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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72187342338187487312020-02-29T17:38:10.586+07:00The BreakAway Learning ProjectOur teens teach us a few things about individuality, expression, and curiosity--energies that empower and dignify our lives. But they're in short supply, and sometimes in our zeal for measurable achievement, we don't realize we're suffocating them. That's what motivates The BreakAway Learning Project. We're not a school, but an escape, not teaching teens, but creating the conditions in which teens decide who they are and where they're headed. BreakAwayLearning.orgColleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-80892429966998595772020-02-12T16:58:00.000+07:002020-02-12T16:58:00.999+07:00Your mind is a web, not a stack of bricks — Let's take stonemasonry metaphors out of learning

As a mom who has helped her kids depart occasionally or permanently from school around age-12, I get a lot of flack from family. I come from a highly-educated family myself, so the criticisms are easy. Aren't I denying my children the opportunities which I enjoyed? Aren't I setting them up for failure? The day-to-day judgments vary--if one is pricing financial derivatives or building a model engine, it's all praise; if one is dancing or making an iphone documentary on our street, it's distress.

We are all op-ed-reading, self-proclaimed consciousness-raisers, til the threat of an irregular income, out-of-pocket healthcare, or an itinerant lifestyle comes up. Then I'm a negligent parent, and we're back to stonemasonry metaphors. You're denying your teenagers the building blocks! The foundations! The cornerstones!

As best I can figure, the argument goes: if my teen will memorize fast and replicate math and science concepts sooner than his age-mates along a linear vertical (e.g., organic chemistry at 14, multivariate calculus at 15), then I am assured that all bricks have been stacked, with the ego-boost that my kid stacked his sooner. Future learning will make sense, future gatekeepers will open privileged doors, future employers will give the secret handshake... right?

I can tell you're wavering. There's a bit of bricklayer in all of us. Yes, gatekeepers will look for algebra and geometry and trig, because that's what gatekeepers are programmed to look for. State education officials and community colleges and core-curricula-makers at universities will all call for a very similar vertical. Maybe bullshit. Maybe so watered-down that it's hardly meaningful. But the same vertical nevertheless, so that boxes can be ticked and diplomas produced. And yes, there are many employers who will look for those ticked-boxes and diplomas.

But there are neurological and social and practical reasons why our brains don't stack bricks, and the whole stonemasonry metaphor is a fiction.

Variety of dendritic trees, Source: Koch and Segev, Nature Neuroscience, 2000.

The shape of learning is actually more like a tree, or rather an interconnected forest of dendritic-trees, than a vertical stack. Healthy neurons connect to numerous dendrites, tree-like projections with small, bud-like extensions, the sites of protein synthesis and memory formation. The length, shape, and density of dendritic branching contributes to the brain's signal integration and propagation. Dendritic trees are dynamic not only during early neural development, but throughout life, pruning away unnecessary extensions and creating new branches continuously.

This might lead core-curriculum apologists to counter, Well, couldn't those synapses be engineered into place according to a scholastic plan? Couldn't we set about to input a hierarchy of content into a population's minds through daily repetition and practice? Surely, the base of long-term competencies, such as fine motor skills, language, and socially-patterned behavior comes from daily repetition. But the mechanisms for strong memory-formation don't turn on and off with a switch (or rather with a school bell, homework and tests). When "learning" becomes a laundry-list of arbitrary content, as it does after kids master literacy and numeracy and head into adolescence--that is, five features of igneous rock, seven facts about Mesopotamia, three bullet points about Roman aqueducts, why Separate Peace is a good book, the formula for a parabola, and six policies related to the New Deal--then the expectation that teens' wildly branching dendrites should neatly cement together according to a common plan becomes ludicrous. Two key conditions are usually missing: emotional connectedness to content, and ready, continuing application. To frustrated parents and teachers, this is: he's not motivated!

When we push a teenager to stack bricks, we're channeling his time and energy away from opportunities to get really, authentically excited. We're also missing the social phenomenon that would happen if he found and spent more time with other people who got excited about the same things. That's missing both the cognitive boost associated with intrinsic motivation (see the extensive work of neuroscientist Johnmarshall Reeve), and the learning-accelerant of shared-focus enthusiasm. It's the double-whammy of being bored among bored people. (And beware, performance-parents, of being cynical among cynical people!)

There are also practical reasons why we don't stack bricks. Concepts connect and form memories when we have ready and continuing need to apply them. In the development of BreakAway, I worked with MIT Computer Science and Mathematics graduates, two over-cynical young guys who seemed depressed about the 16-year educational process from which they had just emerged. "I don't think I ever really made a choice since the second grade," one told me. Aaron had been a contributor to ArtofProblemSolving, a problem-solving start-up created by Bay-area math-lovers. But he himself was crammed through a relentless linear pathway of math and science classes, most of which he found unmemorable and useless. Time-waste and irrelevance was a common theme in their educations, both coming from super-high-performing high schools and rigorous MIT curricula. It came from the vertical stack, they said, the notion that one textbook or course must precede another. Both found that they plodded through thousands of hours of disjointed mathematical concepts with anxiety and fear. The really fun "a-ha!" moments happened idiosyncratically when they dove into problems that caused them to connect old and new concepts in novel ways. When need and excitement and personal investment came together, either of them could absorb volumes in a few days. But instead, years of their childhoods seem to have been misallocated.

I've been beating my head against the bricklayer metaphors time and again over years of defending my teens' right to their own choices in learning. Last week I was panel-interviewed by secondary-ed administrators at a school in Mumbai that our fourth child wants to attend sporadically to make more friends. Despite posturing to "work together as a team," to understand "individualization" and "learning pathways", they showed their cards when they handed me a block schedule of "cornerstones" and "foundations". It would be impossible, it seems, to spend daytime hours pursuing his interests; the "building blocks" have to come first. How has this metaphor become so pervasive?

Maybe the metaphor is not all bad. Maybe there is something we're longing for that we can't describe. Something solid and respected and important to pass from one generation to the next. That's how I felt about going to church on Sundays when we tried for a few years, then caved to sleepiness and kids' resistance. That's how my husband feels about football, being signed up by his dad without any questions, pummelled and coached, and winning. That's how my grandparents felt about sacraments. How my dad feels about the Bill of Rights and visiting Washington. How my mom feels about reading good books and knowing how to cook. If every one of us is atomized-- self-optimizing and self-satisfying--without these bonds cementing us to history, to our towns and our grandparents and our beliefs, then what have we become?

Maybe it's our anxiety about having forsaken those real foundations that makes us so credulous about bureaucratically-determined foundations. If not First Communion or pot roast, then parabolas and the promise of an MBA.

We are right to want cornerstones and foundations. We are right to want rhythm and continuity in raising children. But let's be careful how we trade family, spiritual and community-based foundations for state-sanctioned gobbledygook. Those block schedules are not cementing anything in teens' minds. They are wasting opportunities when real, personal webs could be woven.

Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-37195669602311592020-02-05T13:41:00.000+07:002020-02-05T13:41:14.741+07:00You're a great manager, but with your teen you're pretty lame

Middle-aged parents who self-identify as highly-educated are a pretty monotonous bunch. Get one pregnant, and she'll overhaul her diet. Deliver a baby and they'll obsess over neurological development. Grow a toddler and they'll research five-figure preschools.

It was among this group that I once thought I could find kindred spirits to help teens renounce high school and blaze their own complex pathways. I tried economic arguments about debt and future markets. I tried philosophical arguments about agency and individualism. I tried forming a learning coop in our building, rallying carpools to local expert talks, mobilizing friends' kids to foreign language chat groups, maker-spaces, and robotics labs. (To be clear, I was talking about extended hours, weekdays--real time--that comes from heart-and-soul commitment, not here-and-there visits after school). Maybe that was the kicker. Or maybe folks don't like so many moving parts--set-ups, fee agreements, transport, logistics. I would have thought that the big guys I work around, who consider themselves pretty competent, who manage multiple projects with large budgets, who adapt to dozens of complications each day, have the skills to manage this kind of project, too.

But over years of attempted conversations, their replies have dimmed my hopes. Seems like when the age of aspirational breastfeeding and transcendental preschooling passes, parents of teens become more conformist than ever, content with the state-validated Velveeta cheese glob served up by zip-code with free transportation. Get the GPA, keep up the sports, record the so-called leadership. It's the kind of scorecard only a blockhead-manager would apply. This leaves me scratching my head, because the same parents seem pretty well put-together as leaders and risk-takers.

Between rejections, I have given some thought to what makes my friends and peers so lame when it comes to managing their teens:

An if-it-aint-broke decision-making model: I have enough on my plate as it is!

A lazy approach to complexity: I just don't have the mental space for that!

A nano-manager's approach to task ownership: I don't want to be wondering what she's doing!

A padded playground approach to risk: What if this doesn't work out?

A Victorian view of class-ambiguity: She'd be cut off from the system! ...Then she'll be paying the price one day…

And an arranged-marriage approach to teen agency: She still has to get into college!

You see what I'm up against? From the looks of things, these folks ought to have the greatest resources to throw at teenagers, if only they weren't such blockheads. No wait, I shouldn't say that. These guys are my best chance for allies, after all.

OK, I've written about how we get addicted to school as childcare solution and then hang on too long, how middle and high-school brainwash teens into seeing the future too narrowly, how high school's college-obsession drives perilous debt-taking, and how by unbundling learning teens can invest intensively in what interests them most. But teens are still stuck behind parents. And it is this class-anxious, risk-averse, nano-manager parenting that stifles teens from discovering their voices. Can I offer some advice?

Decouple learning from childcare. When young people self-select into opportunities to chat with experts, hack with friends, build, break and design with mentors for hours on end, they are operating at a level that cannot be achieved in an everybody-together, requirement-driven, behavior management system. When parents assume their teenagers need heavy-handed behavior-management, they may be inhibiting the growth of self-motivation and self-discipline. And as our culture trends toward zero-risk/tolerance, we're missing important developmental opportunities to fool around, slack-off, mess up, and learn. Good managers know that task ownership and empowerment enable productivity; second-guessing micro-management demoralizes teams.

Take deliberate steps to welcome uncertainty and risk. I know it sounds like horrible parenting to not know where your 16-year old is, but that was the norm when we were kids. How did we get here? Find day-to-day opportunities for your teenager to speak for herself with strangers, navigate your city, manage payments, and find her way home from new places.

Ask her what's interesting. And be prepared to listen. It's a challenge not to frame this question around traditional education subjects, and teens just escaping from the conveyor belt will think that's what you're asking for. It takes time and patience and many iterations to start hearing things like I wonder why old people are so lonely? or What goes into my shampoo? or Do you think we're being spied on? And rather than reverting these ideas to the boxes of traditional school subjects, think with her about the trajectories these concepts could launch. I wonder about that, too. What happens to our minds as we get older? Does talking and meeting people make us healthier? Which part of the brain gets engaged? Is it a good idea that older people often live so far from their families? How could they maintain feelings of independence but benefit from more interactions? Every one of these questions is a legitimate springboard to so many more articles, books, lectures, and business case studies. And if her room starts to look like a mess of clipped articles and diagrams, she is chatting with different people and visiting places around town, then you're making her comfortable to explore.

Get comfortable with dropping "foundational" content. This is how we hobble teens' emerging interests and re-allocate all their potential energy. It's based on some visual of building-blocks, cornerstones, and other bricklayer metaphors. Chronological history. Transcripts. The relentless sequence of math textbooks. In our own lives, we would never approach problems this way, but we're remarkably stubborn with our teens. Get outside the bricklayer metaphors, and think about ideas as complex webs. The threads will grow where there is intrinsic curiosity, and stay strong where knowledge loops to emotion and experience. Maybe that polynomial equation will loop in, or maybe it won't. There will be millions of unexpected threads, and you don't have to put them there by force. She will find them when her curiosity and motivation are authentic.

Encourage her to write goals and make graphic representations of her progress. This will be good practice for managing herself, and then mobilizing and managing others. What is her vision? How does she communicate it? What is she aiming for? How can she document what she's doing? Remember, this is a work in progress. She's learning management skills by doing them, and she's implementing a project that changes as she goes.

We can get comfortable with uncertainty and moving parts. Teens in pajamas all day. Or commuting around town til late. Great books read with no reports. Discussions on WhatsApp. Half-completed Courseras. Showing up at places where cool people are doing cool things… hoping one day they'll pay her. Shoeboxes of circuits and wires, shoeboxes of leotards, shoeboxes of tempera paints. Facebook and Skype networks of tutors and mentors. Pencilled schedules, constant changes. Dozens of micro-payments.

Comfortable, right?

You're squirming, I know. This sounds messy. And you're going to give me one of the replies I told you about, because somehow your manager-brain isn't working with your teenager.

Squint your eyes. Try to see your 15-year-old as a 25-year-old. You're smart and take risks and manage people. Help her to start doing the same.

Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-51669052588546500702019-04-04T14:12:00.000+07:002019-04-04T14:16:34.033+07:004 Reasons the DOJ and FTC should launch an anti-trust investigation against America's undergraduate institutions

The heat is rising on America's undergraduate institutions, but for reasons peripheral to the real problem. Yes, they're favoring elite kids. Yes, they're taking bribes. Yes, they're racially profiling applicants. Yes, they're relentlessly marketing to kids too young to understand debt-traps. Yes, they're inflating grades and watering-down content. Yes, they're teaching irrelevant and soon-forgettable content that employers aren't interested in. Yes, they're bloated, over-employed, wastefully splashing money around on buildings, landscaping and sports complexes.

Why do they get away with it?

Here's the reason why every family should write to Lamar Alexander (R-TN) head of the Senate Committee on Education and demand the Department of Justice Anti-Trust Division and Federal Trade Commission Bureau of Competition launch an investigation.

The 4-year, 120-credit-hour, all-from-one-place undergraduate degree is an anti-competitive, bundled product that distorts the market for higher learning.

Here are four reasons:

Price Discrepancy: Why does the edX/Harvard specialization in US Government, entailing 4-months of coursework cost $196, while 3 credits on campus costs $4218? Why does the Coursera/UCSanDiego specialization in Data Structure Algorithms entailing 6 months of coursework cost $294, while 4 credits on campus costs $4900?

Barriers to a-la-carte consumption: Universities make only a few courses from the entire selection available to 'visiting' students, holding back the majority to full-time degree candidates. This is especially true of higher-level and laboratory courses. Tuition structures often prefer all-in-one-place study; that is, students pay more to take courses here and there than they would if they took 15-18 credits in a semester from one place.

Unwarranted switching costs: Students pay more to switch among universities; first, because they have to pay for standardized tests and pay for sharing the scores, pay for sharing transcripts, spend time preparing and then submitting applications and references, and pay for that, too—multiple times. Second, universities discount the value of "credits" already earned and curricular units covered from other places, requiring many students to re-take similar or identical courses to complete degrees.

Ex-post penalties for a-la-carte consumption: Here the term "credit" comes into play; it is the socially-accepted word for bundle-able product. And universities get to decide what is bundle-able and what is not, always in their own favor. Very few universities recognize comparable study completed whether for online certificate (e.g., Khan Academy, FutureLearn) or identity-verified certificate (e.g., edX) or even with in-person, proctored exams (e.g., ModernStates) as worth of "credit", requiring a-la-carte consumers to repurchase learning services in bundle-able form. Students that already have advanced knowledge and skills developed through a-la-carte study (e.g., a mathematician having mastered stochastic calculus, linear algebra and coding in C++ on Khan Academy, Brilliant, through books and tutors) is NOT admissible to most Masters, PhD, or professional degree programs. Lesser candidates having undergraduate degrees—even in unrelated fields to the intended graduate study, and even degrees earned years ago and the contents of which could hardly be remembered—will get admitted to spots that the a-la-carte student can't access.

It's a worthwhile thought experiment, too, whether during the past few decades undergraduate institutions have really played the role of a public utility.

Why might we think of them as a utility? The 4-year, 120-credit-hour undergraduate degree has been:

A standardized metric of skills and knowledge embedded in HR systems of the majority of American medium and large-scale employers, including state and federal governments;

A metric (acceptance or enrollment to an undergraduate program) which the vast majority of American public and private high schools track as a performance metric;

An unavoidable pathway to access a very large portion of jobs in both the public and private sector (including many state and military jobs, where it's a felony to represent other aggregated forms of study as a Bachelors Degree);

An unavoidable control-point for employees to increase compensation, even when doing the same work.

