Trotter Edu Manifesto

The following is excerpted from chapters 13-16 of Setting the Bar. This writing only has merit if it is shared so please feel free to make copies, email, or otherwise pass this along.

Chapter 13: Towards a Better Educational Philosophy

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” –Abraham Lincoln

During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, my wife and I took the ice cube trays out of our freezer to make room for more frozen food. Like many of you, we stocked up in case there were any food shortages and, with limited freezer space, ice was not a priority. There were times, however, when we wanted ice for an evening drink. I kept suggesting that we run up to the gas station to get a bag that we could keep in a cooler, but it never happened. Then one day it finally occurred to me: we have many small little cups and containers. Why not fill a couple with water, and stick them in a small opening on the freezer door? Boom! Ice. It was as if I had forgotten that ice didn’t have to come from an ice cube tray. 

We often have trouble finding solutions because our minds are clouded by the way we’ve always done it. Even the most passionate educators don’t realize the full extent to which education falls short of its potential. Their vision is limited by the fog of their own experience.

Educational reforms fail over and over because they are built from the same pieces as our broken cultural  model. We’ve added a little technology to each class, replaced high-demand life skill trades like woodshop with computer labs, and de-valued former keystones like physical education and home-economics. We’ve lowered standards, inflated grades, and demonized direct instruction. But other than that, our core curriculums and basic school structure has hardly changed in over a century. 

Of course, we should explore history for bright spots and pull together the ideas of our wisest and most innovative. But we, also, need to step away from these old models and think unclouded by past assumptions. 

First principles are the fundamental components we work with to solve any problem. First principle thinking seeks to break systems down to their most basic elements so they can be reassembled in new ways. 

Imagine that you want to build an electric car in hopes of creating a new automobile company. Most people would read books on how to build cars. They’d follow the step-by-step model provided to them and they’d build their car in the same form and fashion as the other market competitors. Inevitably, their product and costs would be relatively similar to everyone else’s.

Elon Musk took a very different approach. He went back to the fundamentals of powering machinery. He looked at each necessary component and even broke down the constituent parts of those components—an electric car battery is made from cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation, and a seal can. By attaining a complete understanding of the form and function of all the car’s ingredients, he was able to create a better electric automobile for far less than any competitor. This approach requires an understanding of the underlying principles. This is the difference between following a recipe and being a chef.

Musk describes the way most people think as “reasoning by analogy.” They work with the forms they are given—a compilation of blocks someone put together long before, rather than the actual building blocks. If we can leave behind our conditioned assumptions about how schools operate, a world of opportunity opens up.

The purpose of education is to learn. Many problems arise when we forget this obvious directive. Many solutions arise from remembering it. Later, we’ll look at what we should learn, but first we need to explore how we learn and make sense of the world. 

Sense-making and the Human Mind

Humans experience the world through flawed senses. Optical illusions, magicians, and marketers repeatedly take advantage of our imperfect perceptions. We’ve all been dazzled and mystified by the necker cube, the Andrus’ impossible box illusion, or that YouTube video of the moonwalking bear we missed because we were busy counting basketball passes.

There are also many things we simply cannot detect. Human eyes don’t see ultra-violet (UV) light, the electromagnetic wave responsible for sunburns. Bumblebees, ants, and some lizards can see UV light, but humans can’t unless their cornea is removed. This is an advantageous protection, but it also limits our capacity to see reality. 

Likewise, we can detect some gases like methane (men love to remind each other of this) but we can’t see or smell oxygen. Still, if all oxygen suddenly vacated your premises, reading this chapter would be the last thing on your mind. Our ability to perceive something does not always predict its importance. Despite the fact that humanity had no way of seeing germs and viruses, they have caused illness and death since the beginning of human history. All of us use an incomplete sensory set to interpret the world. And all we have to make sense of our senses is our own narrow set of experiences. 

Most Americans assume that everyone needs a car, that prescription drug advertisements are normal, and that people in third world countries are less happy than us. A couple centuries ago, most people were raised to believe women should not work and that slavery was part of the natural human order. Growing up, I assumed no one talked during football games and everyone lived to debate political theory. Before I was married, I assumed a 1:1 pillow-to-person ratio was sufficient. When I adopted two black children, I assumed our hair care needs would be similar and that babies would sleep at night. The list of faulty assumptions is endless.

In addition to the biases that stem from our past experience, each of us are subject to a vast number of cognitive biases inherent to human thought. Warren Buffet’s business partner, Charlie Munger, famously outlined several important cognitive biases in his Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment. A few examples:

• Social Proof Bias: Our tendency to believe local norms are correct. Social proof has allowed humans to adopt bizarre beliefs and oversimplifications even against overwhelming evidence. Hello, Westboro Baptist Church. Hello, Pop Tarts for breakfast. Similarly, we see from the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments that people tend to yield to authority. Social proof bias and our bias to trust authority combine to explain how the holocaust was possible. 

• Reciprocation Tendency: The Marketing professor and author, Dr. Robert Cialdini went around a college campus asking people to take young children to the zoo. One in six said yes. Then, he went around asking different people if they would devote two afternoons a week to watching young children. 100% said no, but when he followed that question up by asking, “well, would you at least take them to the zoo once,” half the respondents said yes. By starting with a big-ask, he tripled the likelihood that people would agree to his original proposition to take children to the zoo.

• Contrast-Caused Distortion: We are easily fooled by contrast. Put a hand in hot water and a hand in cold water, then plunge them both into room temperature water. One hand perceives that water as cold and the other hot, yet it’s the same water. Likewise, a mediocre home seems like a dream after the real-estate agent shows you a few overpriced dumps.

• The Paradox of Choice: We assume that having more choices is better. But with more choices, our decisions become increasingly irrational and we are less satisfied with every decision. Each choice is subject to far greater buyer’s remorse as we obsess on all the other options that we could have chosen. Also, as our choices grow, we are more likely to never make a decision. Paralysis by analysis.

• Prevalence Induced Concept Change: The blue-dot effect. The mind finds what it sets out to find.

It is with flawed senses, shrouded in cognitive bias and limited by a narrow set of experiences, that we humans try to make sense of the world and make decisions about the best ways to conduct our lives. 

Education is the process of improving our capacity to interpret the world so that we are better able to respond wisely to events and live a more fulfilling life. If you are still reading this book, you’ve probably encountered ideas that will change the way you perceive and respond to future experiences. That is why we read, question, and seek knowledge.

With this in mind, I’ll expand my original assertion that the point of education is to learn. The primary role of education is to promote:

1. More accurate interpretation of the world by acquiring vital knowledge and logic-driven critical thinking skills. Let’s call this sense-making.

2. A greater capacity to make good choices and to adapt one’s situation to produce desirable outcomes. Let’s call this wisdom.

3. The above two points should be driven by a master goal of enriching the human experience. This requires a basic understanding of how humans thrive but also an emphasis on creating citizens inclined to form the sort of cohesive social unit that people thrive within. Let’s call this human flourishing. 

The best path for meeting these goals varies drastically depending upon the time and situation. For most of human history and for most early civilizations, there was no need for an education system. If you were a hunter-gather on the African savannah or even a young Sumerian farmer, the intimate adults in your life would convey all the necessary skills. Life was your school. 

Certain inventions necessitate education, however. Representative democracy is one. Voters must be well-educated in the principles of government and have a means of obtaining and interpreting new information. Add the printing press and suddenly it is clear that society can’t function well unless everyone learns to read. You need schools to ensure mass literacy, teach the science of government, and to inculcate a sense of social duty.

What new competencies must we give people to make them capable of sense-making, wisdom, and flourishing in a world of mass information. What lessons do the internet and the smartphone necessitate? How about the industrial food complex? 

As outlined by Daniel Schmachtenberger at the end of chapter 11, we must train all of our citizens in three levels of sense-making. Students need to master:

1. First-person epistemics: Can I recognize my own biases and how they are impacting me? Can I recognize impulses that are not serving me and become better at mastering myself?

1. Second-person epistemics: Can I take on other peoples’ perspectives and find what drives them? Can I see the many viable long-term considerations that are weighed in every group choice? And can I communicate in a way that makes my message most likely to be received well by others? 

1. Third-person epistemics: Can I more accurately make sense of reality? Can I understand the world better and train myself to come to better interpretations? This is logic, science, and philosophical inquiry.

• Combining 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person epistemics, can I make the best possible case for your opinion (steel-manning) so that we are debating from agreeable premises while not succumbing to emotional outbursts, low blows, or fallacies. 

Beyond these fundamental skills , human flourishing also requires that our schools focus on providing an environment that promotes community and breeds a culture committed to optimizing physical and mental health. Much more on this in chapter 17. 

