Learning Experiences for Human Flourishing

And why they have remained largely invisible

A 2017 study of two British birth cohort studies, each with 17,000 individuals, one for those born in 1958 and the other for 1970, with survey data for each roughly each five years, concludes “In both cohort datasets, it is childhood emotional health that is the strongest predictor of adult life satisfaction.” An obvious implication is that if we could invest in improving childhood emotional health, the yield in adult life satisfaction would be significant.

The CDC-Kaiser Permanante Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, 1995-1997, also with 17,000 in the original sample, is often regarded as establishing solid evidence that childhood neglect and abuse results in lifelong damages to health and wellbeing.

Clearly the years from 0-5 are critical and parents are largely responsible for those outcomes. Indeed, the ACE questionnaire typically assumes parental or caretaker responsibility, with questions such as:

Did a parent or other adult in the household . . .

Live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic . . .

Was a household member depressed or mentally ill . . .

Was your mother (or stepmother) treated violently . . .

Did a household member go to prison . . .

Indeed, the only question that is not explicitly tied to household circumstances is, “Did an adult or person at least 5 years older ever . . . “ (various forms of sexual abuse.)

But while families and households are clearly a major influence while children are young, after age 5 children spend a significant amount of time at school. The average school day is 6.64 hours plus .54 hours of transportation for an average 7.18 hours per day for an average of 180 days per year. Yet we’ve never had an “Adverse Schooling Experiences” study despite the fact that pediatric suicides are 30-43% higher during the school year than compared to when children are at home. While many are aware of sexual abuse in the home, few are aware of the prevalence of sexual abuse in schools, with 81% experiencing sexual harassment at some point during school and 10% sexual misconduct by a school employee. In middle school, about 25% report being bullied each year, with 25% fewer incidents of bullying in private vs. public schools. Homeschooling is likely close to 0% bullying.

Beyond abusive behaviors, there is the overwhelming anxiety and malaise of schooling. 75% of high school students are unhappy at school, 66% are not engaged in learning. Not surprisingly, school engagment correlates with having a positive outlook on the future,

Various studies suggest that having a more positive outlook on the future while young correlates with greater life satisfaction - as well as evidence showing that young people today have an increasingly negative outlook on their future.

What Is to Be Done?

With very few exceptions (this unit at the University of Arkansas, this unit at Johns Hopkins, and a handful of professors elsewhere), academic education departments and social science academics generally assume public schools as the default education model and government mental health interventions as the solution to adolescent mental health issues. Just as special economic zones were invisible as a growth strategy for development economists (until the 2010s), so too is educational choice invisible as a strategy for improving adolescent well-being to almost all professors in education, psychology, sociology, social psychology, and psychiatry (please point me to all exceptions you find to this generalization. Certainly The Handbook of Resilience in Children doesn’t include any such references).

There are several general reasons to believe that educational choice will lead to improved adolescent well-being:

1. Providing a sense of meaning and purpose through religious or positive secular frameworks.

2. Providing a stronger sense of connectedness at school.

3. Providing high agency student environments.

4. Providing healthier and more positive subcultures.

Because the first two are more straightforward, I’ll address them quickly before addressing the second two more extensively.

1. Providing a sense of meaning and purpose through religious or positive secular frameworks.

I would hope that the importance of meaning and purpose for mental health and human flourishing is familiar. Certainly having a sense of personal mission is important. The Stanford Center on Adolescence is primarily focused on the role of purpose in adolescent well-being. William Damon, the founder of the program, has found that only about 20% of young people have a strong sense of purpose (and in a Q&A at Stanford he acknowledged that it was easier to cultivate a sense of purpose in charter and private schools).

While the terms “conservative” and “liberal” are very rough proxies for complex worldviews, it is striking that conservative teens are much less likely to be depressed,

This essay by Musa al-Gharbi goes into some nuance on the question, but suffice it to say that orienting young people to be chronically focused on oppression and believing that politics as a solution to pervasive oppression is probably not a recipe for human flourishing. Thus if a “sense of purpose” is narrowly limited to woke politics, it most likely will not lead to flourishing. Young people need to have a sense of inner purpose that leads to a greater sense of self-determination.

