American Parents Spend More Energy Picking A Backpack For Their Kid Than Picking His School

Thang Nguyen / PEXELS

American Parents Spend More Energy Picking A Backpack For Their Kid Than Picking His School:

We do not make the child fit the backpack. We keep looking until we find the one that fits the child. Education deserves at least that much imagination

Toward the end of every summer, my family makes what has become a small back-to-school hajj to the western suburbs of Chicago. We hit Oakbrook Center, then the outlet mall nearby, and spend a day acquiring the things our children try to convince us they need to become well-educated Americans.

This year my son got an L.L. Bean backpack, and my daughter, a pink patterned one from Pottery Barn. Water bottles, teal unicorns, sketchbooks, chapter books. My son will read almost anything with a credible risk of dismemberment. Then shoes: He wanted something that made him look a little more like James Dean, whom he reported on last year. I doubt Dean bought his shoes at an outlet mall with his father, but we worked with what we had.

This is what American parents do in August. Using survey projections and K-12 enrollment data, Deloitte estimated the back-to-school market at $30.4 billion this year, or about $557 per child. We comparison-shop, chase sales, and adjust according to price, taste, and the lobbying power of the child standing beside us.

Somewhere between Pottery Barn and L.L.Bean, it struck me that we were exercising extraordinary discretion over everything surrounding school.

Except, mostly, the school.

I conduct focus groups with parents about education, and one of my favorite questions is meant to get them outside the school they already know: If you could build a school custom-tailored to your kid, what would it look like?

The first response is often dead air. Eventually come the safe answers: good teachers, safety, strong academics. Leave it sitting there long enough, and people start wandering. Maybe school happens mostly outside. Maybe the kids build things every day. Maybe it looks like a laboratory or a garage full of cars and go-karts to pull apart and, with luck, put back together again.

Once I let myself do the same thing, I have no trouble at all. For my son, I can imagine museums and national parks, robotics labs, and workshops where roller-coaster engineering and animatronics count as perfectly serious subjects. Maybe a year on the Great Loop with American history passing just above the bowline.

Then I look at what we actually choose from. Even a good school is built for scale, not for my son. The calendar, subjects, age groups, classrooms, and shape of the day are largely fixed before anybody meets the kid who has to live inside them.

For most of American history, there wasn’t much alternative. The school was where the school was. You took the package. Eventually, necessity hardened into habit, and we stopped expecting much of the education itself to be ours to decide.

Psychologists stumbled onto something useful here in the late 1960s. Martin Seligman and Steven Maier found that dogs exposed to shocks they could not control eventually stopped trying to escape, even when escape became possible. The finding became famous as “learned helplessness.”

Parents learned something similar about school. You could request the teacher, hire the tutor, pack the lunch, fill the afternoons. But the big decisions were already made: where, when, what, how, with whom, for how long. We got very good at choosing around school because choosing much about school itself rarely seemed possible.

Then Seligman and Maier went back to their own work and found the more interesting lesson.

Helplessness, they concluded, wasn’t really learned. When nothing you do changes anything, passivity comes naturally. Control is what has to be learned. You act. Something changes. So you act again.

Agency needs reps. Fortunately, by then we needed lunch.

We wandered into a restaurant hilariously embedded in the middle of Crate & Barrel, where my daughter ordered buttered corkscrew pasta and my son ordered tonkotsu ramen with chili oil and an extra soft egg. Same parents, same house, much of the same genetic material. Apparently none of it reached lunch. --->READ MORE HERE

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