With these broad goals in mind, we can finally turn to determining how we learn best.

How Do We Learn Best?

Learning is built upon both direct experience and different forms of direct instruction, which give us conceptual models for deeper understanding. As I’ll show, both are necessary. 

In 1982, philosopher Frank Jackson created the Mary’s Room thought experiment to color the learning discussion:

Mary has lived her entire life in a room that only contains black and white. Despite her limited experience with colors, she is an expert on the science of color and how it is perceived by the human brain. She has read scores of black and white texts, watched countless hours of black and white educational documentaries, and enjoyed many days contemplating the physics and biology of color with colleagues over the phone. Mary knows everything language can communicate about color. One day, she leaves this room and is exposed to all the colors of the world. Does she learn anything?

Undoubtedly, red now has much more meaning to Mary after she leaves the room, even though she already knew every physical fact about the color red. Similarly, you may know the flu is an undesirable sickness, but you have a new level of understanding after a week in bed. There are some properties of knowledge only available to us through experience.

Experience is especially powerful to the young mind. Hot doesn’t mean much to children, until they burn their hand on the stove. Children learn the nuances of degree by also experiencing a hot summer day. Both stoves and summer heat are hot, but the latter is tolerable. If they experience a summer day in Tucson, Arizona and then visit Tampa, Florida they’ll learn the difference between dry heat and humid heat. More experience creates more capacity for nuance.

But we can’t expect students to construct essential higher-level lessons from only self-discovered experiences, as many progressive-sounding educators argue. There are essential skills like reading that cannot be freely constructed. Furthermore, even if Mary never left her black and white room, I’d still think Mary is better equipped to build color enhancing goggles than that guy cheering on the Bears at Buffalo Wild Wings.

It is not possible to learn everything through physical experience and, as we’ve already seen, we couldn’t entirely trust our senses to do so anyway. Direct experience is what led humans to presume the earth was the center of the universe. Your direct experience may lead you to believe that the earth is flat, all red-haired people are loud narcissists, and your softball team wins more games when you don’t wash your socks. 

Learning requires us to confront our misunderstandings in order to build a more accurate interpretation of the world. If I’m explaining how airline control centers work to someone who believes the earth is flat, the flight patterns won’t make sense. Fly west from L.A. to get to Japan? But Japan is in the far east. Yet, if they have a concept of roundness, they’ll quickly be able to assimilate a workable model after being told that the earth is a giant rotating ball. 

In his book, The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction, Greg Ashman takes issue with the simplified, experience-focused view that predominates modern education. One prominent educational text perfectly illustrates the insanity that dominates the radical constructivist philosophy:

“The teacher’s role is to facilitate learning….The teacher must set the classroom in a way that allows pupils to enquire, by posing problems, creating a responsive environment and giving assistance to the pupils to achieve autonomous discoveries. This applies to all areas of education, from discovering prose and its meaning in English to design problems in technology.”

Constructivism is a valid theory of learning which argues that new learning has to either fit or change past mental schemas (see my earth is round example). But the validity of constructivism as a learning theory in no way suggests that all education should focus on facilitating “autonomous discoveries.” Constructivism applies to learning by listening to a lecture just as well as it explains how we’d learn from a direct experience. 

This is all lost in the reigning educational perversion. As Ashman writes, “Plucked from its philosophical and scientific roots, constructivism in the classroom usually equates to asking students to find something out for themselves—to “construct” knowledge rather than passively receive it....”, He contrasts this approach with Sir Isaac Newton’s famous proclamation that, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of giants.” In modern education, Ashman jokes, “It is as if the giant is there, offering children his shoulders, but instead we are asking them to construct a ladder out of sticky tape and drinking straws.”

I’ve advocated for more free play, autonomy, and room for discovery in childhood, but as kids mature, the skills they need to master require more direct instruction. There is something profound and essential about the ability to learn from others or to read text and derive complex meaning. If we are to learn above an elementary level and benefit from the hard lessons of others, our minds must become capable of these skills. Education must teach students how to listen, read critically, and learn from others. This will be a source of inspiration that gives them the capacity to imagine something and bring it into reality—to have an idea and bring it into existence.

All this is to say, we can learn and be inspired by experience, but experiences must be filtered through a well-trained mind and enhanced by explicit teaching. We need clumsy physical experience, illuminating direct instruction, and practice communicating and critiquing ideas. The more we use knowledge, break down its parts, manipulate it to fit new contexts, and subject it to critique, the more understanding we can have. This is best accomplished with depth, not breadth. 

Many organizations, such as the Knowledge Matters campaign, argue that accumulating more knowledge brings many educational advantages and enhances students’ lives. I couldn't agree more. Students do better when they know more history, geography, science, math, classic literature, and have a broader familiarity with how things work. These students tend to find school more interesting, because school subjects begin from familiar building blocks. 

However, this familiarity comes best from an enriching home environment where knowledge is not shoved down children’s throats but is a natural extension of parent interests, family dinners, vacations, and trips to the zoo or planetarium. It is fostered by homes that feature physical artifacts like globes, books, chess-boards, and instruments. There is no substitute for an environment where learning is a part of living. 

We can’t ignore the vast differences between children’s home experiences—the number of books they read, the number of different words they hear, the amount of time spent in passive vs. active entertainment, and the psychological connotations they’ve formed around learning. If a learning tradition does not come from home, then students may need to spend more time on basic knowledge accumulation in order to best close the substantial gaps by the end of high-school. Unfortunately, this is an enormous challenge, which many students, particularly those whose families don’t emphasize education, will not bridge. We will have to continue to adapt to make these gaps less common. 

Still, it is foolish to suggest that all children need the same things or that teachers in one classroom can best facilitate extreme differences in students’ home educational environments. Different school populations will have different predominant needs and charter schools can help provide for major differences. But the public education system and its prevailing educational culture should not be built upon an expectation of bookless homes, lest they continue making that a more likely reality. 

Most schools would do well to break free of the heavily compartmentalized, knowledge-accumulation approach. Today’s subjects are sanitized and separated from the real world. Students chase test scores on broad state tests. They craft essay responses for the simplified grading standards of a far-away reader but rarely learn to think critically or express themselves well.  

What good does it do you to learn 20th-century world history if, after three months, you have no idea what caused World War I or what contributed to the rise of totalitarian governments? What good is passing a geography course if you still refer to Muslims as Islams and have no clue where Vietnam is in relation to Somalia. What good is any class if it doesn’t change how we interpret, experience, and act in the world? Students will always forget many specific details but, for a class to be worth it, it has to create understandings that last after the final exam. We don’t learn in order to pass tests or achieve ceremonial outcomes. We learn to create a richer human experience. The goal of school is to promote long-term human flourishing.

Today, the number of possible future occupations far surpasses our ability to speculate. We can’t possibly teach our children everything they will need to know. We have no idea what the future will look like, nor can we expect our students to remember every concept covered over the course of their education. What matters most is that youth cultivate higher order sense-making skills, learn how to learn, and feel inclined to do so. In addition, they need to build the antifragility to learn from failure and adapt as situations change. If they have these skills, regardless of their situation, they’ll have the tools to improve their circumstances and guide their own future. 

Make no mistake, these are skills. The culture and guiding philosophies of our schools will largely determine whether or not students develop these skills. With that in mind, we can turn to reimagining what education should look like. But, in doing so, we should be careful not to fall into what Nassim Taleb calls “neomania,” where we presume anything new is progress. Neomania has created an education system that is obsessed with technology for its own sake and that immerses its teachers in pseudoscientific bunk. There is a big difference between dreaming of a perfect education and putting it into practice. For that reason, it will be helpful to temper our reformist zeal with the wisdom of past models.

Chapter 14: The Lost Tools and Other Possible Reforms

“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.” – Elon Musk

Perhaps the greatest critique of modern education was written over 70 years ago in 1947. In an essay titled, The Lost Tools Learning, Dorothy Sayers rejects the broad, “checklist” educational approach, focusing instead on creating self-reliance and the ability to learn. She writes:

“And today a great number—perhaps the majority—of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out our research… and who educate our young people—have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline… We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or ‘looks to the end of the work.’

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers—they work only too hard already…. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

The tools of learning Dorothy Sayers refers to are the trivium—a model of three sequential parts of learning: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric—that correspond with the child’s developmental age.

There is very little good that comes from strapping 6-year-olds down to a desk for most of the day. Likewise, it would be futile to ask them to analyze different political theories and synthesize their best attributes into an optimal government. At this stage in a child’s development, which Sayers calls the “Poll-Parrot” stage, students have less capacity for abstract reasoning, but enjoy accumulating and memorizing facts, particularly when done through song and activity. As Sayers says, “To know the name and properties of things is, at this age, a satisfaction in itself.” 

