School Is Not Enough

Skip to content

Vance Osterhout/Boy using miter saw

When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14 years old. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, by 11. When Vladimir Nabokov was 16, he published his first poetry collection while still in school. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12 and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16, he was the family’s mainstay of income.

Biographers and readers tend to fixate on the celebrity itself, the time when people become famous or remarkable. But before their success, even their early lives contain something revealing. Before you grasp, you have to reach. How did they learn to reach?

In my examples, the individuals were all doing from a young age as opposed to merely attending school. And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was nonetheless something that they, their families, and society felt was useful, purposeful, and appreciated. In a sense, they had useful childhoods.

Do children today have useful childhoods?

An individual’s life can continue with an inertia that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most young people today know approximately what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life: school. Post-schooling, the inertia continues. Many a modern story opens with a worker—an office worker, usually—who is so inert that he scarcely notices the passage of time until he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality that forces him out of his inertia.

Agency is the capacity to act. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you. Remarkable people typically go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a telegraph message boy is one opportunity; asking how to operate the telegraph is another. He was handed the first one, but he had to ask for the second. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them all in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan.

And of course, no one is asked to write a book, or start a company, or stage a play, or seek invention and excellence in the unknown. These acts are very contrary to the default script. Yet they are the resources that create the world. Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?

Conservation of Agency

I find it striking just how early and varied the avenues were that allowed promising adolescents to pivot off-script and do something different than everyone else. For a 13-year-old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy where one can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16-year-old? What is today’s equivalent of becoming Verrocchio’s studio apprentice at 14?

Where are the studios, anyway?

Modern complexity has erased some avenues for agency. After all, no boy can become a telegraph operator today. But the primary problem is not technology, it is how we have oriented the world and our expectations. A 13-year-old Steve Jobs once called Bill Hewlett—whose number was simply listed in the phone book–and received a summer job at Hewlett Packard. This would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.

We have a public imagination that cannot conceive of what exactly to do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless, and so they shuffle through a decade of busywork. Partly, the length of schooling has increased simply because it could—because we no longer need children to work, yet need them to do something while the adults go do theirs.

The sad result of school’s length and primacy is that it ensures there is nothing in particular for children to do, and since the rigid framework precludes other options, we are sure to destroy their opportunities for making meaningful contributions to the world. The longer we disallow children from having the agency to act on the world, the harder it becomes for them to visualize it in the first place. The result is that we have young adults who have a difficult time adjusting once their life-script changes even a little bit. The path is rigid, yet brittle.

Much of this fault lies with the nature of school, the largest dictator of early life-scripts. Modern schooling began as a track to be left as soon as you had something worthwhile to do with your life. But it has since morphed into an attempt at systematizing as many years of a child’s life as possible, extending well into their adulthood. At the same time, school can never gratify the smartest pupils as much as either party would like, because they are charged with...