We need to rethink the conventional wisdom in our society that after age four, kids need to be in school, continuously (except for perhaps summertime) from kindergarten for at least seventeen years until they graduate from college. I think it is leaving too many of our young adults dazed and confused coming out the other end rather than feeling prepared and inspired to join the greater adult community. They’ve spent too much time endlessly preparing and practicing to lead a “real life”, with little chance to experience living a “real life” where things they do have meaning beyond themselves. They’ve been too long under other people’s direction to have a sense of confidence in their own ability to chart their own course.

One of the biggest problems with our standardized OSFA (one size fits all) education system is that a group of people (state educational policy makers) who have never met you control and dictate to you your learning process, including what you learn, who you learn it from, where you learn it, how you learn it, and when you learn it. Your education, and more broadly your development as a human being, tends to become something that other people are trying to do to you, rather than something you own yourself.

In this piece I want to focus on the pace of formal education, the “when” you learn it aspect of this high-stakes standardization and the toll I believe it continues to take on our youth and young adults, as it did on me growing up.

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