Elementary students are naturally inclined to observe and memorize. Thus, these years are for fostering children’s natural sense of curiosity and mastering the basic building blocks—arithmetic, language, reading, geography, science, and a knowledge of prominent historical figures, events, and chronology.

As Sayers concedes, this is not a radical departure from the elementary standards of 1947. “The difference will be felt rather in the attitude of the teachers who must look upon all these activities less as ‘subjects’ in themselves than as a gathering-together of material for use in the next part of the trivium.” More than anything else, teachers must develop new attitudes about learning and a firmer grasp of the type of education students require.  

I would add to Sayers’ suggestions that we must expect students to accumulate this baseline knowledge gradually as we keep our foremost emphasis on respecting children’s developmental age and natural orientations. Young students need to be encouraged to explore and find pursuits that will later become portals to deeper understanding and thematic learning. They need multiple recesses and P.E. every day. These are essential needs, not luxuries to be shoved aside in the pursuit of knowledge accumulation. And we should foster, rather than squelch, kids’ natural inclinations for competition and rough-housing in order to bring more passion and excitement to the school environment. 

This point is best made well by author Matthew Crawford:

“I think we confuse the will to distinguish yourself… with the will to dominate others. And so the thirst for distinction gets a bad rap because it looks like the will to tyranny. The irony here is that it is the effort to clamp down on play that is itself a kind of tyrannical need to control everything. And you see that in, for example, affluent, progressive schools where you have these playground minders who are on the lookout for signs of trauma to the fragile selves they’re busy cultivating.”

Teachers would do well to give young students more freedom to self-organize and mediate their own disputes whenever possible. These meta-skills are the foundation of future emotional health and antifragility. 

“How can juvenile people be expected to self-govern or to navigate an advertising-saturated market economy full of propaganda and untruths? How can they determine fact from opinion or what’s been proven from what might be possible?” –Ben Sasse 

The next stage, according to Sayers, begins around the age when students grow more argumentative and “pert”—probably starting sometime around 6th grade and extending throughout the awkward early adolescent years. Students’ contrarian inclinations should be put to work learning formal logic and the foundations of dialectical reasoning—the dialectic. This is perhaps the most fundamental skill set of all, without which students will never be capable of critiquing claims or forming coherent opinions. 

Sayers sees formal logic as the basis of all education at this stage. Having mastered vocabulary, language can focus on structure, arrangement, and analysis. Reading can shift from narrative to argument and criticism. Nearly every subject would feature dialectical debates and written argument. Social studies, in particular, should meld history, political theory, and current events so that students have a framework to ask hard questions like: “What form of government is best?” Or, “What recent movements most closely parallel the extremes that led to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror?” And, finally, math and science instruction will turn to algebra, geometry, and how to apply the scientific method.These fields are a natural extension of logic as they are systems built for testing what is true. 

“But above all,” according to Sayers, “we must not neglect the material which is so abundant in the pupils’ own daily life.” All around us, from sports games, to politics and what’s trending on Twitter, there are good and bad arguments to critique. The more we can apply lessons to their lives, the more students will enjoy their learning and take it into the world. This speaks to a whole range of subject-matter that Sayers neglects and which I will emphasize in my own educational framework (in chapter 17). 

To Sayers, every subject is truly secondary to the mental skill that it aims to cultivate. As she puts it, “The ‘subjects’ supply material; but they are all to be regarded as mere grist for the mental mill to work upon. The pupils should be encouraged to go and forage for their own information... and shown how to tell which sources are authoritative and which are not.” The primary goal is to create an environment where teachers and students are “ready to detect fallacy, slipshod reasoning, ambiguity, irrelevance, and redundancy, and to pounce upon them like rats.” One can’t help but note that the majority of college graduates today have nothing approaching the skills Sayers would expect us to master by high-school. 

According to Sayers, it is around high-school that students' imaginations tend to reawaken as they become far less sure of their assumptions and more cognizant of the limitations of logic alone. With heightened cognitive abilities, students can approach old, rote subjects from exciting new angles. Without sacrificing expectations of quality, student learning should become increasingly self-directed and individualized. As Sayers explains:

“It would be well, I think, that each pupil should learn to do one, or two, subjects really well, while taking a few classes in subsidiary subjects to keep his mind open to the inter-relations of all knowledge. Indeed, at this stage, our difficulty will be to keep “subjects” apart; for Dialectic will have shown all branches of learning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledge is one.

When we dig deep into any subject we learn about ourselves and build a level of understanding that allows us to pull apart pieces, stitch them together creatively, and apply the themes to other fields. Depth is what is most important in the final stage. The deeper we learn anything the more we learn about everything. 

Sayers thought that the entirety of public education should be finished by age 16. Thus, this final stage would last from ages 14 until 16. Her expectation says something about how much we have delayed maturation. Still, I’d argue that we should maintain our current system where senior year ends at age 17 or 18. For those enamored with Sayers’ vision, it might be prudent to slow down and expand the length of the first stage (grammar) for a couple years, thereby giving more room to honor developmental exploration and pushing back the other phases a year or two as well. So many of the most important lessons are born from freedom and social experimentation, and so many brilliant people dismissed their schooling until later when someone brought it to life for them. 

While Sayers’ vision does a wonderful job of addressing third person epistemics, it mostly ignores the first and second person epistemics, as well as the central role of health. Still, the basic trajectory and principles behind her vision should inform our thinking about an ideal educational approach. By the end of high-school, students must have developed an earnest desire to learn and direct their own lives, as well as an ability to critique arguments and appreciate different perspectives. We must expect this of citizens as we head into a chaotic 21st century environment. As Sayers explains, this was even the case back in 1947:

“We who were scandalised in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education… we postpone the school leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes a burden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.” 

Our world is far more complex and dynamic than eighty years ago. To make a great future, we need to rediscover the lost tools. 

Student Expectations

For any of this to happen, we must understand that education holds no merit if the student does not invest for him or herself. Passionate personalities can help awaken interests. Relevant curriculums can better tap into intrinsic motivation. Teachers who model a growth mindset will create a learning culture. Honest grading and appropriate expectations will help foster maturity and self-awareness. An environment with fewer distractions and better incentive structures will promote more focus. Still, no amount of teacher support will matter if there is not a clear understanding that students are ultimately responsible for their outcomes. 

Today’s schools devote an inordinate amount of their energy into handing diplomas to the bottom tier of their students as if this will fix whatever disadvantages stood in the student’s way. In the process, they’ve distorted the entire system. You will often hear comments from teachers like: He doesn’t need this class, he just needs to get through high-school. Or even the dubious claim that: Nowadays students will need a high-school diploma to work at McDonalds too, you know? 

This pervasive line of the thought is the problem. No, you don’t need a worthless piece of paper to do any job. The only reason a high-school diploma or any ceremonial indicator could matter is if it truly demonstrated mastery of some level of competency. The paper is only ever as good as its requirements. If the high-school diploma came to indicate that students had successfully completed a high-school program like the one Sayers suggested, then the majority of occupations that currently require a bachelor's degree would only need a high-school diploma. 

In the process of making a world where the high-school diploma means nothing, we have watered down the entire system and, subsequently, the baseline level of adult citizens. Students now have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and attend four more years of school to learn the skills they should have mastered by the end of high-school. We push high-schoolers toward a college diploma even as it becomes more expensive and less valuable, and even as most students are less ready to determine a future path and less interested in the academic benefits of college. 

Rampant grade inflation and social promotion place many students in classes they can’t begin to understand. Learning builds upon prior learning. If a high-school freshman can’t do single digit multiplication in his head, why would we promote him to algebra? He isn’t in a position to learn it, so why pretend to teach him? Unfair as a student’s circumstances may be, we do him no favors by passing him along. 

According to clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, the best way to address social issues is through broadly emphasized individual interventions. In a 2010 study, a group of college students went through Peterson’s online Future Authoring Program, which required them to vividly describe their ideal future and then contrast that to a less desirable future possibility. This group was then prompted to create a specific plan of action. Academic performance improved by 20% for students who went through the program. Additionally, the gender performance gap decreased by 98% within a year and the ethnic gap shrunk by 93% within two years. Peterson is often attacked for not accepting the social justice ideology which dominates college campuses, but his efforts do far more to promote equality than their dogmatic social agenda. 

Peterson’s study takes advantage of the power of environment while also mitigating the danger of teaching people they are victims. Regardless of what we teach students, they must leave school with a sense of responsibility for their lives and a sense that they can learn what is needed to adapt to their challenges. 

