Agency is not taught at school
At 14, I ”worked” for an American online gaming community with thousands of active users, managing their discussion forum and writing content. I put ”worked” in quotes, because while the owner asked for a way to send me money, I never got around to providing it.
Before that, I had been running dozens of servers out of my bedroom. When IRC was the system used to chat with other nerds, I setup a server that me and my online friends would use to connect to the chat system. That way, we could see the chat messages that were posted while we were offline, as the server had us logged in at all times. I was 11 years old, and they were all teenagers in other parts of the world. No one asked me to do these things. I wandered around the internet and found stuff to work on. To learn, and to follow useful pursuits. To the outside world, I was just a kid with too much screen time, playing on my computer. But not to my mom. She would listen for hours every week, as I explained my latest learnings, and suggested next steps. We’d set the limits on computer usage together.
As a parent myself, although my kids are still small, I’ve started to think about how we can make room for our children to wander. To explore interests beyond the default path. To work, for the joy of working. To find agency.
Their school will try to fill their weeks with the standardized curriculum, and if they spend all of their learning time on it, it will suffocate their opportunity to explore individualized knowledge. Steve Jobs, at 12 years old, cold-called HP’s co-founder to ask for parts that he needed to build a frequency counter. He was subsequently offered a summer job at the company. That would never had happened if he had spent all his learning time on his homework. If the opportunity was suffocated.
My kids are not old enough yet, but I hope that I’ll be able to encourage their own educational ventures. That I make sure they have the time, material and encouragement needed to do useful things, out of their own interest. Because that won’t come from their school.