What parent would deliberately choose a school that left their children more prone to depression?

2. Providing a stronger sense of connectedness at school.

There is a huge literature on the benefits of student connectedness at school (here is one entry point). Yet only 40% of high school students felt close to someone at school. This is one of the biggest no brainers of all: If students don’t feel connected at a school, empower them to find a school where someone does care about them. In a full market in educational options, as parents realize the importance of having at least one caring teacher at school, what parent would leave their child at a school where no one cares about their child?

Yet consistent with my argument that academic reputation does not track truth and goodness, I’ve not seen even one scholar researching school connectedness suggest that school choice might be a solution (again, please show me an exception if you find one - I want to be in touch with such people!)

1. Providing high agency student environments.

Maria Montessori was a genius who re-imagined pedagogy from adult-directed didactism to a prepared environment in which children from the youngest ages experienced significant agency in their own learning. For those who believe that the result in necessarily chaose, observe how intentional, responsible, and focused this four year old is,

Now watch a time lapse of entire classroom of such children,

Montessori education consists of highly trained guides (rather than teachers) who are taught everything from the use of the materials, to a Montessori cosmology filled with meaning and purpose, to specific lessons in “grace and courtesy,” standards of behavior that both guides and children are taught to exemplify. The purpose-driven young children in the classrooms above are not simply “doing whatever they want.” They are immersed in a carefully crafted system in which the combination of sequenced learning activities with adult guidance and definite cultural norms for the classroom result in a quiet, effective, learning environent centered on student agency.

Maria Montessori herself developed her program through upper elementary (typically grade 6) and then down to infancy. In her lifetime she wrote an essay on “Erdkinder,” children of the earth, which envisioned middle school children living and working on a farm with associated bed and breakfast, full on active business people. By high school she envisioned them having a degree of independence similar to university students, thus allowing a great deal of depth and personal choice in their studies.

While Montessori originated high agency education, many more models have been developed. Sudbury Schools more closely approximate the “doing whatever they want” perception of alternative education. In 2009, entrepreneur Jeff Sandefer developed Acton Academies, a modern “one room schoolhouse,” which teaches academics through learning apps while emphasizing student entrepreneurship and “the hero’s journey.” Alpha School, a spin off of Acton Academies, focuses on “two hour learning” through apps with student projects beyond that. Prenda Learning is a home-based microschool that allows parents to host ten students in their home learning on apps. Primer targets teachers, supporting them to create their own microschools. These are the a few of the dozens (or hundreds) of high agency learning models being developed.

I’ve been involved with Montessori adolescent programs off and on for thirty years. Very gradually we’ve developed urban adolescent Montessori programs because few families are willing or can afford to send their middle school child off to an Erdkinder program. After creating the Montessori high school program for the largest Montessori network in the US, I created The Socratic Experience as a virtual version. In order to provide a high agency high school experience, we:

1. Provide both an accredited high school experience and a non-accredited one, with the former requiring grades and standard high school credits and the latter with total flexibility.

2. Get students into universities by a combination of SAT scores, good grades/scores on a handful of college courses or AP exams, coach students to do amazing entrepreneurial or creative projects. Using this recipe we’ve gotten students into Stanford, Georgetown, Smith, Bard, Bennington, UT-Austin, University of Colorado, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Parsons School of Design, and St. John’s. If they only take three college courses across four years of high school, they have tremendous flexibility to learn how and where they want.

3. SAT verbal scores are developed largely by means of years of close analytical reading of difficult texts (e.g. classics) in our Socratic classes, along with extensive recrational reading outside of school. No test prep required.

4. SAT math scores do typically benefit from SAT prep for those students who are not naturally gifted in math. Whatever their ability, their is some boost for learning to optimize with respect to style of problems and time constraints. But this is a relatively modest commitment over four years.

5. By means of focusing since middle school on entrepreneurial and creative projects based on the student’s own interests, I’ve seen multiple students create financially successful businesses, write novels, create various digital products with large followings, etc.

