NHEG-Magazine-September-October

www.NewHeightsEducation.org
www.NewHeightsEducation.org
Most Young
People Today
Lack the
Psychological
Resilience
to Thrive
Professionally.
In the Wake of
Mass Shootings,
Parents
Reconsider Mass
Schooling
By Ryan Ferguson
Saturday, May 19, 2018
In December, I wrote a post about how hard it is to learn how to work. In that post, I talked about how one of the biggest
challenges for someone starting their career is getting used to the undefined nature of work.
It feels very uncomfortable to go from a protective and easy school environment, where you live without responsibilities,
to the professional world, where you are expected to think, prioritize, and deliver.
The only way to get better at it is to stick with it, but many people who have done well in school don’t know how to stick
with it. They quit when they reach the point of responsibility in their work and start a new job where they can feel comfortable
with lower expectations. After a while, if they don’t figure out how to handle expectations, they may retreat
back into mindless work that can support them but never truly allow them to thrive.
What Makes the Adjustment So Hard?
In school, priorities are defined for us. You have projects, papers, and exams that you will complete. You can prioritize in
a limited way, but you have very little control over your direction or responsibilities. The teacher is responsible for making
sure the workload is manageable. You are responsible for getting all your work done and don’t get to decide what you
work on in the first place.
When young people start work, it is usually in jobs that similarly require very little thinking. Whether that is at a fast
food restaurant or doing some sort of manual labor, you learn how to show up and be dependable (which are very valuable
things to learn), but they still don’t develop the skills you need to thrive in a work environment where you could
always do a little more.
As you progress past the first layer of low-responsibility work, you enter into an environment you have never experienced
before. You now have core day-to-day responsibilities, but you also have many other ways that you could invest
your time. You have projects you start that you have to put on the side to work on more urgent things. You have deadlines
you set that you struggle to make or sometimes miss. You don’t know how to set accurate timeframes for your
work. You don’t know how to prioritize what is most important.
These are things you have never had to deal with before. In school, everything was structured. Now you have certain
things that have to get done, but there are countless options for the actual ways you get those things done.
Here's What You Need
You need to develop technical skill at getting things done, but also (and probably more importantly) psychological resilience
to be able to thrive in an environment where you have to set your own priorities, where you don’t have enough
time to finish everything you want to get done, and where you need to quickly bounce back and improve from failures.
This psychological resilience is the exact thing that the best students are missing. They can thrive with the hyper-defined
school work, but fall apart when they enter into the professional world where they need to think for themselves about
their priorities and the methods they use to fulfill their responsibilities.
There is no easy way to make this adjustment. The school system puts us in a bubble, and it hurts to leave that bubble.
Solutions like Praxis and Unschooling are making it easier, but there is no easy way to do it. The only thing you can do is:
Identify that your school experience has not prepared you.
Accept that is going to be uncomfortable.
Get to work and stick with it.
Source: The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
86 NHEG Magazine | September - October 2018
https://fee.org/
By Kerry McDonald
Monday, May 21, 2018
n the wake of recent tragic school shootings, anxious parents are contemplating homeschooling to protect their children.
After February’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the Miami Herald reported that more parents were considering the
homeschooling option. And after Friday’s disturbing school shooting in Sante Fe, Texas, a local ABC news affiliate in Alabama
reported the increasing appeal of homeschooling.
“If I had the time, I would teach my kids myself, and I would know that they’re safe," a father of four told ABC station,
WAAY31. A public school teacher interviewed by the channel disagreed with the idea of homeschooling. According to the
news story, the teacher “says resorting to homeschooling is teaching your children to run from reality.”
But that raises the question: Is compulsory mass schooling “reality”?
Public Schools Are Consuming More and More of Kids' Time
Segregating children by age into increasingly restrictive, test-driven classrooms where they are forced by law to be unless
a parent or caregiver liberates them is hardly “reality.” What’s worse is that young people are spending increasingly
more time in this coercive “reality” than ever before.
For young children ages six to eight, schooling increased from an average of five hours a day in 1981-82 to an average of
seven hours a day in 2002-03. And for today’s teens, schooling consumes much more of their time than it did for previous
generations, seeping into summertime and other historically school-free periods. According to data from the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics, 42 percent of teens were enrolled in school during July 2016, compared to only 10 percent enrolled in
July 1985.
In the case of teens, spending more time in school and school-like activities may be further separating them from the
actual real world in which they previously came of age. As Business Insider reports: “Almost 60% of teens in 1979 had a
job, compared to 34% in 2015.” Spending more time in the contrived reality of forced schooling and less time in authentic,
multi-age, productive communities may be taking its toll on today’s youth.
Compulsory Mass Schooling Is Hurting Our Kids
New findings from researchers at Vanderbilt University show a disturbing correlation between time in school and suicidal
thoughts and attempts by young people, which have been increasing over the past decade. Whereas most adults see
suicide spikes in July and August, most kids see suicide dips in summer. Children’s suicidal tendencies appear strongest
during the school year.
Boston College psychology professor Dr. Peter Gray believes that increasingly oppressive schooling is leading to serious
psychological damage in some children. He writes on his blog at Psychology Today:
Children now often spend more time at school and at homework than their parents spend at their full-time jobs, and the
work of schooling is often more burdensome and stress-inducing than that of a typical adult job. A century ago we came
to the conclusion that full-time child labor was child abuse, so we outlawed it; but now school is the equivalent of full-time
child labor. The increased time, tedium, and stress of schooling is bringing many kids to the breaking point or beyond, and
more and more people are becoming aware of that. It can no longer be believed that schooling is a benign experience for
children. The evidence that it induces pathology is overwhelming.”
Recent school shootings may be extreme examples of this rising school-induced pathology.
September - October 2018 | NHEG Magazine 87