Balancing Reformist Philosophies

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.” - Galileo Galilei

Dr. Peter Gray (whose play research I referenced in chapter 4) advocates for a much freer and wide-open educational experience. He would argue that low expectations are not the problem—that, in fact, the problem is having any expectations at all. Gray is an advocate for the unschooling movement and often references the Sudbury Valley “non-school” School where children are encouraged to learn by spending their days however they want. 

It is good that such laboratories exist to challenge conventional wisdom and provide opportunities for kids who can thrive in this environment. But such students tend to be gifted and have well-educated, involved parents. For the masses, this approach would be a chaotic mess leaving them ill-prepared for life. 

By contrast, it appears that some students, particularly those in low-income environments with the least home support, might benefit most from a highly structured STEM-oriented environment where discipline is put at the forefront. In particular, the most successful charter schools, Success Academy and KIPP schools, have changed many students' lives with an approach that demands discipline and high standards of conduct. While I wouldn’t build the entire system in this image either, these schools are perfect for the needs of their students just as “un-schools” might best suit theirs. 

There will always be those who thrive in non-conventional environments like Sudbury Valley, but society must be built upon a far more realistic framework. Social cohesion stems from a shared sense of standards that are far more likely to be the reason people thrive than the reason they “shut down.” In fact, for most students, shutting down only becomes an option because they live in a culture where it is such an obvious and appealing option—where so many adults are eager to make excuses for students and tell them how teachers aren’t accommodating their unique needs. 

Now, more than ever, we need standards that help build willpower and challenge the cultural momentum which pulls us to only do what feels good in the moment. It sounds very enlightened to call traditional schooling an archaic prison and claim that all students would love learning if it wasn’t for all that discipline. How would you feel if people were telling you what to do all day? 

But, as silly as the educational idealists sound, they highlight kernels of truth that are worth bearing in mind. Students have different interests, learning styles, and temperaments. They all can find a passion for learning, especially when nurtured well early on by teachers who care about them. And when possible, offering students flexibility, autonomy, and creativity in how they reach a learning goal can make subjects come to life. As Sayer’s pointed out, subjects are mere “grist for the mental mill” to help train better sense-making skills.

Still, no matter how hard we strive, there will be no perfect education. I’ll do my best to clarify a better vision in chapter 17, but the most important thing to remember is that our students must create their own future. Learning and growth are messy and mistake-ridden, not linear. A teacher’s greatest impact comes through creating depth and connection. Rather than giving students fish, they transform lives by teaching their pupils how to fish and helping them discover a passion for fishing. 

Education’s forement focus should be to train the specific skills and understandings that are most fundamental for people to flourish in the modern world. This system must incorporate Sayers’s lost tools of learning, but also give students a roadmap for self-mastery. Before I introduce my educational vision, we must explore some essential principles of human behavior that no student should graduate without.

Chapter 15: Master Thy Self

In the famed Stanford Marshmallow experiments, Dr. Walter Mischel put hundreds of four and five-year-olds alone in a room with a single marshmallow. The children were instructed that they could eat the marshmallow or wait fifteen minutes for the researchers to return and be rewarded with two marshmallows for their patience. Imagine four-year-olds in a room trying to distract themselves for what seemed like an eternity. I’m sure the video is priceless.

These children were tracked over the next four decades and those who successfully delayed their gratification for fifteen minutes, tended to be more healthy, wealthy, happy, and more successful by every metric. They had lower rates of addiction, lower incidence of divorce, and greater economic freedom.

Similarly, in the 1940’s, Harvard conducted a study to see how long college sophomores would stay on a steeply inclined treadmill traveling at high speeds. Researchers believed test performance would indicate the “extent to which a subject is willing to push himself or has a tendency to quit before the punishment becomes too severe.”

Some participants jumped off after little more than a minute. The majority made it about four minutes. Scientists contacted all the study participants every two years for the next 60 years to collect data and a lifestyle questionnaire. Just as in the Stanford experiments, they found that those who persisted longer were more successful and better psychologically adjusted.

Free Yourself

“No man is free who is not master of himself.” –Epictetus

We love our freedom, but in light of the mass dependency characteristic of 21st Century America, can we really claim to be free? When I felt compelled to stay in a shower until I thought of the name Mark DeRosa, was I free? If that email alert dings at 8 p.m. on Friday night and you just have to check it, are you free? How about when your best intentions to eat well are sabotaged by the smell of your friend’s French fries? Are you free then? Or, when you are driving along feeling great and someone cuts you off in traffic. If you fly off the handle and allow that to prompt an angry downward spiral, are you free? The reckless driver is long gone, blissfully ignorant of your insults. Yet you still suffer from the anger you can’t seem to let go of. 

To some degree, this is just part of being a warm-blooded mammal. There is nothing desirable about becoming a passionless robot. Still, most worthwhile pursuits are characterized by an ability to overcome impulse for something greater. This doesn’t mean that we should numb ourselves from every feeling, but to be able to feel an impulse and objectively decide that we will be better off if we ignore infantile emotions and take a wiser course. This is maturity in a nutshell and it is the secret to being who we would like to be. 

There are differences in the values and mindset between disciplined people and those who are more controlled by the allure of instant gratification. But for the most part, both types of people would choose similar outcomes if given the same choices.

Would you like to have savings or debt?

Would you like to have connected, reliable relationships or superficial relationships built on convenience and pleasure?

Would you like to be healthy or sickly?

Would you like to have projects you feel excited about or nothing to do?

Both the self-mastered and the instant-gratificationer would choose the first option in each scenario. What all those preferable outcomes have in common is they are made possible by the discipline of delaying self-gratification. Millions of tiny impulses have to be overridden or ignored. 

Where the fulfilled and impulsive differ most is in their ability to define what is most valuable, script the critical moves, and act upon them. Planning and acting are the secret to being who we want to be. Therefore, acting is where we should place our emphasis. Educators, coaches, and parents should go to great lengths to help develop kids’ ability to overcome impulse (as well as their own). 

Developing Your Will

“Do not be afraid to exaggerate the role of willpower. It is an exaggeration with a purpose. It leads to a positive self-fulfilling dynamic, and that is all you care about.” – Robert Greene

In the late 1990’s the psychologist Roy Baumeister conducted a famous study on willpower. Participants were placed in a room with two plates of food—a plate of radishes and a plate of warm fresh cookies. He instructed half the participants to abstain from eating cookies and only eat radishes. The other half were told that they could eat whatever they wanted. Then the two groups were given a puzzle to work on. Unbeknownst to the subjects, this puzzle was impossible to finish. The experimenters wanted to see if the radish-only group, who had been fighting back their cookie cravings, would quit earlier. And they did. Radish-only participants lasted an average of eight-minutes while the eat-anything group and the control group both averaged 19-minutes. 

After many similar studies, Baumeister concluded that willpower was like a muscle, which loses strength as it fatigues. Many have since taken this willpower depletion model to rationalize impulsive behavior as an inevitable consequence of circumstances. It provides us an easy cop-out after a work day when we’d rather plop on the couch than exercise. More broadly, it is a common justification for excusing low standards in schools and other developmental institutions: It isn’t fair to ask as much of her because she has disadvantages that drain her willpower. What appears as compassion is actually subtle cruelty. We amplify the effect of people’s disadvantages by seeking out rationalizations for every misstep, thereby removing the impetus for correction. Rather than instill the belief that if they try hard enough they can find a way, we program students to find an excuse. 

This tendency is especially problematic in light of recent research indicating that past studies have overstated the willpower depletion effect and excluded findings that did not fit their desired conclusion. A more comprehensive meta-analysis of the willpower research revealed that the most significant factors in people’s ability to persist are how committed a person is to their goals and whether she believes she has the necessary willpower or not. The most important factor for people’s success is whether or not they believe they have the power to be successful. 

Still, willpower-depletion can’t be dismissed altogether. It is a relevant variable, but most people missed Baumeister’s larger insight: willpower is indeed like a muscle. It grows stronger with exercise. Triathletes don’t use the existence of fatigue as justification to demand a shorter race. They train their capacity to endure longer and go faster. Likewise, success in life will continue to require willpower and to reward those who build more of it. This is one of the few certainties we have about the future. 

Thus, educators and parents should consistently put youth in situations that require them to develop willpower. No, you don’t get to put your head down now under the guise that you’ll just do the assignment for homework. No, you don’t get to watch TV before doing your homework. Yes, it is hot outside and I expect the lawn to be mowed as usual. Bring some water. We must expect people to demonstrate willpower and train it through millions of tiny expectations. Willpower training is a staple of life and should be a central focus of every school and every parent’s worldview. 