6. Students have a daily conversations on personal growth topics and have a mentor who meets with them one-on-one for 30 minutes per week. They thus learn how to develop good habits (e.g. Atomic Habits), how to optimize their own learning (e.g. deliberate practice), how to organize themselves (Getting Things Done), etc.

7. They can get high school credit for almost any course on Coursera or Udemy. They can also get credit for real world achievements (e.g. competitive golf, singing at Carnegie Hall, creating a succesful business, etc.)

8. I teach a daily 30 minute course on Purpose in which we discuss “What do you love?,” “What are you good at?,” “What will the world pay for?,” and “What does the world need?”

9. There are three primary high school tracks, one for creative professionals, one for entrepreneurs, and one for intellectuals (with some students de facto overlapping). Only the intellectuals are predominantly focused on college prep. The others may or may not go to college (most do), but the focus is on developing their core expertise rather than college prep per se.

10. Our math program is personalized and self-paced with tutors. Our math race horses can thus cover two years of math per year and go to college ready to take more advanced math courses. Our creatives and entrepreneurs may focus predominantly on financial math in high school.

The net effect is that many students enjoy a rich experience of 2-4 hours of intellectual dialogue per day which provides them with connection, community, meaning, and purpose while being free to study almost anything they want for high school credit without stress. Broadly speaking, this approach is aligned with the principles of Cal Newport’s Zen Validictorian. We have a diverse community that includes creative, entrepreneurial, and intellectual rock stars, each focused on a purpose-driven life aligned with their chosen path for competing in the 21st century.

1. Providing healthier and more positive subcultures.

I first realized that my primary role as an educator was creating more positive subcultures when I was leading Socratic Practice in inner city public schools and writing my book on how to do so. But discovering Montessori gave me a second case study - for a century Montessorians had been creating distinctive subcultures at their schools.

When I created Montessori middle school programs in Palo Alto twenty-five years ago, half of the students had been in Montessori since birth and the other half came from public schools. No matter how intelligent and well-behaved the public school kids were, they were unable to be as self-directed as the Montessori kids were, at least for the first semester (and sometimes it took a year). The CFO of Pixar visited as a prospective parent and, upon seeing the functioning middle school in its second year, asked, “How do you do this? This is exactly what I want my employees to be doing.” The “secret,” of course, was to raise the children with the level of agency seen in the Montessori videos above - and then have a substantially influential peer group that the incoming students who had not been enculturated into agency learned from their peers how to behave in such an environment.

One of the most remarkable things about the Montessori middle school children was that they were able to initiate, organize, and play games with each other, then resolve any conflicts and disagreements on their own. While banal, in some times and place, this is not an achievement that one can take for granted in most public middle schools. In addition, many of the girls from public schools had been jaded, tough girls coming in, but gradually became warm, open authentic girls after a semester. All of these were cultural transformations, a set of norms that transferred from the Montessori native kids to outsiders as they gradually became enculturated.

Many of my other Substack posts go more deeply into the creation of subcultures the goal of education in order to address a wide range of contemporary calamities.

Creating Subcultures for Human Flourishing as the Goal of Entrepreneurial Education

The opportunity cost of government schooling has been immense. Academia, which is often assumed to be a source of valuable information, does not track truth and goodness with any reliability.

Meanwhile, millions of parents are spontaneously creating more humane learning environments for their children through homeschooling, microschooling, virtual schooling, private schooling, and religious schooling. As millions of children are raised in environments which:

A. Cultivate meaning and purpose, rather than nihilism, hedonism, and/or debilitating woke politics;

B. Have relationships with caring adults;

C. Are provided with more agency, and

D. Are embedded in healthier and more positive subcultures,

many dysfunctions, mental illness, and much of the misery associated with our society will gradually vanish.

It is entirely unnecessary for a society to train children to be miserable for the rest of their lives. Let’s release millions of entrepreneurs of happiness and wellbeing to end the miserable age of government-dominated adolescence, 1950-2050.