And its provision is, by definition, limited to a finite number of accredited institutions which:

Have privileged access to federally subsidized student loans and to the distributions of tax-preferred college savings plans;

Are financed therefore at rates far below what the cost of credit would be for consumption of similar learning services from providers outside this group.

What would be the implications of classifying undergraduate universities as a public utility?

Would it be fair that college tuitions have risen at more than double the rate of the CPI during 1980-2014, and have outstripped price increases in household utilities and healthcare?

Wouldn't the FTC question the ballooning cost structures, bloated staff, and ancillary services that keep tuitions rising?

Wouldn't the FTC use words like collusion, price-fixing, unfair barriers to access, unfair product bundling and switching costs to describe what is happening?

It seems for now that the public has been suckers to an industry that presents bundling as core-curriculum, switching costs as pride-in-alma-mater, and collusion as ivy-covered gateways worthy of respect. It's time to stop the grand-standing around college education in Congress and at our kitchen tables. It's an industry over-due for anti-trust investigation.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-79522821522022848922019-02-26T16:50:00.001+07:002019-02-26T17:18:55.828+07:00Raising my daughter by ten thousand suggestions

My 14 year-old daughter recently dug up a stick-figure drawing she made in kindergarten of herself scaling a smoking volcano. "I want to be a volcanologist", she wrote, above the brown marker-haired figure in triangle-shaped skirt. That drawing, she remembers, set me into weeks of investigation about how one becomes a volcanologist--studying admissions policies at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, pulling up PBS films about Katia and Maurice Krafft, emailing Philip Kyle at the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory in Antarctica, and Darcy Bevens at the Center for Study of Active Volcanoes at University of Hawaii at Hilo. We watched, played, read and talked to folks about volcanoes until, not long after, she announced that she no longer wants to be volcanologist.

That was 9 years and about ten thousand suggestions ago. As my daughter tells me, sometimes she wishes I was a more 'normal' mom. I learned along the way that I could create whole life-stories for my daughter, latch on to briefly-mentioned ideas and cook up must-see, must-try, must-read lists faster than she cared to notice. I learned that suggesting too hard sometimes turned her off completely. A once-fun experiment became a chore, or my insistence on background reading made conversation stilted. The most heartbreaking response she could give me was an indifferent shrug.

OK, so I also learned a few things about suggesting. Suggesting is better in sweetened spoonfuls than inundations. Suggesting doesn't need to watch her reading over her shoulder. Or to follow-up every time. The silence between suggestions is probably more valuable than the suggestion itself.

Like watching a 2-year-old's vocabulary tentatively emerge after months of listening, and then explode in complexity, I'm starting to see with my daughter how years of suggesting--people, ideas, careers, dilemmas--is beginning to articulate itself. Like the 6-month old listening to her mother sing, the 9-year old absorbs something from her mother's suggestions that's not apparent to either of them at the time. Like a thousand open-ended questions that are only partly answered in words, but move to the front of her mind and seem to build a lens through which she watches the world. Am I here by mistake or intentionally? Is there a metaphysical purpose to my life? When will I know? Are we all living under the same moral framework, or is each one of us building his own? Would that be fair? Is anything fair? How long will I live? What will be the thing that I do that makes a difference? I couldn't tell that this was happening when she was 7, or 9 or 11. But now I walk up on her and she is curled up with her tablet watching a YouTube lecture about the sanctity of human life. Or making lip balm in a jar from ingredients we found in the market. Or researching municipal strategies to manage street dog populations.

I am on fire with motherly purposefulness, but I'm learning to hold it back to let my daughter emerge. Watching her find herself is a quieter triumph than those explosions of 2-year-old language. But being purposeful, I'm also curious. Are other families suggesting? Are mothers calling around to find experts to talk to their kids? Are fathers messaging article links? Are grandmas talking up internship possibilities with their friends at the gym?

For me, suggesting has become a crusade. But I wonder, is it scalable? Do families by and large entrust suggesting to school teachers and guidance counselors? Can they be coached as better suggesters? Could an algorithm help? Or would a flashy, edtech solution or auto-nudging mobile app do for adolescent self-discovery what 8 hours a day of PBSKids does for sedated 18-month olds in low-quality childcare settings--that is, pretend at doing the right thing, while getting it exactly wrong?

This is just as much a moral challenge as a business problem. Suggesting is not by definition helpful, just as televised speech does not necessarily promote language development, when not coming through an engaged human. Virtuous cycles of suggestion rely on life experience, insight, and connectedness. When done right, suggesting nudges the young person into a hundred not-so-comfortable situations. It prompts thousands of conversations, often with strangers. It drives toward countless unsolvable problems and apparent dead-ends. It's as exhausting as it is stimulating. It's time consuming, needs the time of close family and friends, and can't be easily priced, because there's no apparent payoff. When we try to tell ourselves that it could be massively scaled and replicated, we find out bad-suggesting looks like: mechanical, inert, rooted in default-settings and biases, one-size-fits-all, that just keeps hammering away.

How could I plant the seeds of healthy suggesting in families with pre-teens and teens? I'm excited to see what BreakAway Learning can do to help teens and their parents feel more comfortable about exploratory learning, to put it out there completely free, and see if it can drive a change in behavior. But I know the limits of what a website can do. Good suggesting comes from strong communities and strong families. And those aren't scalable.

Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-26714200820140486592019-02-18T16:59:00.000+07:002019-02-18T16:59:30.630+07:00What if consumers demanded the unbundling of the 4yr undergraduate degree?
The 4-year, single-institution-loyal, core-curriculum driven undergraduate degree is a bundled product. If it were a cable/telephone/data package, or a new car/warranty/service package, or an all-inclusive cruise ship vacation,

we'd be quicker to call it what it is. We'd be poking around the edges, asking 'Why would I want this?' and 'I could do without that,' and 'How much if drop all of these things?' In short, we'd each pick it apart and demand product and pricing according to our own interests.

But for decades now — and particularly the past decade, when Udemy, Udacity, edX, Coursera, MasterClass, SkillShare, Praxis, KhanAcademy, Preply, and a wide range of other free and fee-based, online and blended offerings crowd into this space — we accept as a given that this bundle must exist.

Progressives that call for lower costs, debt forgiveness, or outright socialization of tertiary education unwittingly cement this bundled product in place. They aim for equity and access, but frame it according to a rigid product design — SATs, admissions committees and fees, large and growing administrations, time-consuming core curricula, institution-specific degrees — that benefits the incumbent college industry more than the rising student. Looking to northern Europe is a good indication of how the socialization of costs applies further standardization to tertiary learning, deterministic testing, inflexible prerequisites, and set-in-stone curricula.

I think it's imperative — before the next U.S. presidential election cycle — that young people, industry leaders, public figures, economists, and learning experts come together to voice a demand for something else:

UnbundleUnbrand: The overdue demand to unpack the undergraduate degree.

We are a group of economists, neuroscientists, high-tech employers, and public figures.

We are watching with anxiety the volume of American student loans at $1.5 trillion, 11% of which in default, 14% in forbearance, with predictions of 40% in default by 2023.

American young people are chasing the false promises of knowledge, skills, and career acceleration from institutions that foremost seek to bundle and brand, that hike tuitions absorbing nearly all federal debt subsidy, that entice young people into levels of debt that are costing households more, and lasting more years than any generation has witnessed before.

American high schools are chasing graduation rates and rates of placement in 4-year universities, also false promises to communities that place statistical improvement-at-any-price ahead of the real interests and needs of young people.

American employers are slow to refine talent identification systems to acknowledge smart, hard-working, skilled candidates on the basis of their demonstrated learning and results. Undergraduate degrees are too often used as a baseline metric for eligibility when there is almost no correlation of knowledge or skills attained to the obtaining of the degree, nor to the demands of many careers.

Meantime, the proliferation of online courseware, gameware, tutorials, face-to-face and blended learning models, subscription-based, and pay-per-use content continues, but is underused by our teenagers. The promise of individualized learning is limited not by technology or logistics, but by the social imagination, that still sees teens moving through set schedules and an arbitrary, standard hierarchy of 5 or 6 subjects.

We believe that if teens will be encouraged to pursue intensive, individualized learning by making use of already abundant tools, combined with mentoring, internships and real work experience in a more flexible learning environment, the arbitrary urgency to apply and commit to 4-year undergraduate degrees would decline.

Unless and until the simplistic recognition of the so-called undergraduate degree as a measure of education is unbundled, our counterproductive culture of college-readiness is depriving youth of enormous opportunity, while our economy is imperiled by students' misguided borrowing. The loan crisis may cost America hundreds of billions. The opportunity cost of a decade of young people's lives spent mechanically going through motions, not exploring their interests, not intrinsically motivated, is unknown.

Given these concerns, we appeal to America's universities to:

Offer unbundled, a-la-carte course enrollment to anyone, anywhere, anytime

Stop differentiating price or credential value for "full-time", "for credit", versus a-la-carte students

Accept in any course any interested student, irrespective of prior degree attainment, or based on performance in online prerequisite study that is open to anyone

Enable click-to-buy or free courses, such that enrollment is quick and simple, and prices are transparent

Dismiss the admissions committee and eliminate the cumbersome admissions process, including fee-based standardized test-taking, essay-submission, and racial and ethnic identification

Offer courses in a greater variety of durations, frequency and times of year, to break down the rigidity of continuing learning

10. We appeal to America's leading employers to:

Eliminate the "highest level of education attained", simplistic human resources drop-down menu;

Revise human resource systems to recognize the wide range of relevant, competitive learning and experience that prospective job candidates can attain alternative to an undergraduate degree;

Stop differentiating salaries for the same work based on a candidate's having or not having an undergraduate degree.

11. We trust in the intrinsic curiosity and rebellious spirit of our youth that when these artificial constraints are removed, our youth will naturally diversify their efforts across a much broader range of subjects, problems, work and study modalities fitting to their interests and needs. With responsible guidance and supervision of family, community and state, these diverse learning approaches will enable a more motivated and productive young population, fitting a modern economy and free society.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-37113239869018239952019-01-28T13:02:00.000+07:002019-01-28T13:06:17.296+07:00Woe is my department! Downsizing universities try to build a public sob-story, but students aren't missing-out, they're migrating!

When you get no claps on Medium, or your Udemy course gets 6 buyers and one star, there isn't half the tantrumming you're gonna hear from an associate professor who didn't get tenure. From the headlines of higher-ed journals that mourn the downsizing and budget rationalization of colleges coping with declining enrollments, declining selection of humanities majors, and declining interest in foreign language study, it would seem we are a sad, regressing society. Doleful professors of obscure art genres and literature are looking for work, woeful foreign language departments are closing their doors. Alas, youth don't appreciate humanities and the wide world of languages.

Cut the crap, academia!

Has anybody checked out the meteoric rise of Duolingo, that built a US$700 million business providing the basics of foreign language learning without charging users? Or Preply, the Ukrainian start-up that links aspiring students--mainly foreign language learners--with low-cost conversational partners and tutors around the world?

If it's art appreciation you're after, there's a wide range of course and short-tutorial options from Artsy to Sootheby's Institute to MoMA Research and Learning, not to mention college-style courseware on edX and Coursera. If it's making art or craft or music, there's SkillShare, MyBluPrint, New York Institute of Photography, and so many resource and lesson sites like Mutopia Project, Art of Composing, and JustinGuitar.

And of course, you would have to be crawling out from under a rock right now not to have found better lectures on just about any author, artist, or ancient civilization on YouTube (e.g., the most popular sort to the top) than the particular adjunct lecturer who's teaching the particular course on your campus during the times you're available this semester, and which satisfies your pre-req. See what I'm getting at?

It's not necessarily the collapse of civilization that is foretold by declining enrollments in undergraduate humanities classes. It's the emergence of better alternatives. But universities and students aren't looking at this the same way. A deeper client engagement might be a place to start…

Why does the undergrad humanities student believe that she is sitting in your class?

* Her parents and teachers said she should do this.

# She's looking for a group to fit into.

# She's postponing tough decisions about her life.

# She feels better when her work is organized into neat steps that lead to a concrete endpoint.

# She works harder when she has a definite schedule and deadlines.

She hopes she'll see something inspirational that could become a business model for her work.

She wants to build a brand for herself, narrow-in on a market niche where she can add value

She wants to find people who will believe in her, build a client network, create a blog, offer free webinars, get invited to fairs and exhibits, raise money on Patreon, and create some kind of FB marketing strategy.

She wants to make money.

Stop and ask yourself which of these objectives is really served by your university class. I have put a * next to the one I think is uniquely served by universities. I put a # next to ones that are served by BOTH universities and other learning resources.

OK, so why does the instructor think she is in his class?

He has unique knowledge and skills.

* These knowledge and skills will be important to completing a degree.

# These things should be valued by society in general.

* These things satisfy a university pre-req.

The skills he imparts will be vital to her career pursuits.

Now I don't mean to hurt feelings, but only to point to market signals. Anyone who gives a lecture on Dostoevsky is competing with a whole YouTube genre, YaleOCW, and numerous threads on GoodReads, among other resources. Maybe he is really trying, but as the number and modalities of learning resources proliferate, if his presentation is not really AWESOME, then she is compromising by sitting in his class. And do I need to go into the disconnect between college classes and career pursuits? What are we left with, then? As any professor (including Bryan Caplan) will attest whose students gleefully fled the scene when he ran 11-minutes late, most college classes exist on the rationale of core curriculum requirements and the bundled 4-year, 120-credit-hour degree. Meantime, the rapidly expanding market of shared notes and hired essay-writers, creating quick-wins for firms like OneClass, StuDocu, and Stuvia, is emblematic of the cynicism inherent in this whole process.

That a society values liberal arts is as true as its concert ticket-sales, public library usage, museum foot traffic, and digital media subscriptions. And, by the way, all the above services do cope with market tastes, convenience, perceived utility, and price sensitivity. ...All except one. Alas, the university culture. Give us more subsidized debt! Protect the core curriculum!

Don't worry, humanities bureaucrat! You have a few more months. Graduating high school cohorts have been drinking the college Kool-Aid, and a new cohort is prepping for its PSAT right now. Meantime, you are protesting and digging in your heels and calling your critics illiterate buffoons.

But it's not just me calling you out, buffoon that I am. You have graduated thousands of today's bloggers, editorialists, art curators, craft-online-market-makers, freelancers of every stripe. They emerged to a job market that took no notice of the bachelor's degree, and where anyway they had to build business model, branding, reputation and client-base from scratch. Everywhere are signals that the staid, gerito-cratic corporate careers of our forefathers are vanishing into sepia-tinted memories, giving over to AI and rationalized staffing that prefer the outsourced solution. And what are those "solutions"? They are scrappy, small teams working out of apartments day and night, eating and drinking work, work that transforms as quickly as the clients' needs change. Ask anyone on that team if he would fund a colleague to get a liberal arts degree. Hell, no!

OK, so I concede that a few fields are not going to change so fast. University professors, for example. They're pretty rigid when it comes to demanding formal degrees. And then there's the State. In my recent podcast, I questioned whether President Trump could get up to pee at night and tweet that the Executive Branch doesn't recognize the undergraduate degree as a meaningful measure of knowledge and capability anymore, and thereby force HR officers in every department and agency under him to re-formulate job qualification matrices more specifically. Well… Not impossible given the precedents he's already set. Yes, there will be laggards to recognize the irrelevance of the undergraduate degree, and both the slow, inflexible employers and the late-to-learn, Kool-Aid-drunk bachelor-holders will find themselves at a loss.

The disruption is only beginning with humanities departments. Watch what happens to mathematics when large sections of content could be mastered on Khan Academy for free, and then fewer paid courses are needed to reach one's goals. Watch what happens to laboratory science with students shop around for semesters here and there to access best labs and best professors. Watch what happens to finance and entrepreneurship and pre-med and a hundred other subjects where students pick and choose the courses and micro-credentials that work best for them, here and there, mixed with internships and work experience, online and face-to-face. Humanities departments are just the first dominoes to fall in a system that rapidly collapses when users will unbundle and unbrand the 4-year, undergraduate degree.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-36904453648507609782019-01-15T15:58:00.000+07:002019-01-15T16:13:24.709+07:00Social Studies is stuck at the beginning of time, while our tweens are blind to Khashoggi, Crimea, surveillance, and the faltering priority of free expression

If you've got a 5th or 6th grader, then you have also printed his Mesopotamia ppt at work, built a model Roman aqueduct in a shoebox, or made a poster about pharaohs, papyrus and the Nile River. My 6th grader is the fourth in line, so I'm getting pretty tired of it, although I can whip one up quickly. But since some of our kids at any given time are pursuing individualized study, I can't help but notice how different social studies can be. (These days we are in a small, icy, dark city in the north of Kazakhstan, so I'm sympathetic that time with friends is often more important than real learning. My kids are homeschooling in turns with brick-and-mortar school).