But the implications of the radish study don’t stop there. A large part of the challenge for the radish-eating group was smelling cookies and watching others eat them. Remove the cookies and you remove the willpower fatigue. Likewise, if you go to a school where there is no access to social media and phone games, where it is normal to study, and where all the available food options are nutritious, then it requires far less willpower to focus, study, and eat well. Rather than teaching our kids to expect safe spaces, second chances, and infinite accommodations, we should build our environments to support effort, focus, courage, toughness, perseverance, honesty, and the competition of ideas. 

Further, we should explicitly teach students how to design their environment so that they are more likely to behave as they objectively want to. My experience with students is that they have vague goals, but don’t know how to make a plan or adapt to the inevitable hiccups along the way. They feel helpless. We should explicitly teach and model environmental design throughout every school. This begins with setting smart boundaries for technology but, more than that, we must give our students a toolkit for creating behavior change that lasts.

The Rider, the Elephant, and the Path

“It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.” –Marcus Aurelius

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt explains that the mind is run by two separate, often competing systems. He illustrates this with the metaphor of a man riding atop an elephant. Your logical mind is the rider, who sits atop an elephant (your emotion). When your emotional side is dispassionate, the rider can easily determine the best route. However, when your emotions are strong, the rider cannot muscle the reigns and get his way for long. If your rider decides to wake up at 4:30 am to work out, you may get your way for a few days, but the rider can only control an unruly elephant for so long. Eventually, emotion wins and you hit snooze…11 times. When we train willpower with small, daily disciplines, we develop our rider’s ability to control a rebellious elephant while, simultaneously, teaching the elephant to crave a more fulfilling reward.

It is tempting to conclude that the elephant is the problem, but that would be like a CEO concluding that workers are the problem. The elephant has tremendous power and energy. Without emotion, we’d never decide to exercise or study in the first place. The elephant informs us about our larger dreams and fuels our creativity. We need to employ both the elephant and rider to achieve long-term success in any endeavor. 

In their book, Switch, brothers Chip and Dan Heath introduce a third element to this analogy: the path. Even the unruliest elephant will walk straight and narrow on a cliffside path. Likewise, the most important variable for producing consistent action is to shape our environment. 

If I want to be successful in my 4:30 a.m. training schedule I need to use my rider to construct an environment that promotes success by limiting my elephant’s opportunities to pull me off course. Before beginning my new habit, I should consider my sleep needs and set up a sleep schedule so that I consistently get to bed at an earlier hour. Then I could set three alarms, each farther away from my bed. The furthest alarm might be right outside my bedroom door with my workout clothes staged right beside it. Or maybe there are other people in the house that I don’t want to wake up. I could set a second alarm outside my daughter’s bedroom door, but program it for one minute after the first alarm goes off so I know I have to hurry to disarm it before it wakes her. I could further strengthen the environmental pulls by challenging friends to do the same workout and to hold each other accountable with a daily check-in. For some people, this still might not be enough. However, if they joined a Marine boot camp, I’m certain they’d have no trouble finding the motivation to get up on time. 

For four years, I trained a talented high-school football player who showed little desire to grow up. He was dependent on his mother for everything from waking up on time, to knowing what assignments were overdue, to being reminded that his SAT was scheduled for the next day. But he was a good athlete and went on to play college football. On a visit home during his Freshman year, I asked him how the transition went. He told me that he’d slept in and showed up late for his first 6 a.m. workout, but was proud to report that after an aggressive punishment, he had not been late since. The path has power. 

Our schools and youth development culture should be obsessed with helping students learn to manipulate their environment and to train their willpower. These are the keys that unlock everything from health and grades, to lifelong hobbies and healthy savings habits. They underlie patience, focus, and every other positive interpersonal skill. 

This is no secret. Nearly every philosophy, religion, or mythology professes the essentiality of self-mastery while offering their own unique training protocols. Yet, our youth development paradigm does not work to create it. Teachers are never given strategies to develop delayed gratification in their students, nor explicitly taught the value themselves. There are no district initiatives to train greater focus and no course that teaches habit formation and environmental design to students. In an age of more temptation than ever before, we must give our children a framework to free themselves from manipulation.

Creating a Growth Mindset

“It's not that I am smart. It's that I stay with problems longer.” - Albert Einstein

As essential as it is to learn environmental design, the most essential strategy to create capable youth may be to praise the right things. Or, just as important, to avoid praising the wrong things.

Stanford’s renowned mindset psychologist, Carol Dweck examined over 400 students across six studies to look at the effects of different kinds of praise. One by one, fifth grade students were taken out of their class and into a testing room where they were given a set of “moderately difficult” problems. After completion, their test was scored. All students were told they’d done well. Some were praised for their ability: “Wow, you must be smart to get so many problems right.” Others were praised for their effort: “Wow, you must have worked hard at these problems.”

Then, the researchers gave students a far harder problem set. Each student was told that they had done poorly after they finished. Researchers then asked if they’d like to take the second, more challenging problem set home to practice. The kids praised for effort (“you must have worked hard”) were far more likely to take these problems home than those praised for intelligence (“you must be smart”). Later, when students were given a third set of problems, those praised for effort outperformed those praised for intelligence. At the end, students had the option to choose between reading how they could improve their test performance in the future or seeing their peers’ results. Those praised for effort were far more likely to want to learn how they could improve, while the ability-praised group wanted to know how their peers had done. 

The group praised for being smart had quickly learned to measure themselves based on what people said about their performance. They were considered intelligent when they easily solved problems, thus struggling to solve problems and needing to ask questions must mean they were dumb. Any increased challenge was a threat to their identity. Dweck calls this a fixed mindset.

Conversely, the group praised for effort overwhelmingly reported liking the harder problems just as much, if not more than, the previous task. Most of them were eager to take the problems home to practice. They were praised for giving effort and this hardworking identity freed them to enjoy a good challenge. Dweck calls this a growth mindset.

In his book, The Art of Learning, the chess prodigy turned world champion Tai Chi Push Hands fighter, Josh Waitzkin, compares the hazards of a fixed mindset to a hermit crab who starves itself to avoid outgrowing its shell. Hermit crabs take on a shell for protection early in life. At a certain point, however, they outgrow the shell and must discard it in order to find a larger, more suitable one. The crab has to journey out, completely exposed, in search for a new shell. As Waitzkin explains, “That learning phase in between shells is where our growth can spring from. Someone stuck with an entity (fixed) theory of intelligence is like an anorexic hermit crab, starving itself so it doesn’t grow to have to find a new shell.”

Without growth we are truly starving ourselves. Helping kids enjoy challenges is the best way to help them live fulfilling lives. As Dweck puts it:

"If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don't have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence." 

Dweck’s research indicates that praising people for traits like “being smart” or “naturally athletic” creates a fixed mindset and promotes risk aversion. People avoid failures that might shatter their fragile self-image. They would rather look like they don’t care than be seen to care and fail. By contrast, growth-minded people build true confidence. They are willing to risk failing because they are more focused on the doing. Thus, they learn to love the process. 

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case you fail by default.” –J.K. Rowling

When we obsess on outcomes, it is easy to misinterpret feedback and never learn the nuanced lessons that come from raw experience. Failure might not warrant course correction. As professional poker player, Annie Duke explains, “If you define failure as merely losing, then you will think failure is just an outcome. And you might try to adjust your play to avoid losing even though your decisions were great.[6]”

Duke has a lot of experience learning to analyze failed poker hands. As she says:

“…just because I win doesn’t mean I succeeded…. What matters is the decisions I made along the way, and every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward. By doing this, losing becomes a less emotional experience and more an opportunity to explore and learn.” 

Our children must learn to make this distinction. We and our children must learn to think much beyond immediate outcomes. If we are not failing, then we aren’t putting ourselves in situations to learn and grow. When we can appreciate the lesson in each experience the world turns into a fascinating laboratory.

This isn’t to suggest that we can’t enjoy success and feel the pain of failure. Nor should it be misconstrued as a reason for inflating grades or not keeping score. Such developments reflect an environment where adults are so obsessed with outcomes that they are afraid to let kids deal with reality. Outcomes are a vital feedback mechanism. As we explored in our analysis of honor cultures and ranking systems, social comparison is an inevitable and essential tool to use for creating excellence-driven environments. But the only reason to recognize that outcomes matter is to give a measuring stick for the virtues, effort in particular, that make those outcomes possible. 

Teachers and parents should emphasize student effort while maintaining the expectation that students continue working until they have created a high-quality result. Students need to learn to persevere until a project is done well and take pride in doing their work “the right way,” but feedback should focus on effort because this is all anyone can control.

