”

So, all of us parents should raise our voices against the use of GPA as a measure of our students. Any school or college using GPA should be shamed by coalitions of parents. Schools and colleges use GPA because it makes their “sorting” job easier. But that doesn’t make the data right. Our students deserve better.

This does not mean that we should universally ditch grades and grading—some schools have, but many have not, and from a data standpoint that’s OK. To be clear: it is fine for a teacher to read a history paper and, based on their particular expert judgment, assign the paper a grade. It is not fine for the school to then turn that grade into a number, add that number to all the other grades/numbers, and produce a summary GPA number. For most subjects, the grade is not an objective measure, but is instead the subjective response of an idiosyncratic teacher. We pay the teacher for the wisdom of their response, and we expect them to know their subject well. But we should not expect them to be the perfectly objective arbiter of what is truly an A versus a B, nor should we dumb down subjects into true/false or multiple-choice questions just so that we can get every quiz to generate a perfectly objective number.

We should just ask teachers to use their best judgment in grading. We should submit all of these best judgments to colleges in the form of a transcript. And we should never add these subjective judgments together into a GPA as though they were objective, reliable scores. Because they aren’t and never will be.

10. Make College Free

Of students who graduated in 2018, 69 percent did so burdened with, on average, $29,000 in debt. Looking back across all previous graduating classes, we now have forty-five million citizens still carrying student loan debt, for a total of $1.65 trillion owed. Putting aside for a moment the macroeconomic inefficiency of tying people up in twice as much student loan debt as they have credit card debt, think about what this does to the psychological well-being of each graduate.

When the average monthly student loan payment is $393, a graduate makes their first steps toward contribution to society guided not by passion, or mission, or self-discovery, but by financial pressure: Will this job be able to pay down my debt? How many quality teachers or nurses do we lose because those instinctively drawn to these professions do the math and discover the money doesn’t add up? Flipping this around, how many people choose lucrative roles such as lawyering or doctoring that don’t fit their authentic selves, simply because finances trump fit? How many dreams are destroyed by the weight of debt?

It’s hard to put exact numbers to these questions, but as I shared earlier, we do know that only 14 percent of people feel that their job gives them a chance to do their best work every day; that nurses have levels of PTSD twice as high as veterans returning from war zones; that respect for the teaching profession is lower than it’s ever been; that 73 percent of physicians would not tell their children to follow them into medicine, and that as a result, by 2025 here in the US we’ll have a shortage of twenty thousand doctors.

Not all of these data points can be explained by the pressures of student debt, but common sense tells us that something’s amiss. A healthy, productive team is one where each person finds a role in which to express the very best of themselves. A healthy, productive nation requires the same. It’s hard enough for each of us to find our way toward the role or roles that do indeed call on our loves; it’s nigh impossible when our vision is clouded by the shroud of debt.

I have benefited from many advantages in my life, not least that I grew up a middle-class, well-educated white male in an advanced and stable economy. But my greatest advantage was that my college tuition was entirely paid for by my nation of birth. Someone, somewhere made the decision that I would be more likely to contribute more, and more intelligently, if debt didn’t distract me.

Those were the good old days. For the sake of our kids, ourselves, and our nation, let’s see if we can find our way back there.

OK, that’s the top ten list. Taken together, it can appear daunting, so as you march forward and make your voice heard, hold on to this one insight: The most powerful way to help your child learn and grow is to reveal to them what is already inside them, and to show them how to turn what is inside them into contribution. To turn loves into work.

Any action, any class, any educational reform that gets you closer to this is a significant step toward doing what is right by your children.