This past fall my 13-year old daughter and I created social studies around a daily news feed, that sometimes captured her personal interests, and sometimes followed trending articles in politics, international security, and justice. Instead of books, she downloaded the Economist app, we

subscribed to that and Wall Street Journal, she followed Politico, Slate, Huffington Post and RealClear. When an issue seemed to be more than a daily headline but a signal of our changing times-- Russian incursions in the Black Sea, Trump dismissive of Khashoggi murder, tensions in South China Sea, under-reporting of National Climate Assessment-- then we dug up more, followed links and tracked it for several days.

A key to all of this was that we read the news-- or at least the first few paragraphs-- together. I pointed her, and she pointed me, to articles. Sometimes they hung together, of-a-piece, and we talked about that over lunch. Often she skipped around, from allegations against Facebook to U.S. university shout-downs and 'microaggressions', from California wildfires to trade wars. We didn't need to talk about everything. We talked about what interested her.

Another help was that I hired a graduate student of international security studies in Nairobi to WhatsApp twice-weekly with my daughter. We kept a list of article links and passed them to her in advance of the chats. Those scheduled calls created a discipline, which meant my daughter had to get through her news, and had to remember enough to talk about it. It was interesting for me to over-hear her trail of thought as their conversation drifted from one headline to another.

No memorization, no tests, no chronology.

Instead, my daughter's interaction with social studies was contemporaneous, exploratory, and above all, rooted in conversation. When she asked why the South China Sea is referred to as a "tinderbox," we found an Infographic mini-lecture together. When she wondered why the U.S. administration has to seem friendly to Saudi Arabia, we found a bunch more articles in Atlantic Monthly. My background implementing development projects with adult education suggests that making learning timely, relevant, social and reinforced through active conversation will make my daughter's interaction with this information more likely to assimilate into her active thinking about the world around her. But that wasn't my only goal. More importantly, my daughter wants to consume news. And now she also knows how.

I'm saddened by contrast to watch my 6th grader cynically filling the blanks of his 27-page ditto-packet about ancient Mesopotamia. Fertile crescent. Tigris and Euphrates. Cradle of civilization... He watches "90-Day Fiance" in the background while he fills it out. Having seen this version of social studies so many times, I can't help feeling that the irrelevant, boring design is intentional.

At school, social studies never gets within 50 years of the present, often not even 500 years. It's chronological. It has big, bolded words with 3-word definitions next to them. It drills conceptual frameworks (What are the 5 traits of civilization?) to lobotomized kids, who copy phrases from page 34 into the "Critical Thinking" space on page 36. It's non-controversial. It's quickly forgotten. It's so remote that even the teachers struggle to find some way to make it look exciting. (For more depressing views, try joining the FB group, Middle School Social Studies Teachers.)

Chronological learning about society ignores the obvious truth that most of us don't seek or need a huge background to interact with real-time problems. As Elon Musk said, when building an engine, we don't stop and study the derivation of the monkey-wrench. We just figure out how to use it. And I can see through my daughter's experience that she becomes curious around issues like Russian shopping mall fires, American mass-shootings, Hungarian bigotry and Chinese facial-recognition surveillance, and her curiosity drives a backward examination of how these things came about. Her thinking is not in timelines. She is discovering the monkey-wrenches in her own messy way.

The "mastery" (if you speak IB) or content-memorization approach to history short-circuits the tween mind, and prevents this messy discovery process.

Mind-numbingly dull social studies lessons fit into a Hobbesian view about kids and, paradoxically, perpetuate the Hobbesian kid. Kids couldn't care less. They hate it. They want to eat chips and watch BuzzFeed. So we hold them to their chairs, cram it down their throats (and occasionally dress it up with costumes, food-tasting and dioramas made at 11pm by exhausted working mothers). We threaten and hold the grading system over their heads. Kids comply and memorize, hate every moment, forget, and return to chips and BuzzFeed. This closes the Hobbesian loop. As soon as social studies will end, these persecuted teens will settle into making money, watching cable news-tainment, and continuing not to give a shit about the world.

I've written before about the wisdom of political dissidents in their fights--against whatever odds--for self-determination. About the different human value of an hour spent according to one's own will versus complying to the will of a system. I've questioned why education is more Hobbesian than Lockean. Are we afraid of what our kids are made of? Is it unsettling to think of teens skipping over papyrus or the Spanish Inquisition?

For sure, the Hobbesian-programmed kid takes time to discover his productive internal motivations when you take away compulsion and timelines. You have programmed him that way. Learning-to-learn is a process. Tweens need nudges to Politico, to Slate, to the Economist. They need mentors and reminders and some urgency to read.

It takes time, patience, and daily interactions with news to cultivate the civic mind. That's what social studies should be.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-44057810050451481262018-12-16T18:20:00.001+07:002018-12-16T18:20:37.270+07:00If learning is an evolved adaptation, then why aren't teens curious?
The Duke Institute of Brain Studies has taken an interest in BreakAway Learning, and we're delighted to have this blog contribution from Duke graduate student, Leon Li. Leon focuses his research on psychology, language, and shared intentionality. His work highlights the human social cognitive capacity for reasoning about others' mental states. Learn more about his work at: https://psychandneuro.duke.edu/people/leon-li

Greetings, BreakAway family! When Colleen kindly asked me to write a blog post relating psychology to the BreakAway project, my thoughts turned to some ideas from developmental psychology that I hope to share here. To begin, I am grateful to Colleen for the wonderful opportunity to write a blog post relating psychology to the vision of the BreakAway Learning Project.

BreakAway raises two concerns about the education system: 1) the education is not motivating, and 2) the education is not useful. Ideally, we want the system to embody both motivation and usefulness: we want students to be highly motivated to learn things that are highly useful.

Where did boredom come from?

It seems that society is reluctant to allow students to pursue their intrinsic motivations, for fear that the topics that would be most motivating to students would not be very useful (e.g., the worry that students would just devote their time to learning how to mix beats on Garageband). The position that society seems to have settled on is to compromise motivation for usefulness, that is, to compel students to study topics that are not motivating but are, at least, useful.

BreakAway's critique, however, is that the current system may not be motivating – or useful!

I am sympathetic to this critique. Since I don't know much about economics, I can't comment on how to improve usefulness. Here, though, are some thoughts about motivation.

My impression about the motivation to learn is that learning is optimal (i.e., most motivated and most effective) when it occurs in a goal-directed, socially situated setting. This is because learning is a cognitive skill that has evolved over millions of years to be adaptive for a particular kind of setting. It stands to reason that learning, as an evolved adaptation, would function best in the naturalistic setting for which it evolved.

What was the naturalistic setting for which learning evolved? Certainly, it was not the setting that we use today, namely, age-segregated classrooms that teach abstract, specialized, and inapplicable knowledge (and then burden the rest of the students' time with tedious homework).

Rather, learning evolved to take place in the spontaneous movements of everyday life. Learning evolved to enable children to participate, from an early age, in all the various normative, cultural, economic, and instrumental practices that constituted their in-group's way of living. The fact that children are intrinsically motivated to learn and to participate in culture is apparent to anthropologists and parents everywhere.

Thus, the real question is not: how do we inspire curiosity? A bright curiosity already exists from the start. The real question is: why does curiosity go away? Or, to put it another way: how do we keep curiosity from going away?

Here is a preliminary answer. If learning is best adapted for a certain kind of setting, it stands to reason that the motivation to learn will be best preserved if the natural setting for learning is likewise preserved. Here is where BreakAway's proposal seems intuitive and fitting: provide students with settings where they can pursue their intrinsic motivations, and then facilitate the pursuit of those interests with the guidance of adult experts.

I think that these settings would really strengthen the motivation to learn. The real joy of learning, I think, is the joy of discovering things together. We may say that shared intentionality (i.e., the

Shared experiences and knowledge are inherent to
learning. That is, our brains work better with peers.

alignment of mental states onto shared referents, such as shared experiences or shared knowledge) is inherent to learning. Two important settings of shared intentionality are peer interaction and expert guidance. Of course, both are vital contributors to the learning process.

In peer interaction, learning really takes on a spirit of discovery. When experts are not around to present students with "the truth" in a readily packaged form, then students must turn to their own reasoning, deliberation, and exchange of ideas to construct a vision of what makes sense. What makes peer interaction so special is that it actually reflects how science works at the boundaries of knowledge. Scientists who work on unanswered questions cannot turn to experts, since the knowledge has not yet been found. Instead, scientists turn to each other.

On the basis of their existing knowledge, scientists formulate questions and hypotheses, propose and administer methods to pursue those questions, interpret their data, and present all the steps of their questioning, hypothesizing, data collection, and data interpretation to their peers in the scientific community. The scientific process is dynamic, and the boundaries of knowledge are always changing. To give students a portrayal of science as a "list of right answers" is really to deprive them of the experience and the joy of thinking – real thinking – about how to make sense of the unknown.

In addition to peer interaction, expert guidance is also crucial. After all, expertise does exist; it is not like we have no previously established knowledge deserving of our confidence.

Students could really benefit from the company of experts. Experts not only know the material of their expertise, but they also know what they don't know – and what others are likely to not know. In psychology, there is a bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: the tendency for novices to overestimate their knowledge because they don't know what they don't know. In addition to helping students counteract the Dunning-Kruger effect, experts can help students in all sorts of ways: helping them ask the right questions, helping them look in the right places for answers, and providing encouragement. Overall, we may say that experts may provide "scaffolding" for students who are, so to speak, building their knowledge from the ground up.

It makes sense to situate learning within its natural evolutionary setting: in collaborative groups where students pursue their intrinsic interests, while being guided by the wisdom and expertise of their elders. The idea that learning should be situated within its natural setting is a simple one, but an elegant one and perhaps a much-needed one in this time.

Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-74815972700549912432018-12-10T10:44:00.000+07:002018-12-10T10:45:53.128+07:00College-aged kids before 40? The lonely feeling of 'Stop! This whole thing is a hoax!'
So I started having kids at twenty, and now we have five. No need to go over the odd demographic niche I've been living in from attic-of-pizza-restaurant to condemned-tear-down in northern Virginia. I love my kids, I go to church, I homeschool. I also have a graduate degree, speak three languages and worked as a development economist for twenty years. It's the running theme in my life that I kind of don't fit in anywhere.

But in particular, it hurts to watch my older teens struggle with the overwhelming cultural demand for college-going, when I know the hype-in-slick-packaging, the readily available unbundled alternatives, and the real pain of debt repayment. It hurts, because their friends' parents are all 50+ and happy as pigs in shit to send Zoe and Chloe to Barnard and Smith ($72,000/year be damned! She's my pride and joy!), and because my age-mates are all at Gymboree.

I post rants against high school (it subdivides and micro-manages teens' days to the point that nothing excites them. They become cynical, disengaged, mechanical models of what they think admissions committees expect), and my family and peers quietly click elsewhere. They are all happily snapping photos of 3- and 5- and 8-year-olds at school and pumpkin patches. Most of them see school as the heart of their lives, the wellspring of activities, friendships and community.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."

I post to homeschooling groups, but I feel like only a handful of us are homeschooling teenagers. Other posts are about physically juggling children, cooking and crafts, and the kind of hesitant creativity that seeks continual validation from a thousand other moms. Which books are you using? Which curriculum for such-and-such? Approaching the teen years is a fall-off in conversation. Seems like the kids quietly returned to school, or moms felt over their heads with pipe-cleaner and construction-paper projects. A few tentative mentions of things like edX and MasterClass, but so little reaction that it seems most haven't heard of it yet. I'm not even sure if I belong in homeschool groups, because in fairness, I'm not really the one doing the schooling. I co-write curricula with my teens every about every two months, then find online resources and hire grad students to co-implement with them.

Among the overseas parent groups that we're part of, as with most homeschooling groups, it seems the brave, pioneering approach to younger kids (He's learning so much in Phnom Penh! Life is his classroom in Bishkek!) gives way to timid, conformist pragmatism with teens (He'll need his APs, and we've got to work on that resume!), and so the return to U.S. and formal high school enrollment.

And then there are my tech-industry friends. I guess these guys also belong in the Gymboree category, because the smarter you get, the longer it takes to make a baby in America. I get so confused talking to them. Nobody wants to sound stupid. Of course we are all using Scratch. Of course we follow Sebastian Thrun's tweets. Everybody is advancing in his free time in coding and art-photography and home micro-brewing. The revolution in education, skills and networking has already happened, Colleen, didn't you know? They are a curious bunch, because as social progressives, by-and-large they are instinctively defensive about public schools. Teachers are heroes. Schools are the root of the community (cause none of them goes to church). And it helps that they've all got great zip-codes. But I suspect theirs is the kind of backyard, wine-and-cheese progressivism that will ease toward closed-circle Math Olympiads, ArtofProblemSolving teams, engineering tutorials, and timely, well-documented volunteer initiatives around the Bay area, all in time for an MIT application. In short, there hasn't really been a revolution in education, skills and networking, but new formats to an age-old, elite choreography whose subtle cues--wink, nod--their offspring will certainly follow.

And so, my parental peers turn out to be thickly padded, brand-sensitive, or else dimly aware of lower-cost alternatives. My age-peers are still lactating, or else caught up in the warm-and-fuzzy-feeling of zip-code-lucky primary schools.

Believe, believe, believe!

School-bashing to them is like Santa-denial. I can't bear the reactions in their faces.

But somebody's got to listen, and I'm finding kinship in my expanding network of Facebook friends, about 18-25 years old in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, and Ukraine. Our connections are the result of years of university-project work and I think a message that's resonating. School sucks! It's not only boring, but where they live, it's devoid of relevant content, corrupt, and required by law. Worst of all, kids are swept into it at a trusting age, conditioned to comply and that compliance--that is, obedience, obsequiousness, neatness, memorization, regurgitation--promises success in the real economy. As teens, they feel, but can't say, that a decade of their lives is being stolen and wasted. Public universities in these countries often looks much the same.

And so it's these young adults, 19, 23, 25 who link up with me and seem to share an excitement in finally speaking out. They are emerging from a brain-washed process. They're disillusioned. They're pissed. It's a generation that asks, "What the hell have I been doing?"

Girls gathering in Kart-e-char Kabul for BreakAway
Learning mentored co-study session. They are
pursuing individualized study plans in health,
 journalism and coding.

Because only now they are seeing that the real stuff is on Udemy, YouTube, 24Symbols, Udacity, Codecademy… They have nothing that a modern corporation or international employer wants. They are starting from scratch.

It's for them that I'm speaking out, even as my age-mates respond with blank, hurt smiles, my sons' friends scream and flap their hands when their mail arrives, my techie friends have written me off as a Christian conservative. It's hard to jump in front of anybody else's teens, wave your arms and say "You've got it all wrong! Get off the train now!" And among the upper-middle income, social-signal-sensitive families, the track that Zoe and Chloe will follow in these years is sacred. What I'm shouting--"Get off! Spend a day clicking around YouTube! Volunteer full-time for two-months! Go study at Kenyatta University or NIT-Delhi for a semester! Check out Bartleby! Try Udemy! Take a homestay in western China! Skype daily in another language! Try a local internship! Link-up with experts around the world!"--offers none of the trusted branding and packaging. It sounds suspicious and perverse.

Too bad for brainwashed-by-high-school American teens with plenty of household credit, low ambition and no sense of ownership of their learning. Have fun at Wet-Paper-Bag-College-of-Undergraduate-Degrees. While you are plagiarizing essays and parroting each other's politics, an unseen cohort is passing you by. They are the emerging millions of intermediate- and advanced-English speakers in low-income countries. They have mobile 3G and cracked-screen Samsungs, but they are sensing sooner than you will that the system is a waste of time. They are cobbling together at $20 and $30/month skills in coding, machine learning, project management, graphic design, translation, and social media-marketing. They would be thrilled to earn $10,000/year. And that's about a quarter of the student debt that the average American 24-year-old has.

Am I crazy?

Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-60029434273500728222018-11-30T13:09:00.000+07:002018-11-30T13:09:03.358+07:00College debt begins with a perilous teen fantasy. If your kid's in high school, the brain-washing is already done
As U.S. interest rates rise, outstanding college indebtedness rises, and both the number of defaulting borrowers and the proportion of default-category loans increases, it's timely to ask What is college debt?

In concrete terms, college debt is the second-largest debt category in the U.S. (The first is home mortgages. It surpasses consumer and credit card debt). It is $1.5 trillion outstanding, representing 44 million borrowers. By 2023, it's estimated that 40% of those borrowers will be in default. For the class of 2016, the average debt load is $37,172. By debt volume, 11% of that $1.5 trillion is already in default (over 90-days non-repayment), each quarter another 2% falls into default. Another 14% of that debt volume is in deferment or forbearance.

College debt is a different kind of debt from mortgages, auto-loans, corporate debt or working capital. College debt has no collateral. The student-borrower usually has no income history or assets. He has

No income, assets or business plan.

no business plan. There is no incremental demonstration of his strategic viability. Unlike credit card debt, there isn't even an incremental demonstration of repayment culture, since repayment is typically deferred until after the completion of studies. College debt is nearly impossible to discharge through bankruptcy (The College Investor explains how here). There is no pledged asset that can be foreclosed or short-sold to facilitate the borrower's climbing out. It is very difficult to run away from.

This handy tool provided by FinAid.org may be a helpful visualization of repayments by loan amount at current interest rates. Assuming an interest rate of 6.8% and a 10-year repayment plan, a graduate paying off the average debt load of $37,172 would expect to pay $428 per month. FinAid also advises what a borrower should aim to earn per annum in order to manage his loan-size; for this average loan volume, he needs to earn $51,000 to manage repayments if his household size is 1 person--and that's less likely over 10 years.

College debt and default are growing differently for different groups, and that's also revealing some deeper problems. A recent Brookings study found that black and African-American borrowers on average hold three-times greater outstanding college loan volume than white borrowers, and default five-times more frequently. Attendees at for-profit colleges and universities show default rates that are almost double that of graduates from 4-year undergraduate programs at public universities. The borrower profile is aging, too, and that tells us something not only about later-in-life education, but longevity of debt; 30-39 year-olds hold 30% of the $1.5 trillion college debt, and that has increased by nearly a third in the past 5 years. Borrowers over age 40 constitute 36% of the 44 million outstanding borrowers; they are paying off a long tail-end of educational leveraging.

Sixty-percent of that $1.5 trillion is undergraduate debt. And within that, the worst-performing segment is for-profit colleges and students who started but didn't complete degrees.

Interestingly, borrower default does not correlate with overall initial loan size, suggesting that it's not just a question of over-borrowing by volume that drives the college debt trap. According to the Brookings study, defaults are highest among those who started with initially relatively smaller loans (e.g., $10,000-20,000), but these borrowers are stretching out repayment periods, compounding overall debt well into their late-30s and 40s.

This is where it may help to read through the numbers a cultural narrative about young people. How does the fairy tale start?
Here we see an uncertain young person. It's not clear that she is excited about classroom learning; the practice of lecture-listening, note-taking, essay-writing might not come easily. But nor has school introduced or allowed any time that she might learn a skill on Udemy, take up a 30-hour-week internship, work for her parents, or seek an online micro-credential. She found the secondary classroom monotonous and dull; her focus during those years was somewhere else, disengaged, waiting for the bell to ring. Doing as little as possible was a release from the annoying controls. Somewhere late in that process she sensed an external urgency that she needed to "make something of herself", and college seemed to be the key.

Here we see secondary teachers and administrators. They see themselves as champions of knowledge, the stamping out of young people's days into uniform templates around uniform subjects as a social good driving equality and opportunity. Their credibility rides on the claim that such-and-such percentage of the graduating class is moving on to 4-year colleges. These claims are held up

Reach for the stars, right?

from state to state and town to town as if all students need and want the same thing. They are also judged on graduation rates, which had better improve year-on-year during anybody's tenure. And one way to make sure that happens is to fudge it; let students take summary refreshers, inflate grades. They welcome the proliferation of colleges of all stripes, because it means there is a place for everybody; any kind of student, if goaded along to apply, can get in somewhere. And that's the statistic that counts.

Here we see the parents and community. Who wouldn't want to believe that anybody can become anything? That everything is possible when you put your mind to it? That the sky's the limit? This is the American-dream narrative. And families buy into it bit by bit, so that they are not thinking about the $1.5 trillion, or 25-years of $250/month payments, disillusionment and entrapment at the beginning. Instead, they are thinking about high school recognitions and how good that feels. And sports and clubs, and putting their child in the right light. Then PSATs and how important it is to prepare for standardized tests. Then SATs and application packages and where so-and-so got in. As in an auto showroom, it's about momentum, pride, and feeling like a winner. The financing package comes last.

Here we see the college industry. There are literally thousands of these guys, and they come in every possible form. All of them are claiming to make dreams come true. They keep up the appearance of selectivity, print viewbooks, solicit 15-year olds, and impress grandmothers with tours of ivy-covered buildings and quadrangles. They raise money, show off new athletic centers, choose and partially-fund incoming students through an opaque process that leaves everyone uncertain how much things really cost and what it really means to "get in".

Here we see the first employer. She couldn't care less what the 24-year old applicant read in freshman composition, and will never ask her to write an essay about anything. She doesn't ask for political discourse. She is looking for an adaptable person who will learn fast, cooperate within her team, and master skills specific to this job. Her HR officer assumed that meant that a BA would be required, so she has a drop-down menu, and cut out all the candidates who don't have one. Now the employer is surprised during interviews at how little experience, and how distant from reality her candidates seem to be.

Something like this iterates during the young worker's life, as ambitions for advancement and fears about raising a family on a limited income drive further loan-taking and degree-seeking.

If we can be honest with ourselves about what's driving college debt, then policymakers would be honest, too, about what it's going to take to fix this.

It's not a question of making college more affordable through subsidy. The most frequent defaulters took relatively smaller initial loans. Further, there's decades of evidence (see this Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2017 staff study) that universities hike tuitions year-on-year directly absorbing all increases in federal student loan support, so that it's unlikely that additional subsidy would reduce average loan volumes.

And I would further counter Scott-Clayton's two take-aways from the 2017 Brookings study cited above:

--That degree-attainment should be "improved" for enrolled students, a vague allusion to the kind of grade-inflation, course-repeating and watering-down of skills requirements that does nobody any real service neither in secondary nor university education; to the contrary, it keeps pumping hot air into a degree-inflated culture, such that the degree itself diminishes in value as more people of varied scholastic aptitude all have one;

--That income-contingent loan repayment options should be promoted, which implies substantially more expensive and risky loans at the outset (and perhaps the need for loan pricing that takes account of degree type, major, non-profit/profit-status of the school), or an uncertain Federal government posture toward future loan forgiveness (and uncertainty itself may undermine repayment culture), or introducing another ex-ante forgiveness scheme (which perversely incentivizes greater loan-taking, all else equal).

If we can be honest with ourselves, the college debt problem is about a well-intentioned but misdirected dream that moves further and further from reality. And one particular industry has hitched itself (and taxpayer liabilities) to that dream, politicized it, amplified it, so that the dream is about loving our children, valuing knowledge, self-improvement and the American way. Who could argue with that?

The alternative dream is modest, unsexy, and not-so-fairy-tale-like. The kids who have been vegetating in secondary school should be broken out, to spend more hours pursuing with energy

Time for a new fairy-tale narrative.

and enthusiasm things that they actually want to do. And communities need to re-calibrate expectations of teenagers not to measure-up on scores and standards, but to diversify, volunteer, get involved in the real economy, connect with mentors. Students with limited motivation and showing weak scholastic aptitude need to find their own paths, even when this means that teachers and parents won't see the standard progress indicators. All of this will look a lot more sloppy, cut-and-paste, and individualized than it does now.

Kids won't be pushed off a conveyor belt by self-interested secondary administrators, but would self-launch at different times into online studies, micro-credentials, vocational trainings, and a wider variety of much lower-cost learning. [Professional schools and certifications are still out there, but they shouldn't need a BA to get in!] Parents and young people won't take a gigantic loan for the "big event" of 4-year college, but rather will have to make with their children month-by-month cost-benefit decisions about online credentials, visiting enrollment, internship opportunities and housing costs that begin at a much earlier age and may continue well into the young person's adult life (and policy regarding the use of 529 educational savings accounts should follow suit and become more flexible!). Thousands of charlatan and half-baked colleges need to go under. And the best of individual trainers and educators have been emerging (for a decade already!) in online and blended, pay-per-use formats that make interactive, quality learning far more accessible.

It's the culture that has to catch up with already-existent potential.

It's a brain-washed, false American dream that has to be stopped where it starts in the families of young teens.

Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-86974513715610029242018-11-21T15:37:00.001+07:002018-11-21T16:29:13.373+07:00Divulge, But Trust! Teens reveal in college admission essays what nobody should answer in an employment interview
University of Texas at Austin asks undergraduate applicants to write 500 words about this:

What was the environment in which you were raised? Describe your family, home, neighborhood, or community, and explain how it has shaped you as a person.

Princeton gets at the same question through this bloviating, self-congratulatory paragraph:
Using one of the themes below as a starting point, write about a person, event or experience that

Tell us all about yourself...

helped you define one of your values or in some way changed how you approached the world ..."Culture is what presents us with the kinds of valuable things that can fill a life. And insofar as we can recognize the value in those things and make them part of our lives, our lives are meaningful." Gideon Rosen, Stuart Professor of Philosophy and chair, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University.

For those of us with teens in the thick of college applications, this kind of wind-bag-couched request for comprehensive self-description is commonplace. Teens are nervous and seeking to please and still have a naive relationship with privacy. And a whole consulting industry has sprung up around advising what personality traits and gender characteristics to flaunt, which ethnic and racial stereotypes to jettison, what kind of family-upbringing and income characteristics to be proud of, which dialects are endearing and which sound stupid. Armies of Chicos-clad admission officers are pouring over this minutia for our own good, we tell ourselves. And our teen, who has already felt a hundred eyes examining her, plays along.

It hardly crosses our minds how far this veers from the core of what our teen is trying to do: to get (publicly subsidized) access to (many state-funded) educational institutions.

Alia Wong wrote in October Atlantic Monthly
about a Korean-American girl whose college application
coach and tutors advised her not to sound
"too Asian" in her application, and to omit details
 about her love of mathematics or violin-playing.

And because our teens live in a divulging culture, it doesn't seem inappropriate to them to reveal so much personal information that is irrelevant, prone to subjective judgement-making, and unverifiable.

But try to think of the most awkward job interviews where you've either been the candidate or sat alongside someone who was totally out of line:
So I hear you have a really big family, huh? How many kids again? Wow!
I was so sorry to hear about your illness. You are such a trooper!
So you've just got married! Congratulations! I wonder if you're thinking about children?
I didn't realize Scott is your partner! He's such a nice guy.
Was that YOU I saw at mass last Sunday? I didn't realize we go to the same church!
What an interesting last name. Now is that Persian?

Unless you fell off the potato-wagon yesterday, you know that whether you're hiring, or promoting, or managing a team, or vetting a procurement, or screening rental applicants or health insurance claimants, or providing or receiving just about any kind of state service, that these kinds of questions or revelations are completely inappropriate.

Are applicants too young to understand the
inappropriateness of the kind of information
they are asked to divulge? Or too eager?
Or too trusting?

That also goes for ethnic background, spiritual beliefs, sexual habits and orientation, family background, relatives and their incomes, and any kind of subjective narrative about race.

And yet somehow nosy undergraduate admissions officers wormed their way out. They don't just get away with such questions. They flaunt them. The celebration of culture, race, background, class-status, and identity oozes out of every line in the application form. It seems impossible to fill the demanded word-count without divulging a great deal of private and utterly irrelevant information.

And divulge we do. For the most competitive schools, we craft and second-guess and massage the message. Counselors help our teens put exactly the right face on themselves. (Georgetown University isn't the only school to ask for a face-photo attached to the application itself.)

Why do we prompt our teens to divulge so much irrelevant personal information, when we ourselves would recoil and protest if any interviewer leaned across the table, and with a knowing wink asked, "Are you mixed race?" or "Do you come from a good home?" We sanction and assist the divulging, because we tell ourselves that these admissions processes are good, that their intentions are right, that their subjective reading of our personal situations is for society's benefit.

Unfortunately, the divulge-but-trust-me culture is empowered by social progressivism, that stridently and self-righteously promises to engineer a better society by over-stepping personal privacy. I remember coming home from work incensed on the day that World Bank Human Resources promulgated a policy requesting all staff to annotate our HR profiles with sexual orientation and indicate if we are transgender. Why should I answer? How would you verify this? What is the purpose of this question?? I was enraged, but a cheerful HR officer with a helpful face and a hurt expression in her eyes said, "Colleen, this isn't going to hurt you. This is so that we can maintain our diversity scorecard." The explanation feels as meaningless and baffling now as is did then. I carried my anger alone, until my husband got a similar survey from the U.S. State Department.

We don't need to look far back in history, or far from our doorsteps, to see the risks of divulge-but-trust-me. Excessive information creates a cover to disguise racial, religious, gender and other kinds of bias in selections. It sits on servers. It gets passed around. The profile data that seemed well-targeted to one audience turns out to be off-key to another. And so on. It's why sensible adults don't bring up these things at job interviews.

And that's what we should be telling our teens, even if they will leave these questions blank.

Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-62219781946757514332018-11-09T10:45:00.000+07:002018-11-09T10:45:14.854+07:00Why does the state pay when a senior chooses his treatment, but not when a minor chooses his education? Who gets dignity and who gets a pat on the head?
A seventy-year old Medicare recipient chooses his doctor, books (or not) his own appointments, agrees (or not) to recommended procedures, and the state pays.

With privacy, information and selection, the senior
chooses his care, and the state pays.

A WIC recipient shops like you and me at a grocery store. But a 16 year-old is taken to the school that serves his zone, is assigned (mostly) to classes, assigned books, assigned timing, assigned goals. If he chooses differently, he pays--twice (because his parents already paid taxes).

We shouldn't be surprised that surveys of student perceptions about public secondary schools in aggregate are so bleak. Fewer than 15% enjoy going to secondary school. As Christensen finds in his 2008 study, Disrupting Class, most secondary students would prefer to do something else with their time. More than 80% indicate that what they're seeking from school is time with friends and feeling good about themselves--not priorities that schools design for. Bryan Caplan describes a climate of cynicism and superficial engagement in The Case Against Education: minimal effort applied to achieve acceptable grades, decreasing hours invested in study, avoidance of difficult classes or assignments not required for graduation, celebration at class cancellations, and pervasive self-reported cheating. Hardly the behavior of a consumer paying for a service.

Healthcare makes a good comparison, because we similarly treat access as a social imperative, but the patient is the consumer, and we believe he should pay for a given service only once. A senior starts with a range of online tools, he considers how he'd like to address his needs. He can find and compare providers, consider distance, years of experience, other patients' reviews. He can walk away from a recommendation. He can seek a second opinion. He can change course midstream. He can complain, post feedback, file a lawsuit. Medicare is a cash transfer (within constraints) that enables the senior's decision-making about caring for his own health.

The secondary student, by contrast, is a non-entity. The group he'll be assigned into, the books they'll read, the content that's prioritized,

You can choose where you'd like to sit.

have largely been determined before his arrival and irrespective of his interests. By contrast to the senior, his choices are so minuscule and choreographed as to be insulting-- he can choose his seat in the room; he can choose from three essay topics; he can choose his lab partner (maybe). That the service is good or bad, useful or irrelevant, is measured not by his own assessment, but by a concocted measure of utility devised without ever consulting him. There are no star-ratings for this chapter or that, for this classroom, for this assignment, for this teacher. Did this day exceed/meet/underwhelm your expectations?

Any feedback mechanism to the many services inside a public school is necessarily indirect: through parents,

Never seen in a public school.

through volunteer organizations, through a long chain of command. Community fundraising likewise benefits students indirectly. Rarely do you see a direct cash transfer to students to select learning options. Instead, laptops, smartboards, voting devices, musical instruments-- are owned, managed, and allocated by the school district. Most critically, in very few places do students have the means to vote with their feet. And in most of those cases, if they choose, then they pay twice. Public secondary school is a state monopoly that allocates resources on behalf of teens according to its own determination of what is collectively good education.

