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As our family recently gathered to celebrate our younger son’s graduation, I found myself reflecting on the college admissions scandal, wondering how on earth we got to a place where a group of parents felt it necessary to bribe their way into elite universities that they clearly believe are a direct route to success and happiness in adult life.
We got lucky. Each of our boys did well in school and attended highly regarded universities. As proud as I am of their success, however, I am feeling more and more uneasy about our education system as we wrap up our engagement with it. I worry about how the system has shaped our boys as they enter adulthood. What was the purpose of the marathon of grades, high stakes tests, and extracurriculars that they ran? Did it form them in a way that they might have the greatest chance of living the American Dream, or did it misshape them, making it forever difficult for them to live a truly satisfying life?
Many parents, researchers, and policymakers believe the essential role of college is to put one on a path to greater financial success in life. Is that all post-secondary programs have to offer anymore? When did we come to believe that financial success is the most important measure of happiness in life? That certainly wasn’t what the educators who founded our great universities had in mind. Their concerns were much broader: the common good, civic engagement, equal access to all sorts of rights and freedoms that were the essential components of the American experience; not just the accumulation of wealth.
I am not the first parent to lament the enormous stress and anxiety that our educational system places on all students. Some say that hypercompetitive academic, athletic, artistic, and social dynamics mirror the working world into which the student will shortly enter. I am not convinced. I believe our schools embody a distortion whose impact is now dangerously deforming our society, doing great harm to our kids. As we witness the epidemic of suicide, anxiety, and depression among college students, I think it is urgent that we ask whether these are symptoms of an educational system that has spiraled out of control.
I believe the problem and solution may lie in taking a fresh look at two social engineering decisions, which, however useful in their day, have now run their course.
In 1893, a Committee of Ten university presidents was created to develop a uniform curriculum for American public schools. The goal was to better prepare students for higher education, and to equip a general public with the basic knowledge and skill necessary to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding US economy scaling productivity quickly. While we have fiddled with the specific content of lesson plans, the sequence of courses taught in high school has essentially remained the same, at a time when a fourth industrial revolution is underway.
This bit of social engineering was later followed by Harvard’s decision to use an adaptation of a US Army intelligence exam, which was developed to “place” 1.5 million recruits during World War I, in order to identify deserving youth whose academic potential would rise to the high standards set by elite colleges. Other colleges soon followed Harvard’s lead. The test ultimately became the SAT.
In its day, the exam’s focus on the ability to chunk and sequence information quickly was useful in hierarchical organizations. While this remains an important skill, it is not the most essential skill in a workplace where productivity and innovation are determined by empathy, pattern recognition, creative problem solving, and social cognition.
Both social engineering decisions—a standardized curriculum and admission via aptitude testing—had a profound positive impact on the US education system (which had become the envy of the world), and the productivity of our nation. Those decisions drove a series of innovations and economic expansions that have greatly increased our material wealth, theoretically enabling all boats to rise.
The legacy of these decisions, however, is our extreme focus on financial wellbeing at the expense of a more rounded measure of self-worth and success. Should material wealth be the only marker of prosperity, life, and the pursuit of happiness? Aren’t we all, hoping for something more?
A group of economists and policymakers seem to be rapidly moving in the direction of a resounding “Yes,” we need to expand our definitions of wellbeing beyond pure economic measurements such as the GDP to include other benchmarks, as articulated by the World Happiness Report and the Global Prosperity Index.
It, therefore, seems to be that we, in 2019, are overdue for reinventing our education system so that it enables our youth to live out the full promise of the American dream.
Not only do we need a curriculum that equips students to participate as “superworkers” in a 21st Century global economy, we need a series of learning environments that create, inspire, and reward “supercitizens” — individuals equipped with the capacities necessary to fully participate in the democracy that our Founding Fathers fought for, the vision that all US citizens might experience their own full measure of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (For an excellent discussion of what such an education system might look like, read Steve Weintraub’s comprehensive, practical analysis “Save our Schools,” written from the perspective of a former business consultant who is now a high school math teacher).
Commencement is a time when celebrated speakers step up to the mike to articulate their big bold visions for the future. Seventy-two years ago, US Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered a speech that changed the western world. I hope this year we hear a leader articulate a clear, comprehensive plan for redesigning our education system, and that we as a nation find the courage, determination, political will to get the job done.
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