Likewise, it is essential to critique a lack of effort even if the outcomes are satisfactory. In my time as a Strength and Conditioning Coordinator, I’ve repeatedly watched coaches who allow their best athletes to give less effort and get away with far more. Many coaches fear upsetting their stars, so they protect these athletes from the constructive criticism that they desperately need. These players are destined to reach a level where their talent no longer fills the gaps for their lack of effort. But by this point they will be years behind in developing the focus, antifragility, and emotional intelligence necessary for higher level performance. 

Teachers often do the same in school. With incentive structures that pull their focus to the low-achieving students, the most intelligent students are rarely given the critique or challenge they need to grow. After years of being lauded for being smart, these students learn to give teachers exactly what they want, without ever daring to think differently.

There are some schools who pay lip-service to fostering a growth-mindset but they usually have not internalized what this means. They talk a lot about how everyone can grow, but these idle words don’t translate to much difference in teacher or student behavior. 

A study of 400,000 students co-authored by Michigan State and Western Case Reserve University purported to show that growth-mindset interventions had only a small effect on academic performance. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever been to a teacher professional development training. Speakers are brought in to sell some new educational gimmick. They present it in the most rah-rah, superficial manner possible and then the teachers return to business as usual. The school claims a new cutting-edge pedagogical approach and throws up signs in the hall, but nothing actually changes. 

It doesn’t matter what values we post on the wall. It is not enough to profess the virtues of a growth-mindset and to occasionally praise effort. These measures won’t make a dent in a culture of grade inflation, where students are constantly shown that manipulating perception is what really matters. What makes an impact is the real operating system that drives our culture. Do we celebrate failure and risk-taking? Are students empowered to engage in an honest, high-quality dialectic or do we maintain the illusion that all opinions are equally valid? Praising effort requires a clear standard of excellence. There has to be a sense of the way you should conduct your business. Do you play the game the right way?

Most importantly, to appreciate the benefits of a growth-minded culture, teachers must be learners, themselves. Teachers who love learning are always sparking debates and connecting class topics to new ideas that they are learning about. This is the difference between the outcome-oriented developmental strategy that dominates youth development today and one that understands that lifelong learning is essential in order for our children to create fulfilling lives. Learning has merit in and of itself. It is the very essence of a life well-lived. 

Chapter 16: A New Vision for Schools

“There is fire in the flint and steel, but it is friction that causes it to flash, flame and burn, and give light where all else may be darkness. There is music in the violin, but the touch of the master is needed to fill the air and the soul with the concord of sweet sounds. There is power in the human mind, but education is needed for its development.” - Frederick Douglass

The core of today’s high-schools is the same core that you remember:

• Math = Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II, Trigonometry or Calculus

• Science = Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science or Astronomy

• Social Studies = World Geography, World History, U.S. History, U.S. Government

• English = Composition, Expository Writing, and themed literature classes

Each of these subjects are valuable and quite beautiful to those who wish to deeply explore them. Yet, in our current public-school model the average student graduates retaining only the most basic algebraic skills, a few meaningless scientific terms like “chlorophyll,” a few random historic names, a superficial grasp of the dominant political parties, and depressingly poor writing skills. We silo off subjects from one another, rush through them, and dress them in their most boring, unthreatening, and irrelevant clothes. With nothing to tie them to, each fragment falls away. 

As Dorothy Sayers suggested, during the elementary school learning phase all students need a baseline level of math, science, social studies, and english skills. While not alone sufficient, these create a foundation to build upon. I also agree with Sayers’s overarching vision of middle school education where formal logic is at the center of most subjects. 

Having mastered logic, high-school should offer students considerable flexibility. Those more advanced, focused progressions that make up the current high-school “core” should be electives. Some students will need and love higher level physics and calculus, but a majority will never retain, nor use those skills. They are only necessary for a small segment of the population who has the inclination to learn them. Still, every high-school class is not an elective. There are essential lessons and life skills that are truly core to success in the 21st century.

The standard approach to education focuses on checking off boxes that are supposed to guarantee some obscure idea of success. School is an extension of consumerism. We learn to earn. In the process, we miss the point. Even if this model was the best path to bring students financial success (which it isn’t), students rarely graduate equipped to create a fulfilling life. 

A future engineer will need to understand calculus just as a future doctor will need a firm grasp of biology. But what does that matter if he is depressed, in and out of toxic relationships, and lacks the emotional intelligence to work on his anger and compulsive eating? What will a degree in statistics offer a high-school graduate who lacks any interest other than status and immediate gratification? How much more would she be capable of with a strong body, a resilient mind, and clear values? And what will any of this matter if she and her peers don’t understand the context in which they live or feel a sense of civic duty?

The true educational core is the foundation that is common to all humans and upon which we are made most capable. These are the lessons that are most timeless and timely for the human experience.

The New Core should include:

• The Foundations of a Healthy Lifestyle

• Humanity, Self-Discovery, and Self-Mastery

• Rhetoric and Human Relationships

• Cognitive Bias and the Skill of Learning

• Political Theory, Citizenship, and 20th Century World History

• Essential Financial Strategies

Reductionist vs. Integrated Learning Model

Before we examine each of these new core subjects, let’s clarify the overarching educational philosophy. We are teaching the whole person in an effort to create applicable, useful understandings that are stepping stones to future learning and adaptation. Secondary education must transcend subject categories to promote depth and transfer. 

Core subjects are not intended to be isolated classes offering narrowly defined skillsets. While each would be designated at least one yearlong course, the skills and ideas must be used across classes. For this core to work best it, must become the language that schools speak in. 

For example, high-school students should write and read more than they do now, but by high-school, English should be part of every subject, not its own. With few obvious exceptions, every course would require writing and every teacher would be well practiced in the writing process. By making writing an integral component of all learning, the overall level of written communication would far surpass what we see today.

Likewise, each core subject would not only permeate all others, but also the way we approach human development. Since each core subject is inherent to the human experience, they will each be an adaptable vehicle to explore every other subject. 

To best facilitate integration, each teacher would need to demonstrate mastery across all core concepts. Unlike today when social-studies teachers are baffled by freshman algebra and chemistry teachers have forgotten the causes of Rome’s fall, the universal nature of my core creates limitless possibilities for cross-curricular connections that promote real-world application. Learning may be organized by subjects but it knows no bounds.

We need teachers who learn, question, and strive for truth as a way of being—teachers who read every day and are excited to make connections from what they teach to the ideas they are learning about. Such teachers will naturally spark good-natured debates with other teachers and model for students how learning enhances the quality of relationships and life. 

Lifelong learning is more than an empty platitude for teachers in high-performing cultures like Finland and Japan. Teaching is a competitive, challenging field that requires rigorous training, but in turn offers tremendous autonomy and respect throughout society. These countries don’t have exhaustive curriculums, yearly standardized tests, or bureaucratized evaluation systems that encourage superficial oversimplifications. Rather, teachers are empowered to be developmental experts. Higher standards create a culture where teachers exhibit the values and skills necessary to optimize learning without micromanagement. 

The quality of the teachers determines the quality of the school. Not a top-heavy bureaucracy with endless numbers of assistant superintendents, curriculum specialists, human resource czars, and equity officers. These inhibit the learning that would naturally spring from great teachers in a good campus culture. Let’s cut all the excess and bring in the best people possible. We need talented, empowered teachers to make a more inspired educational experience possible. 

The final imperative for schools is to begin treating students like burgeoning adults. Students need to talk about the topics that adults handle because adulthood is the desirable fate they all share. Traditional education sanitizes each topic and puts it in its most unthreatening clothes. We run from fully exploring important, interesting issues such as: death, religion, a life-well-lived, automation, the future of human societies, animal extinctions, the ethical implications of upcoming scientific breakthroughs, mass data collection, how to balance security and liberty, the state of public mental and physical health, race relations, gender relations, romantic relationships, parenting strategies, and corruption, to name a few.

These topics bring learning to life and make students more likely to seek greater understanding. But they have the potential to elicit strong emotions and make some parents angry so we shy away from giving them an honest, thorough examination. 

How are students to navigate the world if they can’t discuss important topics in a contained environment where the rules are set ahead of time? Schools must have the courage to support students’ growth regardless of the uncomfortable moments that it might bring. We need to confront all the hard, taboo topics, but in a progressive manner where students have the logical background and the communication skills to navigate these tricky engagements. Our kids are not inheriting a stable, static world. They’ll prefer that we made them capable, not comfortable.

And now, a brief overview of each domain within the new core:

The Foundations of a Healthy Lifestyle

“Intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong. In this sense physical activity is the basis for all the activities of our society.” – John F. Kennedy

As currently taught, health and P.E. are a joke—relegated to the corners of the building—unseen, unheard, and rarely thought of. And yet, health is our most fundamental need. Every experience and every effort is magnified by greater health and muddied by its absence. We cannot optimize the mind without taking care of the body. Our attitudes and understandings about health directly add or take away years of life and shape the quality of the years we have. 