Teenagers are even non-entities in the social iconography of their own lives. In the paeans to school and teachers, teenagers play the role of cherub props. The impassioned voices are not teenagers, but politicians and public figures. They massage our civic imagination of downtown-parades-Oprah's-book-club-apple-pie-and-cute-puppy-uploads. An actual teenage personality had better be airbrushed in this sepia-tinted world.

Part of the problem of teen students as non-entities is the extension of parents' simplified management style going back to rearing smaller children. The breadwinners call the shots. They can't handle another headache. While you live under my roof… and so on.

But it's not only parents that ride along on teens' non-entity status. It's also an industry of child-management (only a fraction of this growth is actually teachers!) that validates and expands itself. It does this through an impassioned, heart-rending double-speak that makes an icon of teen-rearing while nullifying the teen and reappropriating his resources. University administrations latch-on and extend the same iconography: the sacred raising of young minds (nevermind our tuition hikes, monopolistic and untransparent practices, and the career-irrelevance problem).

In any other industry, it's unheard to say that the industry itself is saintly, even if the overall purpose it's serving is useful, live-or-die stuff. The heroic healthcare industry?

In his September 1990 address to the United Nations
on the occasion of the World Summit for Children
 and signing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
Vaclav Havel lamented years of "bent backs" and "servitude
to hated regimes" supposedly in the name of children.
He recounted horrors of totalitarian regimes "all this
 for the fake happiness of generations yet unborn in some
 fake paradise", and he wished "if it were possible, I would
add another paragraph to the agreement I signed this morning.
That paragraph would say that it is forbidden for parents and
adults in general to lie, serve dictatorships, inform on others,
bend one's back, be scared of dictators, and betray one's friends
and ideals in the name and for the alleged interest of children,
and that it is forbidden for all murderers and dictators to pat
children on the head". ...We would wave off such a comparison
to compulsory school as hyperbole. But we would also shepherd
children--with great fanfare-- to 1500 hours per year stripped
of civil rights, driven by compulsion, silenced as consumers,
straight-jacketed as decision-makers.

The martyrs of American food production? How would you feel about a poster with a United Airlines spokesperson patting a radiant passenger on his head? Even childcare centers and assisted living facilities don't get the mushiness that is heaped collectively on schools.

No consumer is a radiant cherub. No $12,000 sale* is made on mush-factor. Something is missing-- what??

It's the teenager! The teenager is absolutely a consumer! He or she needs encouragement and guidance, yes. Needs reminders and nudging and discipline, sure. But the teenager should compare and choose, take or leave recommendations, personally assess progress on terms which are valuable to him/herself, change course, vote with his/her feet, and give feedback. When we recognize secondary education as an $206 billion business with 15.1 million consumers**, we will-- as Vaclav Havel exhorts-- stop patting children on their heads, and compete to offer relevant, convenient, timely services. It's not the end of the world when teenagers call more of the shots for their learning. It's the end of an abusive hypocrisy.

*The range of per student per annum expenditure by schools varies by state, with New York ($21,206) Alaska ($20,172), District of Columbia ($19,396) Connecticut ($18,377) and New Jersey ($18,235) at the high end, and low-end states as low as $7000. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/cb17-97-public-education-finance.html?cid=public-education-finance

**Total spending in 2018 for grade 9-12 education by public schools in U.S., and number of enrolled students in public schools grades 9-12 same year. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-56855336110360681952018-11-01T11:23:00.000+07:002018-11-01T11:32:26.877+07:00What's an hour worth? Political prisoners teach us about the time-value (and human value) of self-determination

What is an hour of your time? Is it your output? Some benchmark wage? Even if you put a price on it, you know it's something more. It's not only making, it's also being. And being doesn't want a value-number, because being is too proud for that. An hour of being doesn't promise anything. It demands full freedom for itself. Being presumes its own value.

Nietzsche wrote in Will to Power:
There is a solitude within him [sic: the "higher man"] that is inaccessible to praise or blame, his own justice that is beyond appeal.

Isaiah Berlin expanded on this idea in The Crooked Timber of Humanity:
It makes no difference whether a man's own inner light shines for others or not; nor whether he serves it successfully; serve it he must, even if he makes himself ridiculous in the process, even if all he does ends in failure. Indeed this sort of failure is considered as being morally infinitely superior to worldly success, even success as an artist-- provided only that it is the fruit of the blind and exclusive service of what a man knows to be his mission, of what the inner voices tell him that he must do.

As one who loves the literature of political dissidents,

Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in the gulags,
including hard labor at Ekibastuzin in
northern Kazakhstan.
solzhenitsyncenter.org/timeline/

I take a lesson from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Liu Xiaobo and Milan Kundera. There is something in human time that thrives on its own free expression and withers under external control. An hour intrinsically motivated is something very different from an hour (or decade) extrinsically compelled. On the Central Asian steppe, in a Chinese re-education camp, in a prison in Czechoslovakia, these three were subjected to the crushing monotony of arbitrary, externally-imposed ritual. And make no mistake, such ritual is purposefully designed.

Kundera's early novel The Joke is considered
 a partly autobiographical account of arrest,
humiliation and prison sentence which the
author himself endured, narrowly avoiding
death penalty, and serving 14 years in a
Czechoslovak prison.

To the letter it elevates and painstakingly justifies itself (why else carefully recorded confessions?), creates and sustains a massive bureaucratic machinery around itself (surely so many blouse- and tie-wearing officers cannot be wrong!), metes out soul-crushing brutality alongside ludicrous rituals of hygiene, productivity and patriotism, and always, unfailingly, documents, documents, documents!!

I often wish that anybody fervent about teen well-being would take the time to get acquainted with Solzhenitsyn, Xiaobo and Kundera.

They lived in systems that treated/treat the human spirit as a mush to be smashed and remolded into a thing: thing-1, thing-2 and thing-3. They should plug into machines that whistle and click, and a uniform glob should plop out the other side. It should plop cheerfully and reliably. This to the smiling, nodding approbation of

Liu Xiaobo was one of few Nobel Laureates held in prison
and unable to receive the award personally. He died in July 2017 not
long after release from prison.

doe-eyed co-conspirators--classmates, co-workers, neighbors--who unflinchingly turned them over for arrest. These authors were unstoppable voices. But behind them were/ARE snuffed out millions that these machines in their perfect rhythm successfully digest.

Living at various times in Moscow, Kyiv and Astana over the past twenty years, I have only brushed with the machinery that continues to grind human time in the state clinics, post offices, railway ticket-counters, internats and state department stores--remnants of a deeply-ingrained culture of soul-smashing. The quiet, patient plodding from queue to queue, the never-quite-complete bundle of documents, the pleading, smiling offerings to petty demons, the rank smell of bad plumbing, the shrieking calls to wear paper shoe-covers. As a foreigner, I could observe--with irritation--from the privileged vantage-point of one not depending on or bound-into these systems. At the oncology center in Astana, I brought my kids and made small-talk during chemo. Notwithstanding the barking of the shoe-cover lady, impatience of the blood-tester nurse (we had to do it in a line), and the occasional cursing tirade from another patient, I tried to make the best of the hours there. The head nurse was fascinated with me and called me into his office for tea. 'You're the only patient we have who wants to go on living,' he told me.

So what is an hour? For one thing, it's defiantly not being dead.

Maybe there should be two different words for an hour. Here is an hour that celebrates the machine. It goes click-rattle-plop-plop. It sucks in the mush on one side, and pushes out the plop plop on the other. It generates the false hum of false progress. Its laborers dig ditches in the morning that they will fill in the afternoon, its farmers lean on hoes over crops that will be reappropriated, its production quotas, harvest yields, birth rates(!!) boast an impossible unity of compliance and desire.

Here is an hour that celebrates the man. It races by while he stutters and gasps to express himself. He flails and fights against monotony, fights to be meaningful.

These hours are not defined by geography or politics, but by our own estimation of the human being. Make no mistake that so-called free countries also hold task-masters, pinheads and bean-counters. How easily would we trade hours and years of another person's life for the reassuring whistle-click-plop-plop, the reliability, the ritual, the documents? Who are we crushing along the way?
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-61053523588256409942018-10-25T13:33:00.000+07:002019-01-09T11:59:43.008+07:00What's the point of half-assed algebra? A case for some teens to stop
It's a buzz word for foundation grants, optimistic local headlines, model schools, premature celebrations of against-the-odds engineers and mathematicians. It's STEM.

Why do we love it so much? Why have so many first ladies, mayors and philanthropists thrown their dollars and heavily-made-up faces behind kids with beakers and protractors?

Better sit down and finish this...!

Part of us is going gah-gah for the narrative that a fun chemistry class or a zany math teacher will transform an unlikely young person into the next astronaut or Google executive. The other part is sighing (silently). Yeah, right. We feel it, but we know we'd better not say so.

Go ahead and measure the length of the hallway, freeze and melt some water, light that thing on fire and then weigh the ashes. We should smile and rally around the camera.

After this star-studded visit, Excel Academy was
 forced to close its doors in January 2018
for poor performance. It re-opened in August.

Too many over-promising STEM projects have made big deals about mediocre programs in math and science, only to disappoint with results later on.

That's awkward to say, but it's not the only problem. The other problem we are unwilling to say.

What if some teens are actually better off to stop studying a math or a science?

[In most schools, these are rigidly hierarchical subjects with pre-set texts like pre-algebra, algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, calculus; or earth science, biology, chemistry, physics. Even veering laterally into something like logical thinking, visual puzzles, game theory, behavioral design or psychology is rarely an option. So when I say STOP, I mean, get off that narrow conveyor-belt of classes that high schools call math and science.]

What are we expecting will come from the extra hours of painfully muddling-through by a teen who has already demonstrated no enthusiasm and very little aptitude for a subject? What will the memories of slope-intercept equations, rate-time word problems, momentum equations and atomic numbers cumulatively represent a year later? A decade later? We are (most of us) more willing to listen to reason when a child tells us she's sick of violin or no longer interested in basketball than when she says she can't stand another math class. Why is that?

I'm caught in the line of fire between two of my children who are non-reactive to math, their father and grandparents who won't give up the cause. I would say it becomes evident around age 11. [With 5 kids, my sample size is small.] Before then, I agree with math-lovers that we all need a basic measure of numeracy, anyway. Counting, adding, comparing, visualizing, demonstrating equivalence, considering rates and proportions. At around 11 years, I started to see that some kids were comfortable in math textbooks and Khan Academy and ArtofProblemSolving: seeing it once, turning a concept upside down, extending a model to another application. But for these two, it has been just painful. Yes, we could play games, make models-- we have already veered into logical puzzles, game theory and perception. But mathematics the way Sal Khan, McGrawHill, McDougall Littel and the rest do it-- that became a daily misery. So when our second son was about 14, I quietly let math slide; with no major announcement to the family; we just stopped doing it. His energies veered into story-writing, film-making and guitar-playing. Our oldest daughter is now 13, and we're getting to that point. Every hour that she doesn't beat herself up with Khan Academy, she is sculpting, reading contemporary fiction, dancing or reading about neurobiology and visual perceptions. If I could measure their "success" in motivation and happiness, then they are really improving by setting math aside.

The math-faithful aren't entirely wrong. Measures of scholastic aptitude from standardized tests to state-core curricula to the SAT include mathematics sections, which look to things like sine and cosine functions, polynomial factoring, quadratic formula, rate-time problems and complementary angles.

What if he's just not that into this?

Teens who have veered away from this stuff at a younger age will stand out as under-performers by these standards. It makes any reintegration into traditional classroom learning painful in this respect, and the college application process unnecessarily dramatic.

But here's the absurdity. Teens who hate math know that they are tolerating it in order to reach the SAT. If they complete that and decide to go to 4-year college, then maybe another "core" requirement will need to be filled with some kind of math-for-poets class. But that will be all. And that will be the end. (If they shift away from 4-year university, then that abrupt ending will come even sooner). They step out into a workforce and community where almost nobody ever uses any of that McGrawHill content--EVER.

I know we're trained to resist that observation with every muscle in our bodies, but please try this experiment with me. Next time you're at block party (except in Cambridge, Los Alamos or Mountainview), ask your neighbors. Who has factored a quadratic equation today? Who can tell me when two drivers from Toledo and Duluth will meet?

The reality that we live with but resist admitting to ourselves and our teens, is that a few of us with exceptional talents in math or sciences design and create systems that calculate, plan, predict, and optimize for the rest of us. There is hardly an economic role for sloppy and error-prone half-competencies (Kissenger makes an ominous prediction about the capacity of artificial intelligence to re-write the roles of humans in this June Atlantic Monthly article) . From downloadable tax preparation software to Google flights to GPS navigation to online mortgage calculators to credit repayment calculators to office procurement systems, for most of us the real challenge is using the right tool at the right time as an aid to another kind of thinking.

For those other kinds of thinking, we would be wise to encourage teens to explore outside traditional curricula, while keeping eyes open to apps and tools as they emerge. How could music intervene to accelerate healing and reduce anxiety, and what tools would deliver it to the market at the right time? How could underemployed rural moms pool time to provide comfort-care to elderly and homebound people, and how could their driving and time be optimized? How could dogs trigger early warning systems in crowded places to mitigate the threat of mass violence, and how would their signals be translated across wide areas?

Opportunities are visualized by teams that bring together feeling, expressive, intuitive and calculating, ordering, implementing minds. Or creative people who find the right app to get a job done. So why do we try to stamp out teens with the same mold? We know that inspired, creative thinking is fragile among teens. It doesn't turn on with a switch, and can be crushed by repeated failure-indications in subjects on which authority-figures place high priority. A warning against barging in on our young storyteller and insisting he should graph a few parabolas.

There is a weird and counterproductive optimism behind all this. It's the mantra of core curriculum defenders that anybody can be anything. By investing hours and years in standardized curricula, every teen should have the same building blocks to decide to be an astrophysicist or an impressionist painter. Too bad we are all very different in our aptitudes and interests. Too bad there are only 24 hours in a day and millions of things to which you could have applied yourself. Too bad if somewhere along this boring route you tuned out and turned off.

In this family, a few of us are just pretending to be math-faithful. These years are short, and there's so much more to do. Wait a few more years and nobody would notice anyway.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-4218147572301986912018-10-17T18:27:00.002+07:002018-10-17T18:27:43.549+07:00Take this screaming kid! How survival expediency drives school-going--years too far
Anyone who has tried calling me at 7:30am knows this is the impossible hour. I'm a completely different person:

Me, 8:30am

frazzled, pleading, exhausted, confused. By the time I've got our screaming, publicly-undressing 5-year-old to the door of her kindergarten, it's with a certain relief that I make that last push into the arms of her teacher and let the door slam. Bang! And then I breathe. Cause I've got eight hours.

If you don't have children, you can keep sipping your caramel macchiato and judging. If you have any, you know what I'm talking about. By kid #5, my brain is so fried that I can't remember when this started or if it's getting any easier.

As when she's asleep, when Bina is at school, she is angelic. The teacher sends WhatsApp pictures of her and the other children peeling cucumbers, gluing dried leaves, or celebrating a birthday. I feel a rush of warmth as I forward to husband and in-laws. By some miracle she changes her own clothes, washes her own hands, and takes naps on cue with other kids. And when I show up again at pick-up time, she is a completely transformed little person, regaling me with lessons

Tender angelic moments.

about covering my cough, where our food goes and how eyeballs work as we walk home together. School--and that brief intermission of sleep she allows me each night--is the reason why our few hours together are so precious.

When it comes to packing-up small children and restoring sanity, I hear you! I read with awe the posts on groups like Christian Mothers of Large Families that Homeschool and Thrifty Homeschoolers about moms who juggle 8+ small children for entire days of meals, bathing, lessons, activities, and pediatric appointments. I wonder if the children are actors, or if the mothers live on Red Bull. My husband used to wear ear protection in alternating ears at home when the kids were smaller, I guess protecting equally crappy hearing on both sides.

With the exception of those maternal endurance-athletes, most of us live in a state of near-collapse and mental decay that requires small children to be somewhere else for some hours of the day. We love them more that way. We also shower, earn money, respond to messages, and (we think) restore that spark that created those kids in the first place. Don't get me wrong, homeschoolers-extraordinaire, my hats are off to you. I read about you with my twitching eye and scrambled brain, in the eight hours of solace while Bina is at school.

School is the warmed foil tray coming down the aisle. The four subsections of mild, brown-and-beige gruel for which we expectantly lower our tray-tables and stare impatiently at the cart.

Just enjoy.

It's not any one thing we're hungry for, but it's the reassurance that it's all there, the warm, total package. And in rich countries, school takes care of it all. Transport, supervision, meals, toilets, behavior-management. That's an irresistible package.

But what if we're getting hooked on the airplane meal-tray? What if as parents, we're so lulled and satisfied by the all-in-one package that we're missing cues from our children that things really could be a lot better? Or what if we are programming our children through our own choices to expect that education is an inevitable daily routine as dull as re-warmed potatoes and gravy?

When would we be ready to live with our kids' own choices about how and what they learn? At 8? 10? 12? I'm not offering any guidance here, just uneasiness that it seems we've pushed it back to after 20. Our kids can already vote, marry and enlist before most of us have given any leeway for choice about how they spend their time.

Why is that? As our kids become pre-teens and teens, I think our early parenting excuses become a cover. What if he wants to work part-time and study online? What if she wants to only read and paint? What if he spends three months coding competitively? What if she wants to only volunteer and take dance classes this spring? I don't want to think about it, and This is one more headache, are how we appropriate our teen's own risk-taking, dreams and plans to ourselves, revert to our 5-year-old-management model, and slam it behind a door. Bang! Cause it's a lot easier that way.

There's a more troubling explanation, too. Maybe we're afraid of what our kids are made of. If we took away structure, routines, and minute-by-minute ordering of things, maybe they are horrible people. Maybe they would hurt others, or themselves. Or maybe they are apathetic lumps whom we would find in the same place on the couch at 6pm, where we left them at 8am. No principal would start a commencement address this way, but really, isn't the whole industry of kid-management built on this Hobbesian premise? If not, then why bells? Why seating charts, three strikes, and cumulative grading? Our certainty about this comes from something deeper: We were broken, so they should be broken, too.

I know that I am broken. I'm scrambled and confused, and I stutter when I'm nervous. My kids had something to do with that. I love them and don't mind the judgmental glances at 8am. I am still taking my youngest to kindergarten and look forward to our walks home. At some point, this arrangement, too, will give way to something messier, louder and less certain. I've got to let her do it, and won't have any door to hide behind.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-43068201066935295412018-09-27T13:45:00.000+07:002018-09-27T13:45:11.629+07:00If the Goal Is Broadening My Horizons, Then Why Am I on This Campus?
We're hearing the defense of liberal arts education more and more, from the critics of Betsy DeVos and defenders of loan forgiveness to the embittered humanities professors squeezed out by universities' shifting priorities. They portray a battle between vocationalists and poets, business and ivory towers.

Was it serendipity that brought
these two together?

I'm a lover of books, of exploration, of living in new places and trying new things. I'm a defender of the liberal arts; but that's why I can't understand going to college.

Broaden your horizons! Learn to learn! Take time to explore! So goes the parent and guidance-counsellor wisdom about 4-year liberal arts degrees.

Getting in to the more elite schools requires looking like an explorer and free-thinker. A volunteer trip to Guatemala. A teen summer leadership conference. A provocative essay. (Never mind that many schools have used these subjective indicators as cover for years to disguise racial profiling in admission decisions, and one is now dragged before a Federal Court.) But better not explore too much. Not actually work two years in Guatemala. Not actually enroll for a semester in Delhi. Certainly nothing that would disrupt the pathway from high school to competitive (Oh please! Oh please! Pick meeee!!) enrollment at a single, in-residence, 4-year college.

Embarking on the journey

Teen exploration is a Panda Express version of a real thing that's abundantly available all around us, made of real stuff, and infinitely cheaper, too.

If I should get comfortable working, living and cooperating with people very different from me, why don't I get a job at McDonalds? Or cleaning restrooms in my nearest airport? Why not extend that volunteer work in a faraway country long enough to really make a difference? Why do we instead count on the army of admissions officers and their opaque selection model to place me with people who will supposedly broaden my worldview?

If I should learn to learn, then why is the process administration-led and not student-led? Why should I only take classes during defined intervals and only from this one school? Why shouldn't I pursue the topics that interest me most from the sources (whether it's Udemy or Masterclass or another university or person) that deliver the most value to me?

If I should explore, then why is there a required curriculum? And even as critics point to the erosion of supposedly "essential" education toward trendy, preachy progressivism, administrators still dish it out like a pre-set menu: so many credits of race and ethnicity, so many credits of foreign language, so many credits of social science… Why is my path so mechanical and contrived? Wasn't Picasso exploring when he dedicated years of his life to the color blue? How have we become such bean-counters about exploration?

What you won't hear ivory tower-defenders admit is that the ivory tower itself is a business model. And a very illiberal one. Excessively complex and untransparent selection. Bloated administrative function that poses to ensure diversity and uphold fragile identities while driving up per-student costs. Bundled product that raises switching costs and leverages simplistic HR systems (highest level of education= drop-down menu) to over-price a product that costs far less in unit-form. Inflexible product terms and conditions (e.g., timing of course availability, core requirements) that always advantage the seller. Indirect subsidy distribution and third-party payment schemes (think Sallie Mae and American taxpayer) that limit buyer incentives and information for true price comparison. Final price tag double the median household income.*

So if the goal is broadening my horizons, then why should I go to college? If I am the most liberal, liberal arts student, then I should grab my backpack and head for an internship far away. Tuck Jack Kerouac under my arm and hop the next Greyhound. Hook up to Udemy and Coursera from the sofa where I end up sleeping tonight. Show up on some college campus not starry-eyed and contractually bound,

Thrilled!!!

not primed by some elite, inaccessible process, not riding on mom and dad's home equity line of credit; but with twenty bucks, a backpack, and a one-click sign-up for the course that interests me. And a few years from now, my mix-and-match courses, my pasted-together knowledge and experiences shouldn't wear like a stigma on my first big job interview, but should be a legitimate and understandable credential to the HR blockhead. That would be a real liberation.

Be wary of those who defend liberal arts from inside university campuses. There's a business process at work that's sifting, sorting and stamping the foreheads of over-eager teens (Louis Vuitton! Prada! Gucci!) while pretending to celebrate learning.

*U.S. median household income, 2016, acc. U.S. Census Bureau was $57,617. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/acs/acsbr16-02.pdf
In 2017-2018, the average cost of 4-year undergraduate tuition and fees was 2018 school year was $138,960 at private colleges, $39,880 for state residents at public colleges, and $102,480 for out-of-state residents at public colleges. https://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmpl.jhtml?articleId=10064
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-20547438612292823282018-09-07T15:44:00.001+07:002018-09-07T15:44:47.117+07:00What if We Graded Students on Motivation Instead of Content-Mastery?

It's back-to-school time for many of us, and as we buy planners and sign parental consent forms, it's a good time to consider why we're doing this, anyway.

Our local school refers to its curriculum as "units of mastery", IB schools talk about "mastery-learning", and standardized tests refer to "content-mastery" and "scholastic achievement".

But what if all of these terms are putting an important-sounding name on a phenomenon that is really superficial and temporary?

How much can he absorb?

We'd like to think that by October, our seventh-grader has "mastered" four qualities of igneous and sedimentary rocks, our ninth grader has "mastered" the factoring of quadratic equations, our eleventh-grader has "mastered" six economic and political dynamics preceding the American Civil War. But where has this content gone, and how will it interact with other bits of knowledge, ways of thinking and solving problems in their future minds?

Admittedly, our children and their school experiences vary, and some of them will hold on to facts and rules for a surprisingly long time. (I can still sing the 50-states song, and chant the most common English prepositions in alphabetical order). But with the exception of songs, chants and Please-Excuse-My-Dear-Aunt-Sallies, many of which hang from a disjointed scholastic neuron in our aging minds, where does the rest of this content go?

If we can be honest with ourselves, it goes to the same cognitive rubbish heap as administrative process-rules from the job you held 12 years ago, phone numbers of earlier contacts, turn-by-turn directions to the grocery store in the town you lived in three towns before this one… And what would an adult say about any of those forms of knowledge? Well, actually, that you don't need to know them, because an app knows them for you. You need to know how to get at them, how to find them when you need them, how to update or revise them when necessary.

But it's uncomfortable to say that about teenagers. We feel viscerally that they should know how to find the roots of a parabola, say something about the Monroe Doctrine, name various kinds of wetlands, even as we ourselves could not, and most of us have never been asked to do so since high school. If you asked me right now, I would ask Siri.

Where does all the information go?

For our teens, who would love to hear me say that, we fear it's letting them off the generational hook; it's excusing them to return to Instagram and Buzzfeed. But the "content-mastery" approach is misguided for two reasons.

First, we are over-optimistic about our human capacity to meaningfully assimilate arbitrarily-assembled content and hold on to it over time. Admittedly, for every subject in our teens' classes, from the water cycle to post-Civil War reconstruction to Hamlet to sexually-transmitted diseases, we find important lessons that ought to guide their future interaction with society, decision-making and perspective. In the same way, policymakers wish that adults would learn to wear seat-belts, get health insurance, eat vegetables and file a 1040 correctly. But we've learned a lot about the failures of massive-education in these contexts (for example, about improving adults' financial literacy, energy efficiency, and health). In particular, the failures of classroom-style learning, excessive content, boredom, poor timing, disjointedness, and disconnection from practice, have been explored for years, but seemingly in a separate space from our attitudes about teen education. We wish for activated knowledge and informed decision-making, but our approach is like the Microsoft User Guide (notice how the iPad comes with no guide and just one button).

Second, the champions of content-mastery (many of whom hold tenured positions) poorly prepare students for the cognitive iron-man that is lifelong skills adaptation. Yuval Noah Harari's October Atlantic article warns about the demands of an accelerating knowledge-assimilation cycle brought about by artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies: "Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times." She predicts the emergence of a cognitive under-class: "By 2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills."

So what are we missing? What's the ingredient that makes things knowable? That bridges the gap between knowledge and action? That makes the best entry-level job candidate and the strongest mid-career transfer?

Motivation.

Would it matter if I had forgotten the particulars of the Dred Scott Case, if I was generally motivated to read news, listen to analysis, and talk about the world? Would I be so badly off if I had forgotten the formula for compound interest if I was generally motivated to search around and try to use an online calculator before signing a mortgage? There is an obvious advantage to knowing things, and don't think I'm making a defense of ignorance and forgetfulness.

What if how she approaches learning is more
important than what she's learning?

Only a reality-check about the limits of our confused and tired minds. As when the office changes the e-procurement system for the the seventh time in two years, I humbly suggest that we are not designed for this kind of learning-by-firehose.

But we are designed to get motivated, and I really believe that it's how we want to be most of the time. I am motivated to look good, to make people like me, to do things that I can be proud of. We are motivated when we feel that we are in control, when we create things ourselves, and when we're recognized for the things that we create (Ariely explores this wonderfully in The Upside of Irrationality. Also, there's a great literature about all the things a bad boss can do to de-motivate her staff, and it's funny how much of it is built into the structure of classroom learning).

It doesn't make sense to measure content-mastery across students, because the structure which it applies uniformly to everyone de-motivates the individual learner. It doesn't matter what you want. You are not in control. Learn these things here. It's also not terribly useful, because content-mastery, we have seen, is a dressed-up fallacy. Today's "master" of polynomial long-division is tomorrow's blank slate. Don't get me wrong-- there is content, and it can be studied and learned. (Let's measure that at the individual level.) With motivation and context, it can be remembered and applied.

But that's the kicker. Motivation is what matters. We would do our teens a huge service to cultivate it and reward it. And if there's something that will more reliably track to success, not just on next week's test, but in the eleventh job in the fifth city with the nineteenth information system, it is our relentlessly human motivation.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-62273599482033064932018-06-21T16:23:00.000+07:002018-06-21T16:23:24.599+07:00Agency Makes Boys Manly, and that's a toxic word

What is agency? Agency is having and exercising the power to do the things you want to do. It is more than the wrestling of a man's rational and passionate selves. It is also what Hegel called his thymotic self, what Nietzsche called his demand for dignity, what Fukuyama described as his demand to be recognized and to assign value to things. Man has agency when he not only has the cognitive faculty of decision-making, but has a full chest. He decides what is moral, valuable, useful, and acts accordingly.

What is not agency? I recently asked my brother if he thinks his 13-year-old son has agency in learning, and he told me (rather defensively) that he most certainly has. There are electives at school,

and he has selected orchestra and Spanish. Will you wear the blue shirt or the red shirt? is not agency. Will we start with math or Bible? is not agency. These are pretending at agency in an environment of pre-determined opportunities and potential outcomes. And while stylized choices make a good practice for smaller children, a few years later, they insult the emerging man.

What turns a boy into a man?

I ask this question anticipating the now-ubiquitous prickly response to these words. Man. Manly. Before Harvey Mansfield and a resurgent social movement had to reclaim manliness, I was trying my own experiments on our pre-teen sons. My husband was away for months at a time in Army training, becoming a Ranger, and then deploying to Iraq. I worked among international professionals who shot condescending remarks at the always-pregnant American mom whose husband believes in fighting terrorism. And I sensed that my boys were on the brink of something alien to me, something that would take several leaps of faith to find.

She's a bad mother.

Nobody applauds the mother-bird when she throws her young out of the nest, especially if he tumbles and falls. We reserve the worst judgment for her. We're ready to applaud when he soars splendidly upward, but we close our eyes to the awkward process that brings this about. So, too, with the minute-by-minute coordination of kids' time; hundreds of permission slips; opt-outs for PG movies; zero-tolerance policies; and the de-risking of kids' playgrounds. I looked around me at other Army children--pudgy, hypo-allergenic, addicted to video-games--and I wondered, who will fight the next war? (If you're cringing at my honesty, Condoleezza Rice made the same observation).

So I tried a few things. I didn't ask anybody's permission, and to be honest, a lot of this was probably terrible parenting. In Cambodia in 2011, I put our then-11-year-old son up to swimming across the Mekong River in a charity competition with me and other athletes. I sent our boys on an unaccompanied trip to Mongolia to live with a family I'd only heard of through a friend. I left my oldest son in Bishkek for a month in a woman's apartment whom I had just met to work as an intern for an American company when he was 15. And at 16, I sent him to Shanghai to study, and he got lost in the train station for 24 hours. As the mother-bird watching her chick fall (or not getting any response to calls for 24 hours), I can say this is a really terrifying process.

But I believe that what was kicking-in within my sons' chests when they fought against the current, or navigated an airport, or found the way to Xinxiang, was an instinctive agency. I will make myself survive. I can figure this out. And I believe that this agency can only be unlocked when there are real choices and real risks.

Now I am guiding the first clusters of teenagers in BreakAway Learning, and we message each other almost constantly. There is a recurring theme. Which online course should I take first? Which biology book should I read? Which pages should I start with? How much should I read today? These are 17 and 19-year-olds. And while I'm glad to make preliminary searches on Udemy and Coursera, to provide the Scribd subscription so that they have access to an e-library, I want them to take charge. Decide which course is more interesting. Decide which tutorial is more helpful. If a book is poorly organized or not captivating, put it down. Overcoming a deeply-ingrained view of education as an externally-applied process to which one passively conforms is turning out to be a very difficult transition for many of our teens. They are trained to believe in an intelligent machinery that has planned their education and linked it to a future pathway, that the utility of content and the promise of later reward are certain. What is required of them, they have been told, is to FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS.

The great betrayal: We have no further plan for you

School administrators and the education industry work up to a climax that precedes the fall from the

Tell me what I should do after the clapping, mom.

nest, and therefore, absolve themselves of any guilt when the chick flutters hopelessly down. The boy is reminded to sit still, to keep his hands to himself, to follow directions, to perform when asked to perform. He achieves stylized successes in de-risked scenarios where only a handful of outcomes were possible from the start. If he's a good boy, he gets into college. In college he takes more classes, including on many campuses required core courses that strive to remold his errant worldviews toward a more 'socially conscious' reality that at the same time admits little room for disagreement, cannot be opted-out, and tends to view his emerging manliness with suspicion or downright scorn. The hallmark event is graduation.

But what comes next? Here is the great betrayal. Noone within this self-enclosed system has any relationship to the real world. No one knows what this empty-chested man will do with himself when he is 24, 27, 32. Will he start a small business? Enlist in the armed forces? Marry the girl whom he got pregnant? In other words, will he MAN UP?

How can we expect it, when the words themselves are toxic?

Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-27311969729860918212018-05-28T12:14:00.000+07:002018-05-28T12:14:30.505+07:00When the 4-year undergraduate degree stops being "the thing", will high school have an identity crisis?
There are so many hollowed-out Main Streets in America that one hardly needs to recount the story of what happened when shop-retail gave way to big-box retail. And there is an even uglier asphalt wilderness left behind when big-box retailers bankrupted each other, and then ultimately lost to online shopping. People in small towns still need a Main Street that is about strengthening families, civic engagement, getting outside, and supporting the arts. But in many towns where retail stood in for those goals, its demise meant the demise of greater Main Street, too.

In case you didn't know,
college is the thing to do!

We shouldn't let that happen to secondary education! Teen learning should be an exploratory and idiosyncratic process. It should be the recognition of one's place in a historical continuum-- deference and respect for those who came before, curiosity and identification with one's local and religious community, and an emerging sense of duty to contribute further to it. It should be many brave attempts, numerous failures, and the first glimpses of opportunity.

But in most high schools, it's not.

The culminating moment.

Rather, the association with college preparation has become so pervasive that many accept the two as inextricable.

Just as retail is not civic engagement, nor are preparatory classes and obligatory service assignments human exploration and growth opportunities (don't let those college essays fool you!). Quite the opposite.

For the most ambitious teens, a fixation on grade-point average, class rank, and what "looks good" on a resume squeeze out time for real intellectual exploration (is there really time to pick up a book, even an article, of one's own choosing?), limit risk-taking, and preempt the budding of a spontaneous, judging, moral self with a contrived, mechanical, inert and compliant self that ticks off the boxes of grades, sports, and volunteerism.

For teens that don't show ambition, struggle with behavior, or admit that they'd rather be someplace else, high school is an externally-applied machinery to which they are subjected for 7 hours each day. And that raises a million other questions that we should be thinking about. Is conceptual dialogue meaningful, even possible, when forced against the participant's will? Is there a point to content recollection when it's almost immediately forgotten? Is the effort to achieve measurable, standardized results placing an abstract social prerogative ahead of the human being that's subjected to this process? More simply, if you were forced to sit through this against your will at age 40, would you resist?

And yet we not only accept, but endorse high school's current role. Why? Because it is preparing a generation of teens for college-- that great 'transformative' journey of lectures, projects, parties, sex and debt sewn into the quilt of American coming-of-age. High schools measure their worth on the percentage of graduates heading to 4-year colleges. They adorn their entry halls with commendations of the college-acceptances of their seniors. The whole junior and senior curriculum is built around college prep and advanced college credit. Counsellors, teachers, and administrators strenuously shepherd wavering teens back into the flock, moving forward in unison toward one certainty. The thing to do is college.

But what will happen when college is no longer "the thing" to do?

There are predictions of a college enrollment implosion and of a slow decline. Personally, I think if we are to take cues from the housing sector, we'll see a loss of confidence in securitized student loans, a shake-up of political commitment to Sallie Mae, a spike in student loan interest rates and further defaults. We're already seeing the rise of microcredentials, loss of distinguishing value in a Bachelor's Degree, multinational recruitment and distribution of tasks across an increasingly anglophone world talent population. None of that bodes well for the last sheep to be herded toward American college admission, and what today averages $36,000 (public in-state), $100,000 (public out-of-state), or $136,000 (private) for four-year enrollment.

What could the "next thing" look like? I think it will be 18-25 year-olds who continue studying on Coursera and Udemy and other coursewares to achieve specific skills targeting work opportunities that they are undertaking in parallel. I think it will be young people living from one Airbnb to the next in shared spaces in large cities. I think it will be a blending of micro-credentials and internships, whereby those who invest the most in social networking, build their LinkedIn referrals and recommendations, demonstrate jobs well-done and connect themselves to promising projects will emerge with more opportunities. I think teams will increasingly form around temporary projects, but the breadcrumbs of their shared interests and positive feedback will contribute to new forms of validation, more timely, specific and discriminating than undergraduate alma maters. This has the potential to be hugely empowering to brilliant, hard-working people from very low-income backgrounds, at the same time that it's horribly unsettling to the parents of low-ambition, go-through-the-motions teens from middle-income America.

[Don't get me wrong, professional certification will still have its role. Surgeons, dentists, operators of heavy machinery, and hundreds more job classifications will require special training in state-accredited programs, culminating in tests and certification. But the presumption that the 4-year undergraduate degree is the precursor to such specific study will be broken.]

Which brings me back to high school. It's one thing to turn one's tassle, take a life-guarding job for the summer, and self-importantly drive off to University X in September. Administrators and parents applaud a job well done, and dust their hands of another class. But it's something very different to factor quadratic equations one day, and struggle to self-network, set up temporary domicile, build reputation and secure health insurance the next. John Knowles expresses nostalgia for those last months of adolescent boys' innocence, awaiting a WWII draft in A Separate Peace. For today's young people, it's not so much a leap from innocence, as an incompetent, self-absorbed, and morally empty tripping into a hyper-cost-conscious, commoditized, automated, decentralized, transient, unforgiving reality, to which their "preparation" has been exactly wrong. For those touted as the brightest students, the narcissistic emphasis on self-enrichment, individual achievement, and stylized pretending at community engagement instill attitudes and behaviors that adults would find abhorrent to work with in a team, to manage as an employee, or to be married to. For those that endured, rather than enjoyed high school, it's hard to say what could have been of those years. Dreams, creativity, rebellious spirit and outside commitments have been hollowed out by a relentless daily process into which those things didn't serve any purpose. They will have to recover and rebuild a part of their intrinsic selves. Young adulthood will not consist of gym coaches, history tests and algebraic equations, after all, but the potential energies of these students will have to be discovered from scratch.

I know I'm making gross simplifications. I know that numerous teachers are reaching above and beyond to identify students' special capacities, to encourage extra-curricular projects and increasingly to train in vocational skills. But here's the point. These are added-onto a thing that is called high school, where pre-defined curricula, standardized testing, arbitrary timing, and college prep are at the core. My argument might come across as a No shit moment, but it's precisely because we accept these things as the DNA of high school, that high school cannot adapt to what's coming.

So what comes next? I believe that an alternative model for teen learning is emerging at the periphery. Homeschooling was the first wave, but the mainstream looked at is as inaccessible-- too demanding of parents, too nerdy, too weird. Even among homeschoolers, few continue through the teen years, and very few take a try-and-see, exploratory approach (the most common posting on homeschool Facebook groups, I think, is "Can anybody recommend a curriculum for my xx-year old?"). But the very small try-and-see group is onto something. Their teens remain close to their parents, follow social and political issues, read books out of curiosity, visit foreign universities, speak multiple languages, intern at real jobs, participate at their churches, and volunteer when nobody is keeping track.

I believe we can learn from and expand this approach through a million local efforts in families, community groups, churches, synagogues and mosques.

Learning cluster in Kabul,
Afghanistan. Learn more about them at:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/
breakaway-learning-project-
kabul-kids/x/17612837#/

I believe that a new format called "cluster learning" will foster thoughtful, creative, and brave young people from the roots of parents, pastors and mentors. They'll meet in living rooms and coffee shops and church basements. They'll be a tangle of laptop chargers and headsets, a jumbled bunch of different-aged young people reading and skype-chatting with tutors and taking online courses, in between talking with their supervising mentor, or playing frisbee together at the park. They'll come and go some months studying, and some at a homestay in another country, at an internship or visiting a university campus.

This learning cluster in Bo City, Sierra Leone,
is still short of furniture, but students are pretty happy
to be working with tutors and mentors,
taking university-level courses and one-on-one
chats for $24/month.

It won't look like much, and it might take a few more years than high school, but each one will be navigating her own path, racking up her own kind of credentials, and moving eyes-wide-open into the new adult reality.

Defenders of high schools have already tried all means of discrediting this movement (religious fanatical, neo-conservative, anti-diversity, etc), but it won't help their identity crisis. And when some states introduce vouchers, the exodus of the brightest, most self-disciplined and motivated students toward cluster-learning will strengthen the perception that public high schools are behavior-management facilities. Their adherence to group-management and an outcomes-driven approach will deepen their alienation from individualized learning, as their identity crisis goes from bad to worse.

Could high schools be saved from becoming the next shuttered Main Streets? Yes, but like Main

Don't let these become another
asphalt wasteland.

Street retailers, a massive and irreversible dislocation is coming. Unless states can loosen rules governing standardization and outcomes-focus in secondary education, high schools themselves

Maybe time for another sofa.

will have to stop being high schools in order to be relevant. If they can reinvent themselves, they are local assets that could be re-modeled as smaller, cozier, flex-use spaces offering ready mentors, tutors, wifi, devices and other resources. (Personally, I would prefer a comfy Airbnb space or a coffee shop, but hey, some people dig painted cinder blocks and Lysol-smell).

I hope that the transition can be a productive one, like the small towns that have creatively re-invented their Main Streets. Parents and community leaders should look at 15 and 17-year olds as emerging 20- and 25-year olds. They need choice, risks, and agency in their lives. Because the "next thing" is going to be a lot less comfortable and certain than it was before.

Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-11235633290433267012018-05-17T11:44:00.000+07:002018-05-17T11:44:08.395+07:00What's the difference between an identity-verified certificate and course-credit?
It seems like an obvious enough question. Imagine arriving at Walmart and being presented with a pre-filled shopping cart at a price far beyond what you had wanted to spend and containing numerous items you could see that you didn't want. You could alternatively take your own cart, walk up and down the aisles and select merchandise yourself, and it would cost 1/100th of the pre-fill price to get the products you actually wanted.

Everyone looks up to you when you're
pushing this shopping cart

Sounds like a ridiculous choice, right? But try to imagine that the pre-filled shopping cart is the socially-prized way to shop. You had to compete through a tortuous and uncertain process to have the right to purchase it, and your family and community congratulated you when you got that chance. It represents belonging to something. It comes with a bumper sticker and a sweatshirt that tell everyone you've got this cart. And it's so overpriced and laiden with unnecessary extras, that it seems like only people of a higher caliber are pushing this kind of cart around.

If you're the parent of a 16-18 year-old, you know what I'm talking about.

Not that a la carte shopping in higher education is anything new. Udemy was founded in 2009, Udacity in 2011, edX, Coursera and FutureLearn in 2012. Identity-verified course certificates soon followed, along with subscription-based specializations. Technology that tracks students' eye movements holds promise to improve student engagement and identity-assurance. The potential unbundling of how young people study, explore and certify is more than six years old, but the preference for the pre-filled shopping cart stubbornly remains.

Let's consider some prices. University of Michigan offers a 5-course specialization in Applied Data Science with Python on Coursera. With each course fairly intensive and requiring 4 weeks, let's assume equivalent of 8 "credit hours" for the whole specialization. Coursera offers the first 7 days free, and then charges $49 per month to continue. So that's just under 250 bucks. On campus in Ann Arbor as a part-time undergrad in the Computer Science Department, you'd pay $6,832 as a Michigan resident and $17,880 as a non-resident for those 8 credits (you'd save only slightly by enrolling full-time). MIT, the incubator of edX, has put a huge stock of courseware onto MIT OCW for free. But 8 credit hours physically in Cambridge, MA would cost just under $25,000. The student could also have chosen Codecademy, Hackerrank, or Udemy as pathways to mastering Python and machine-learning, making great strides for well under $100.

The continuing preference of families/government/large employers/schools/communities that teens should be channeled toward a 4-year undergraduate degree based on competitive selection, full-time enrollment, and single-institution loyalty seems like an irrational consumer decision. But its persistence shows us how powerfully social cues drive our behavior. The fact that University of Michigan, Yale, Harvard, MIT and scores of other high-priced universities give away their course content free or nearly free, indicates how strongly they expect young people and future employers to differentiate an online, identity-verified course certificate from "credit," and that from "degree-granting credit". High schools establish the basis for this difference with Advanced Placement tracks, usually a very narrow selection of courses promising potential college "credit" if students perform well on exams. The same credibility is not given to an identity-verified certificate from any of the thousands of online university courses that a teen might take. The message is clear: those courses "don't count".

This view is underscored in American education policies. A 2017 Brookings study examines high-performing secondary students in a sample of states where high schools send students to community colleges to take advanced classes not available on their premises. The report concludes that the additional cost is not warranted, and that "the public cost for a high school student to take a three-credit class via dual enrollment was actually higher than if the student waited to complete high school and took the same three-credit class once she got to college". The use of the term "credit" as a presumed currency deserves greater attention. Why had the researchers not compared the costs of students walking down the hall to an open room with wifi, logging into edX accounts, and taking any one of thousands of university courses, or tutorials on Udemy or Udacity for that matter? The policy implications go further. Families can only apply 529 educational savings distributions to "for-credit" tuition costs (and since January, up to $10,000 per year for K-12 school tuition). FAFSA assesses need-based financial aid of "for-credit" enrollment. Student loans are defined, and interest eligible for tax credit, when applied to "for-credit" study. "Credit" is more than just a word. It has become the underlying justification for the irrational, over-priced product bundle that is the "undergraduate degree".

Bryan Caplan's January 2018 critique of the 4-year undergraduate degree should be required reading for parents, counsellors and teens. He takes on the well-guarded myth that college is a transformative experience, repeated ad nauseum in college promotional materials, that it turns young people into critical thinkers or develops a lifelong love of learning. University promoters talk about some kind of alchemy in the classroom where smart young people and brilliant professors get together and "something magic happens" as one university president called it. But Caplan presents embarrassing data about how little effort most students put into it, how little is remembered, how little is applied later, and how overwhelmingly more stock is placed in the diploma-paper than the entire process.

Understanding our strange preference for bundling makes us ask a few things about our motivations for learning in general. Do consumers find utility in the incremental process-- that is, conversations, ideas, histories, methods, problems? If we saw utility in each of these things, then we would want to assign value accordingly. We would be like cable customers who really want to know whether the phone, data and television plans serve us better individually or all together. After all, who would sign onto a cable bundle that they knew cost more than all the individual parts?

But then again, maybe if we saw value in these things, our teens would already be on Udemy and edX. We'd be inside of libraries more often. We'd be making and doing things that didn't award "credit".

But maybe many of us aren't sure about the value of the incremental learning process, and that's precisely why we continue purchasing bundles. If that's the case, then the sweatshirt, the bumper

It feels good to have a college sweatshirt
in this group.

sticker, the camaraderie of other elite shoppers, and ultimately resting our heads on our pillows at night knowing that our confused/unambitious/uncertain/wandering teen has "made it", is really what we're after.

And that's OK.

As long as I'm not the one paying for it.

Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-69028827339384679352018-05-14T16:18:00.001+07:002018-05-14T16:18:32.496+07:00BreakAway Learning Project: Kabul

What is BreakAway Learning? Our Kabul cluster explains the simple and radically individualized approach to learning, ahead of our May 15th first Indiegogo launch.Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-60523573584009232742018-05-11T12:59:00.001+07:002018-05-11T12:59:21.214+07:00What do we mean by Equality when we're talking about teen education?
What is equality? And when some of us get together talking about secondary education, why do I get the feeling we're talking about different things?

Alexis De Tocqueville sees human equality as an inexorable force driving the ceaseless advance of democracy. He writes about equality in the opening of Democracy in America, "it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress." Equality then, is an undeniable fact. Human exertions continually reveal it, "some unknowingly and some despite themselves," and thus what Fukuyama calls The March of Equality toward the ultimate political model, continues unstoppable.

The view of human equality as self-evident is central to the Jeffersonian view of democracy. Neither he nor Locke believed in an equality of physical endowments or intellectual capability (Jefferson was an aristocrat and slave-owner), but it was the idea of equality in the eyes of God, the equality of claims on life, liberty and happiness, the equality of a right to dignity, that formed the cornerstone of Western liberal democracy. The kind of equality Jefferson was talking about might not be visually evident, but it is morally self-evident that, under the eyes of our Creator, every human equally deserves opportunity and the tools for self-realization.

Education as a vertical

It should be no surprise, then, that underlying our day-to-day interaction with schools, curricula, education policies, and standardized testing, the desire to assert and protect equality motivates us. The No Child Left Behind Act drew on a vision of education as a vertical along which deviation should be minimized; the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 took this construct further--the vertical itself should be revisioned as a model in which everyone is on top.

Everyone is a winner

If education were an Olympic sport, while some teams are doping their athletes, ours would be preparing a hundred gold medals and a podium wide enough to hold all the contestants.