We spend billions each year on diet plans, trainers, and unnecessary prescriptions. Billions more on the preventable consequences of poor health, which drive millions into limited, dependent lives. This reactive approach isn’t slowing down the epidemic of poor health. Students need to experience an environment that promotes health and human flourishing and they need to be taught the principles of how to take care of their own health. 

Perhaps nothing would make a greater impact on students’ lives than for each school to develop an inspired P.E. program like Stan LeProtti created at La Sierra High in the late 1950’s. LeProtti’s program, which was featured in the film, The Motivational Factor, developed a high level of physical fitness throughout La Sierra High School. He created a rigorous, individually motivating, yet team-oriented system that promoted strong values, perseverance, and student-coaching. Teachers and former La Sierra students rave about how this program instilled an excellence-driven culture that transferred to the classroom and beyond. 

Physical Education has the power to be a unifying educational experience that endears all of society with a respect for health and a basic physical mastery—what many fitness experts call physical literacy. This baseline fitness competency gives people the tools to improve their own health and opens doors to future activities that can be a portal to deep relationships, passions, life lessons, and lifelong health. 

But respect for the body can’t just be quarantined to P.E. Healthy movement habits should infuse every day and every class. Rather than having students sit for six or more hours a day, schools should encourage teachers to include walking lectures and outdoor lessons, and classrooms should feature standing desks. These would have easy up and down adjustment and a high-stool for sitting, but would promote more engaged posture and movement.

In addition to physical literacy, schools should strive to create nutritional literacy in the Betty Dickson mold. Students must grasp basic principles so they can practice sustainable, healthy eating habits. Even more, schools should be selective about what foods and beverages they make available. Halls shouldn’t be lined with vending machines. The costs of providing nutritious meals are a far better investment than fancy atriums, showy technology, or other luxuries. There are obvious constraints to cooking for large numbers. Every school won’t have a farm full of happy dancing chickens, frolicking streams of wild fish, and rows of fresh-grown produce. Still, the foods available in a school day should be reserved for whole foods, which existed prior to the industrial revolution. Schools should convey the belief that taking care of your health is the beginning of becoming an autonomous adult. 

Finally, students must learn more about the mind and the conditions that optimize mental health. As the markers of poor mental health proliferate, many states have begun Band-Aid initiatives. In 2019, Texas Governor, Greg Abbot, signed a bill requiring mental health curriculums. This is a step, but I’m afraid it won’t be any more effective than modern health classes have been against the growing tide of obesity. One token course means little when saturated in an environment diametrically opposed to it. Students spend their days seated, surrounded by junk food, toggling from app to app, while often lacking sunlight and sleep. To make matters worse, schools have become fragility factories—sheltering students, over-providing excuses, and indoctrinating self-defeating mental distortions. 

In addition to fixing these environmental problems, schools should teach students mindfulness practices so they have a basic mental literacy. This is also known as meditation, which apart from the stigmas associated, is among the best tools at our disposal for helping people become happier. As Jonathan Haidt explains in The Happiness Hypothesis:

“Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.”

Meditation also helps you become aware of thoughts and emotions so you can notice unhealthy patterns and take more control of your responses. It helps people drop past assumptions so they can experience a more accurate, unbiased interpretation of the world—pretty advantageous for a learning environment.

Required Reading:

• RAMA: Paradigm 21, by Ed Thomas Ed.D.

Humanity, Self-Discovery, and Self-Mastery

Schools must promote investigation into how humans thrive and explore what it means to be a human. The modern environment could not be further from the conditions expected by our biology. Manipulative entities, heavily incentivized to create addiction and mindless consumption, prey on our every impulse. To ignore this reality virtually ensures dependency and limited living. As we rush into the age of automation this will only increase.

We must study what it means to be human and mine for the universals across the human experience. What environment were we evolved to thrive within? What are the human needs and how do we best operate in this world? From this foundation we can design exercises that promote self-discovery and investigation into creating a meaningful existence in the modern context. This is an ever-evolving process that should be revisited often across many subjects. 

In order for our students to create their own future, they must begin to cultivate a more sophisticated sense of who they are and where they derive purpose. From this foundation, they can develop the skills and structure to intentionally identify desirable actions and then follow through.

Early on, this subject is also where students can practice meditation and deep dive into willpower training, habit creation, and environmental design, which will facilitate all learning. In particular, there should be a freshman semester course based primarily on James Clear’s Atomic Habits followed by a semester that specifically addresses the challenges of 21st-century time management. 

Time is our most valuable resource. Most people feel as if their days are a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. They are constantly reacting and being yanked from task to task. Email, texts, tweets, and all the demands of our hectic world pull and prod them in a hundred different directions. We feel busy, but not productive. 

Students must learn how to create mental space and focus by creating structures that allow them to manage their time effectively. They should learn the value of deep work, how to create boundaries, batch work, prioritize, and systemize in a fast-paced world. These skills amplify each student’s capacity to digest content and direct their own learning. While specific time management courses should probably conclude after freshman year, every teacher and course should expect and reinforce these structures throughout the rest of the student’s high-school career.

As schooling progresses, this subject will delve deeper into the human condition, values, and the pursuit of human excellence. It should communicate the values and expectations of the school culture, uniting all students and staff behind the ideal of aretê. Imagine a student culture that was well-versed in the human needs and trained in the ability to interrupt negative mental patterns, rewire habits, and influence their psychological states by changing their physiology. Such a culture would create amazing people who are willing, able, and excited to improve the world that they inherit.

The culmination of this field will come at the end of high-school when students outline and conquer a rite of passage into adulthood. This will be a rallying point to the entire educational process that requires planning, intellectual competency, physical capacity, and mental will. Think of it as part senior thesis and part gauntlet of challenges that all seniors must complete. The goal is to communicate a sense that adulthood is desirable, but it must be earned and it comes with responsibilities of competency, maturity, and capability. 

Typical of the integrated model, Humanity, Self-Discovery, and Self-Mastery would feature a heavy emphasis on debate, writing, history, psychology, relationships, philosophy, anthropology, interpreting research, literature, and physical experience.

Required Reading:

• Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger

• Natural Born Heroes, by Christopher McDougall

• Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig

• The Obstacle is the Way, by Ryan Holiday

• Atomic Habits, by James Clear 

• Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath

• Getting Things Done, by David Allen

Rhetoric and Relationships

“When dealing with people remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.” - Dale Carnegie

The success of our species is built upon our amazing capacity for communication and coordination. It does not matter how brilliant our ideas are if we  cannot communicate them in a way that makes them palatable for others. Furthermore, the quality of our life depends on the quality of our relationships. 

In the age of the smartphone, it is more necessary than ever to teach communication skills. Our kids lack social practice and often have a staggering inability to understand body language. We must explicitly teach and facilitate these skills within the school structure. Students need frequent practice speaking publicly and presenting their arguments, findings, or original creations. They would also benefit from the “Yes-and” drills common to improvisational comedians where they learn to be in-tune with partners and find creative transitions.

Additionally, we should reinforce ground rules for the type of honest, good-faith debating that calls on students to apply emotional intelligence. Rather than succumbing to common tactics like the strawman, students should practice “steelmanning” another person’s argument by clearly repeating it back to ensure they have characterized it’s nuance before building their case on the other side.

We have to teach our students to understand that differences of opinion are essential to our growth and to a healthy society, but, also, that opinions are not all equally valid. These ends are facilitated by a culture where students practice meditation and have been trained in logic.

To dig even deeper, students should begin to study the lost art of rhetoric. To the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Dorothy Sayers, rhetorical training was the culmination of a person’s education. As author Jay Heinrichs explains, “Rhetoric gives a real purpose to a liberal education, pulling together all of a student’s knowledge while giving her the tools to inspire others. It inoculates her against the kind of manipulation and tribalism that poison our politics. It creates a good citizen. A truly educated one.”

Finally, this subject must discuss relationships, even romantic ones, and the differences between male and female experiences and expectations. This is rich, potentially scary territory, but it must be addressed so students have an environment where they can talk and begin to craft more mature understandings about the relationships that will fill their lives.  

Communication and Relationships is a large subject that digs into:

• How to package messages so they are better received

• How to create clarity in dialogue

• Reinforcing rules of honest debating

• Writing and speaking better

• How to create healthy boundaries in relationships

• How to better understand different personalities

• Looking at variations of the big five personality traits

Infuse this subject with literature, history, logic, and especially psychology. It is territory ripe for conversation and ever-continuing education.

Required Reading:

• How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

• Thank You for Arguing, by Jay Heinrichs

• The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt

• The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle

• Talking with Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell

• On Writing Well, by William Zinsser

Cognitive Bias and the Skill of Learning

“When you know how to think it empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.” –Neil DeGrasse Tyson

This is an extension of the logic-centric “scholastic discipline” Dorothy Sayers called for in The Lost Tools of Learning. This course focuses on cultivating a greater capacity for academic inquiry, more accurate perception, and better judgment. The age of mass media has been built to a consumer base that lacks the basic ability to assess validity. How can we make good decisions if we aren’t equipped with a basic capacity for detecting contradictions and biases?

Our world is ever-changing. Those who know how to learn will adapt and thrive. Those who perceive nuance and understand the limitations and patterns of the mind will be invaluable decision makers. Those who know how to deconstruct parts to synthesize new ideas will innovate and create value. Those who understand how the human mind operates and learns best are equipped with the tools to be successful regardless of what life throws at them. 

This course would dive deep into meta-cognition (thinking about our thinking), logic, and cognitive biases. Exercises would include recreating psychological experiments, working through trolley problems and other difficult moral questions, dissecting misleading studies, debating, and solving riddles. Einstein’s riddle, for example, should become a staple of each person’s educational experience. Albert Einstein claimed that 98% of the world could not solve it, but the reality is most people can. It just requires a strategy to organize thinking and a willingness to persist.

Required Reading:

• Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre

• Stumbling Upon Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

• The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin

• An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, Ali Almossawi

Political Theory, Citizenship, and 20th-Century World History

“A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.” - George Washington

This is really a sub-category under Humanity, Self-Discovery, and Self-Mastery, but it is large enough to warrant its own domain.

Most of the problems society faces today stem from glaring misunderstandings about how human civilization works. Few know how unique representative democracy is within the scope of human history, or what other systems look like in practice. Political theory gives students a foundational exploration of why governments exist, how the various governing philosophies differ, and how they have worked throughout time. From there, students will be able to understand the foundations of representative democracy as well as the tensions across the political spectrum. 

This will require a thorough grasp of history since the Enlightenment, with a particular emphasis on the 20th-century, where modern technology facilitated multiple world wars, a nuclear cold war, and more deaths from genocide than ever before. To be blunt, it is unlikely that human civilization will last if we don’t begin to teach this better. This would be deeply informed by many books from the study of Humanity and Self-Discovery as well as:

• The Lessons of History, by Will and Ariel Durant

• 1984, by George Orwell

• Why We Drive, by Matthew Crawford

• Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari

• First Principles, by Thomas E. Ricks

Essential Financial Strategies

“If you understand compound interest you basically understand the universe.” –Robert Breault

It may seem odd to include finance after waxing on about the ills of consumerism, but money is a tool to create freedom. Once we understand what is most important, proper money management will contribute to every other area of life.

This does not have to be conceived as an advanced finance course. There are some simple, obvious financial pearls that everyone needs to know. Compound interest can change your life, particularly if you begin investing early enough. Conversely, credit cards and debt can quickly eliminate options and indenture you to a job you dislike. 

According to Bankrate’s Financial Security Index, only 39% of American households could handle a $1,000 emergency with savings. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but intelligent management will bring the opportunity to prioritize rewarding experiences and live with more flow.

These lessons can easily cross-over to other fields, as well. Investing money serves as an appropriate analogy for investing time in order to highlight the difference between skill acquisition and passive entertainment. Budgeting is analogous to balanced eating habits. Individual financial lessons are a doorway to exploring more complex economic systems and the effects that collective spending habits have on the entire country.

As with the freshman level habit and time management courses, this subject could probably be covered thoroughly in a semester or two. 

Required Reading:

• The Simple Path to Wealth, by J.L. Collins

• I Will Teach You to Be Rich, by Ramit Sethi

The Whole 

The most important element of the integrated approach is crafting the culture and institutional habits of the school itself. People largely act in accordance with group norms. Every time we practice an action, that behavior pattern is hardwired deeper into our personal operating system. Thus, strong institutional habits program students with strong individual habits. By giving students anchor experiences, like daily exercise, meditation, and a gratitude practice, schools could cultivate emotional control and common experiences for students and teachers to refer back to. 

Likewise, the entire institutional structure should be built to optimize human flourishing. Schools should factor in research about teenage sleep patterns to determine start times. School schedules should honor the needs of both students and teachers for movement and time outside. Lunches wouldn’t be full of students scanning social media as they eat. Schools would implement no-technology policies at lunch, like many districts have already done, in order to promote social skills, connection, and healthy boundaries. 

Students attend school for eight hours a day. We know that institutional habits will become their habits. How thoughtless is it to keep them seated, surrounded by sugar and processed food, and exposed to the constant disturbance of their smartphone? How insane is it to distort grades and repeatedly reinforce the expectation that adults will solve their problems? How destructive is it to constantly maneuver standards around the demands of shortsighted parents? 

As we examine the pulls on our culture, seemingly forcing us down a path we’d never objectively choose, let’s keep in mind the power of culture to do good as well. Imagine if we were pulled towards nutritious foods, activity, competition of ideas, and expectations of personal responsibility.

How much easier and more likely would it be to practice healthy habits if you had exercised and meditated every day at school and been immersed in an environment where only healthy foods were available? Even if you fell away from these habits, you’d have the experience to confidently wade back in and you would live among a population who shared a similar experience. Likewise, how much easier would it be for kids to set technology limits and boundaries if they practiced these as part of their daily school work and lived in a population of people who had done the same? 

The Deepest Inequality

“Our awareness seems to shrink in direct ratio as communications expand; the world is open to us as never before, and we walk about as prisoners, each in his private portable cage.” - Arthur Koestler, The Nightmare that is a Reality

There is a strong, but relatively small portion of the population, probably 15% or less, who are adapting. They have habits like meditation, gratitude, exercise, journaling, the Wim Hof Method, or charging their phone outside of their bedroom. They read books that change the way they perceive and operate in the world. They learn about concepts such as first principles thinking, the paradox of choice, and growth mindset and apply their implications to their life. They eat well without dieting, work effectively without overwhelm, and parent well without sacrificing their lives at the altar of youth sports specialization. These people seek wisdom, try to understand their environment better, adapt to offset the pull of market manipulation, and work to create a more fulfilling life. 

Then, there are most people. They, like the schools that they attended, are led astray by herd norms. Smartphones, sweets, and sales tactics pull and prod them. They kill time. Their lives are driven by the next dopamine hit. Work and education are a means to material ends. These people may be vaguely aware of the issues their phones present, but social proof tells them it’s not that big of a problem. They may occasionally read or try a new hobby, but more often they are resigned to mindless patterns—unsatisfied, yet unable to deviate from their normal way of doing things. They crave meaning.

There is a lot of talk about inequality in our world, but this is the greatest and most controllable inequality. Normal people—the “have-nots”—will continue to face disproportionately high rates of obesity, heart disease, suicide, depression, anxiety, drug overdoses, and general despair. By contrast, the “haves” will live higher quality lives. They will overcome obstacles and feel the sense of fulfillment that only comes from pursuing worthy goals. As parents, they will be more likely to insist on intelligent boundaries that optimize the benefit of technology while limiting its destructive capacity. Their children will be more likely to internalize the belief that they can act to influence their future for the better. These kids will play outside, scrape their knees, complete chores, learn to save, read books, and live a healthy lifestyle. They’ll grow up with nourishing dinner conversations that stoke their natural curiosities. They’ll develop a balanced skill set that opens opportunities and brings a sense of confidence that they can weather whatever life brings. 

The gap between the haves and have-nots is growing fast and it is not best-viewed as an economic gap. Sure, a lot of these “haves” are well-educated and well-off. Economics certainly matter, but culture is more important. After all, Ethan Couch and millions of other rich, spoiled youngsters are among the “have-nots” who have been programmed for hedonism, narcissism, and the constant disappointment that tends to accompany entitlement. Conversely, many of the “haves” are living simple lives and even intentionally taking less money for more freedom and authenticity. The real inequality we see in the world today is between the wisdom-seeking adapters and everyone else. 

Education is the only solution to this inequality that honors people’s freedom and empowers them to take control of their lives. Many of the changes I advocate would be a bitter pill at first. Students who are not used to standards or who have become addicted to smartphones and junk food will not immediately appreciate the benefits of discipline. But the New Core school environment I’ve proposed would unlock a world of possibility and personal empowerment. Many parents and students would be very upset if schools became what they need to. But we cannot continue to build our systems around shortsighted desires. Schools must lead the fight for human flourishing. They must strive to be the authority in human development, unflinchingly drawing the line against a world that breeds “have-nots.”