Of course these visual metaphors reflect an ideal behind legislation; in practice, the tools to effect greater equality involve reshuffling students and teachers, focusing time and resources on a few core competencies, standardized testing, and the re-allocation of (mostly state) funds. The focus is not on

When minimizing deviation
means minimizing choice

equal opportunity through individual choices, but toward equal learning outcomes through greater standardization. A key to social fairness, equality in education, according to this OECD policy brief, is enhanced when states minimize the sorting of students by aptitude and "manage school choice to contain the risks to equity". (italics added)

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes can be consistent goals when they relate to essential life skills, particularly literacy and numeracy. These are baseline needs for functioning within an economy, for accessing new knowledge, managing one's finances and communicating effectively. Governments should place high priority on young people mastering these skills and mastering them consistently.

However, secondary education should be something different. Teens' strengths and emerging interests become much more diverse than can be well served by a system focused on delivering equal outcomes.

We see, then, a contradiction within the Western ideal of equality as it relates to education. Jefferson described humans that are inevitably equal, against all visible odds, equal in their claim to liberty and their right to their own pursuits. An aristocrat and founder of libraries, he emphasized the importance of cultivating literacy and virtuous citizens, but he also advocated for a very limited government, trusting the "moral sense and sympathetic instinct" of humans to guide their own development. On the other hand, the march toward universal success as a recasting of equality takes as its given that humans are born (or come to kindergarten) distinctly unequal, and that it is the role of an active state, through the narrowing of choices, the selection of a core of knowledge, and testing, to cast a K-12 corridor that reduces variation in outcomes.

The narrowing of choice and emphasis on equal outcomes seems even more inappropriate as the range of freely accessible online learning content has grown exponentially. As Clay Christensen pointed out in his 2010 book, Disrupting Class, the potential for completely individualized, personally-motivated learning has been around for years, but the design of school buildings and classrooms, allocation of teachers and supplies, still tends toward a monolithic, homogeneous process into which the child is inserted. Christensen optimistically predicted a sea-change within a year or two. But students are still covering books in September that reflect a state-endorsed curriculum and multi-year textbook procurement cycles; classes are still geared toward standardized tests.

Many families accept the inevitability of an equal-outcomes, managed-choice approach to secondary education, because it has been seen as inextricably connected to America's other obsession: college admissions. I wrote about this mythical corridor earlier. Once admitted to college, these teens have grown into a passive, tell-me-what-to-think generation hardly equipped to grab life by the horns.

Plato and Nietzsche shared the view that humans deeply desire the dialectic, the ability to reason, judge, assign value, and have value assigned to ourselves. Hegel called it thymos, a demand for dignity that is an intrinsic part of the human soul. The ability to take up (or put down) a book, to become impassioned about a particular issue and follow it closely, to listen and respond to intrinsic interests within ourselves, to articulate opinions at odds with authority, is essential to our human dignity. But these are nearly impossible to replicate in an environment of homogeneous and predetermined content, and where achievement is measured as content mastery.

Dialectic doesn't yield results we can benchmark, and so the teen's desire for dignity and dialectic runs head to head with our social demand for equality of outcomes. And when any learning innovation is ultimately judged by the same measures of standard aptitude, then we are not only suppressing that dignity, we are telling ourselves it doesn't exist. Even in praising the march toward equality, Fukuyama warned that "we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts."

How to restore the balance of thymos in the teen soul? Families with adult children may have a clue. When the years of tests, grades and admissions have passed, individuals go back to being individuals. Will they visit a library? Read the news? Express concern for others? To start seeing your teen as a human, imagine ahead a few years. When all of the contents of required curricula are forgotten, will the roots of dignity and intellectual curiosity remain? If you're not sure, it's time to start planting the seeds.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-13481455510900656982018-05-03T14:05:00.000+07:002018-10-10T16:25:59.971+07:00What's Behind the 'Social Solidarity' that America's Liberal Progressives Feel for Schools?

BreakAway Learning has started to grow organically in Kabul and Bo City, but as I practice our Indiegogo pitch on friends and family in the West, I'm discovering some paradoxical defensiveness about schools. And it's making me think again about what is social solidarity, particularly in reference to the education of children.

[Parenthetically, I should say that The BreakAway Learning Project is agnostic about school attendance. We create time rotations in our learning clusters that enable teens to continue attending school if they wish, and some of them do. And while I personally think that school regimes suck up young people's time and energies and convey a view of secondary education as a narrow college-prep corridor, I put my energies into the creation of individualized learning plans for each of our teens. I think if our product is right, teens will decide for themselves what is the best use of their time. Risk-taking and individual agency, after all, are what's important.]

In the first place, it's difficult to have an honest conversation about schools without coming across as teacher-bashing. Teachers have assumed a kind of ennobled victimhood in America, such that the only acceptable conversation about them is with regard to needed pay raises, better supplies, etc.

Other industries and services, from airlines to police forces to hospitals, can undergo a tough consumer scrutiny without counter-accusations that the consumer has dehumanized the flight attendant, cop, or nurse. Rather, a system is dysfunctional, and so even the noblest, most capable professional, has disappointed us. Why can't we have that conversation about schools?

But there's something else going on, too, and I see it paradoxically in our most affluent, highly-educated, 'liberal progressive' class from Alameda to Arlington. It looks like social solidarity, but remote, impersonalized, simultaneously claiming to empower identity while destroying it, celebrating tolerance of every ethos while avoiding identification with any and clearly disdaining people and communities that have one.

--Take for example Matt Damon's support and narration of Backpack Full of Cash, a documentary funded by the teachers' federation that criticizes the growth of privately-managed charter schools in Philadelphia, a city with an abysmal school performance record. The film lashes out against re-allocation of public funds to corporate-run schools, but never interviews

any of the students or parents that choose these alternatives. Are those families not also valued decision-makers? (Damon's own children attend private school). Why in the area of education, particularly, do wealthy people feel so passionate about collective decision-making on behalf of lower-income people, whom they simultaneously lionize and patronize?

--Liberal progressives are hilariously schizophrenic in their love of children, too. They seem to advocate for children more strenuously in the abstract than in the publicly tantruming, snot-dribbling, stick-swinging, sibling-fighting, quick-witted, sarcastic, smart-ass concrete. As one who started having kids when I was still a student, I have advanced from the pity of affluent, middle-aged Georgetown mums (I studied at Montrose Park with #1 in Goodwill front-pack), to frowns and jabs on airplanes as our brood multiplied, to the age-old "helpful" remarks of the sister-feminist at shopping-center-meltdowns (pregnant with #5), You've heard of contraception, right? Indeed! It is from the ranks of these abstract, cerebral lovers-of-children, that we seem to hear more self-certain views about how they should be educated and raised, than from the puke-spattered, war-weary parents of actual kids.

--Perhaps the liberal-progressive skepticism toward alternative-education reveals that the core of their mutated-liberalism is not the individual at all (sorry, John Locke), but the collective. Dana Goldstein warns her ideological peers, "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids" in Slate, "Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive--by which I mean, does homeschooling serve the interests not just of those who are doing it, but of society as a whole?" Wouldn't a Jeffersonian liberal have held that it is indeed the mosaic of individual decision-making within a limited state that is conducive to, well, life, liberty and some kind of happiness?

--As schools, particularly secondary schools, are not just about literacy and numeracy, but are the incubators of children's worldviews, I'm startled by the daily deference to an untransparent machinery whose cues and lexicon signal what are acceptable and unacceptable norms. During our first son's enrollment at a Falls Church public school, we attended a tomahawk-making party on December 22nd. Our second son now studies film at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where

there is a Feminist Club, a Jewish Club, and an African-American Club, and where one unhyphenated prom was followed by Queer-Prom. The absent identifications speak louder than the named ones. Interlochen recently launched a "Community of Care" project to "directly address campus climate issues that leave students feeling marginalized; to promote the identification and sharing of best practices that promote diversity and equity"; the project involves the selective removal and replacement of facilities staff along hard-to-define parameters, seeking, "staff who have increased experience working with diverse populations and demonstrate high levels of cultural competency". It is just this well-intentioned-seeming social-engineering that may cost a very competent Upper-Peninsula-born landscaper his job this semester, while sending subtle signals to my 16-year old son about what is valued and what is not.

I'm learning a few things about the American elite's school solidarity these days, like a foreign film you should tell your friends you really enjoyed. It's a signal that says "I'm diverse and tolerant and open-minded." The truth that schools are zip-code specific, that real financial choice is out of reach of most families, that some of the most vocal advocates have personally mixed feelings about children, that schools grind individuality out of children, that their emerging expression is preempted by an elaborate signaling of acceptable language and thought, is not discussed at the backyard wine-and-cheese of this cohort. To acknowledge this reality is to stare, slack-jawed and belly-button-scratching at the foreign film and say "Huh?"

Clearly, I have a long way to go in refining my pitch for crowd-funding for BreakAway Learning among the group of Americans with the most financial capability to make a difference. Perhaps if the students in Kabul and Bo City, like Damon's subjects in Philadelphia or my baby-hauling student self, look pitiful and poor enough, American funders will rally around a good cause. Little will they suspect that these teens are charging forward, becoming masters of coding and artificial intelligence, multi-lingual biochemists, writers and entrepreneurs. Individually and unapologetically, they will outstrip their American peers. Just watch! [And while you're at it, check us out on Indiegogo at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/breakaway-learning-project-kabul-kids/coming_soon/picahttps://www.indiegogo.com/projects/breakaway-learning-project-kabul-kids/coming_soon/pica ]

Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-16629663095609746092018-04-29T10:28:00.000+07:002018-04-30T12:17:30.758+07:00The Corridor Myth in Teen Education
When we were still trying to make a go of MOGwee Inc (a private, C- corporate aiming to create a marketplace of one-on-one, inspiring chat), my colleagues and I believed that creative, inspiring, one-on-one chats would find a home inside of secondary schools. I personally wrote to more than 400 secondary social studies teachers in Arlington, Bethesda, Brooklyn, Palo Alto, Austin and Ann Arbor-- cities where I thought, if anywhere, teachers would be pushing students to chat with a Khmer Rouge survivor, or with a first-time Afghan voter, or with an Ebola-treating medic.

I tried reaching ambitious high-schoolers from multiple angles-- from their Boy and Girl Scout troops to their churches to their school administrators and parents-- only to be pushed back with the same messages. That wouldn't fit into our curriculum. We really don't have time. My son's so busy with sports and clubs. His APs are taking all his time. Would there be any credit for doing this? Translation: School defines what teenagers prioritize, not teens.

The rhetoric of secondary education: We are preparing young people to get into college.

The myth of secondary education: There is only one way forward. The smartest and most ambitious teens believe they are moving down a narrow, segmented corridor with many bolted doors; they must satisfy without question the demands of every gatekeeper to advance to the next segment of the corridor. As they advance through each door, the inane and discontinuous demands of each gatekeeper are apparent. But that doesn't deter them, especially if they and their parents are aspiring and hard-working. PSAT? check. National Merit? check. AP tests? check. SAT? check. Entry essays about self-awareness and changing the world? check.

Teens believe they are moving along a narrow corridor,
divided in segments with bolted doors between. To pass
to the next segment, they must fulfill the tasks
assigned by the gatekeeper.

Talking to 20-somethings casts a new light on the problems that teen tunnel-vision creates down the road. Within one or two years of high school graduation, many young people are caught off guard by the question of what they will do with themselves; the same adults who have given them no agency in their schedule, classes, reading, suddenly expect an inspired life-decision. Many move through college in a continuing auto-pilot of ticking-boxes, satisfying requirements, trying to keep parents and instructors happy. A few years later they see that even happy parents and instructors have no further guidance, no idea how the next leap will work.

And it's the later-20-somethings who have taken off their blinders, cast a glance back along the path they traveled, and realize that they could have come to the place where they're standing now by a thousand different ways. The corridor is a fiction. Getting out would have been as easy as taking a step to the side. And outside the corridor is a vast field to run, to zig-zag, to tumble down or to surge in any direction.

I have offered this metaphor to school administrators and students to try to visualize a behavior that I think is harming our young people. I don't believe that teens are inherently narrow-minded and self-constraining-- quite the opposite. This is a learned behavior at odds with the instinctive rebellious, sarcastic, destructive, creative, risk-taking nature of teens. But the corridor is a socially revered construct, which adults having emerged from it, disillusioned, go on to reconstruct for their own children. How do many young adults stay on their parents' health insurance? Go to college. What kinds of expenses are eligible for tax-preferred college savings accounts? Full-time enrollment at an accredited university. When could college savings accounts provide for housing? When the young person is full-time enrolled at college. When HR officers click the drop-down menu to identify your highest level of education attained, and there are only 3 or 4 options, what is the baseline she's looking for? A 4-year college degree.

Is it any wonder, then, that our brightest, most ambitious young people are collectively brainwashed from about 14-25, believing their lives to be a narrow corridor? And parents, teachers, administrators, counselors, whether they really believe the myth or not, carefully maintain and rationalize it. We are building a foundation. They are learning how to learn. They are learning to take responsibility. They are becoming leaders and thinkers. Few will say that the corridor itself infantilizes young people, removes agency, risk, consequences, and any interaction with the real world. Baby hawks and polar bears are more prepared for the roles they will have to play as grown-ups than our young people.

Breaking the corridor-illusion is not about exposing children to risk or 'leaving them behind', it's really about breaking the monopolistic hold of universities on the American imagination and the American income. It's about calling college what it is--a consumer product. It's about admitting that teens are really very unique and will naturally move in a million different directions when given the opportunity. Secondary education is not a corridor, because by the time young people are 14, 15, 16, it gets harder and harder to argue credibly that there are universal standards, universally useful knowledge. It's a field-- wide and rolling -- with possibilities that parents, teachers and counselors can't anticipate. And mentoring young people to find their own zig-zagging paths is something more difficult, but necessary, to raise capable adults.
Colleen Mascenikhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7218734233818748731.post-73846245617234133842018-03-20T09:57:00.001+07:002018-03-20T10:03:48.869+07:00Our new structure is not much to look at

David Jenkins, Simin Shokrullah and Benazir Noorzad have been working hard these past few weeks to mobilize from their communities in Bo City and Kabul the first two breakaway learning clusters. And as MOGwee transitions to The BreakAway Learning Project, it's time to reconsider the shape of things.

David Jenkins reviews potential study spaces in Bo City

Take our project, for example. When we started as a C-corporation, we imagined a marketplace of curiosity-driven conversations. Our focus was on the value-added which a for-profit corporate structure could bring to a fee-based marketplace. But we learned with time that curiosity doesn't drive teen learning activity. Instead inflexible curricula, schedules, tests and college-admission drive them. What the heck happened to our teens? Re-awakening that curiosity, we learned, would take a transformation of the whole teen learning system, beginning with a social movement to break-away from schools.

That's when my friends and I realized we couldn't get there as MOGwee, but need to dissolve this corporation and re-define ourselves as a not-for-profit organization. We're striving to change the way people look at the teen learning process, and we know that in many cases, that's hardly a profitable venture. But if The BreakAway Learning Project can get its first few learning clusters going in some of the most challenging places, we'll keep pushing toward that stick-in-the-mud mainstream.

Now there's another structure that we're revisiting, and that's the brick-and-mortar place called school. David spent the early days of March visiting and photographing apartments, houses, even storerooms half-filled with merchandise. We have been struggling with the financial reality that teens need safe, dedicated, wifi-enabled study space and supervising mentors, and yet can't afford much more than US$20 per student, per month. When Sierra Leone's low-quality and over-priced wifi costs are added, it seems nearly impossible to make an affordable package.

Will the Bo City cluster get started
in this storeroom?

But our students are persistent, and so we are finding a solution in expanding their numbers. By tripling the cluster as 3 groups of 8, creating a rotation schedule that provides each student 30 hours per week of wifi-enabled access to the study space, and supplementing the professional mentor with volunteer peer mentors, we can achieve a product that meets the students' needs and their budgets.

We're revisioning "school" as something much simpler-- lights and chairs, electric sockets and a router-- even as we're creating for each student a completely personalized learning plan, with the best of online courses, tutorials and chats.

Possibly the favorite space found yet

Our new structure is not much to look at. But you'd be amazed what 20 bucks and a router can do!

Colleen Mascenikhttp://email@example.com Leone8.460555 -11.7798890000000264.442677 -16.943463000000026 12.478432999999999 -6.6163150000000259