We are mom and dad, who in addition to being parents, do research on healthy lifestyle and cancer. We would like to achieve a healthy, balanced and meaningful life. In our pursuit, we sift the healthy from the unhealthy, the simple from the complicated advice. The blog also includes random musings on topics other than health and parenting. Send us a message at applyforlife@gmail.com, mikelifesteer@gmail.com or through the contact form in the sidebar.
Navy seals learn to live beyond external validation.
This is what someone told me a month ago. Ever since, my mind circled back to this statement many times. It is attractive not to depend on anyone’s opinion, to know for sure what I am worth, to validate my own actions and behaviors.
Interestingly, we do not care about anyone’s opinion when we are born. We are unaware of the approval or disapproval of the surrounding people at our birth and throughout the first years of our lives.
We also die not caring about what everyone else thinks about us and how everyone around assesses us. In the last months or years of our lives, if we are aware of our approaching end, we would likely be disinterested in everyone’s opinion about us.
And yet, between these two events – birth and death – we are entangled in what people think and say about us, in how people perceive us and treat us. This is a most constraining and enduring condition that defines our lives and behaviors. This is also an enormous time trap; we spend countless hours fretting about people’s assessments of us and their behaviors toward us.
The more integrated we are with the society and its structures, the higher is our dependence on external validation. If we work for our living, then we are evaluated on a regular basis.
I am currently evaluated by many “parties” at my job. The customers, several layers of bosses, and external associates are all assessing my behavior and contributions, my knowledge and even my appearance. This is of course, in addition to colleagues and peers talking about me and doing their “behind-the-scenes” dirty politics. I do not care about the last category anymore, since my salary does not depend on them. For the most part, I can effectively avoid the evil colleagues simply by interacting with them only if it is absolutely necessary. I have witnessed that “friendships” with coworkers are useless and even detrimental. I watched such “associations” burn to ashes. The initial “honeymoon”, when new to each other colleagues overshare personal information is quickly replaced by an open warfare period, when the shared information is turned into a dagger, with which the former “friends” backstab each other.
Whereas the pathetic situations with judgmental, evil and psychotic colleagues might be avoided through limited interactions and more guarded behaviors, the imposed by institutions evaluations such as your annual review with the boss cannot miraculously disappear. We are subjected to these "examinations" since school age, when assessments and grades are given for everything we learn and do. And then, we proceed though our lives by enduring more and more evaluations, as long as we need to work for our living.
The only way out of the vicious trap of assessments and evaluations is to be financially independent. This is obvious when you analyze the behaviors of filthy rich people. Let’s take as an example Elon Musk. Not only the guy does not care about what you and I think about him, he is also creating the same judgment-free environment for his children.
Musk established a school for his five sons and a few other lucky kids. In this school, “…there are very few formal assessments and no grades are handed out". Emphasis is placed not on the fear of the grades and opinions of teachers and peers, but on creativity: “…Many students go on to create their own websites with what they've learned “, and “…Feedback is given in the form of TED Talk like symposia and presentations to faculty members of nearby universities“. Best of all, “Each year, the curriculum is totally rewritten, with around half of the content decided upon by the students themselves”.
Do you think that kids, who have gone through this school, would grow up to be adults who deeply care about formal assessments and evaluations? I doubt it.
Can you live beyond external validation, rather than seek confirmation and approval by others? Or maybe the right question is, can you afford to not care about external validation? Is it your life that you are living?
“The best way to predict your future is to create it” Abraham Lincoln
A couple of years ago, I was listening to the “America’s cheapest family”, the Economides family, and realized that I have already made mistakes with my daughter. The father asked whether we all wanted to raise responsible adults or perpetual children. The two Economides parents advised that even if the parents were financially comfortable, they should not allow the children to buy and live at the parents’ spending level, because by doing so the children would be “locked” into a likely unsustainable lifestyle. It is quite possible that the children would not have the income that the parents make. Of course, this does not mean that the children would be less happy than the “richer” parents. After all, the millionaires and billionaires are not much happier than the average American. However, if the children have lower income and yet, spend at the level of the rich parents, happiness is unlikely.
This trajectory of thoughts brought more questions about the future. Would our children have any job stability? It has been predicted that in the future, there might be only temporary job contracts; people would rarely stop to live in one place, since they will be in pursuit of their next job/contract. Would the informational technology and automation continue to evolve and what would the consequences be… As we exhaust the world’s resources and take unwise decisions to address the world’s problems, would our society recess and shrink back to the mechanical and handmade devices? With all these uncertainties, am I making a mistake by pushing my child into the time-devouring, super-expensive, goal-disorienting, haphazard educational system? By conforming to the prefabricated mold of our educational system and its regulations and artificially-imposed standards, do I suffocate the imagination and creativity of my child?
As I asked myself these questions, and felt more and more upset. I thought that the answers to these questions depended on whether I wanted to see my child become a happy adult or a successful adult. Strangely enough, in our society the most popular definition of success rarely overlaps with the understanding of individual happiness. Success in our world is frequently measured in dollar signs. The schools prepare our children to be successful (i.e., earn money); the schools do not explain to our children how to seek happiness. And we, as dutiful parents, reinforce the lessons from the schools. Have you recently looked at how happiness changes with age? It seems that at age of 15, our children become increasingly unhappy with their lives – the school seems worse than a prison, and all their activities in and out of school are rationed and predetermined.
Peter Gray, a psychology professor wrote, “Children are forced to attend school, where they are stripped of most of their rights,”… “The debate shouldn’t be about whether school is prison, because unless you want to change the definition of prison, it is.” … My daughter cannot go to the school’s bathroom unless she has a permission slip, she can attend school only dressed by THE code. There is also a system of increasing in intensity punishments, if she does not observe the rules.
Masters of imagination such as Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter shared their true feelings about school. Andersen reminisced that "his years in school were the darkest and most bitter of his life. At one school, he lived at his schoolmaster's home. There he was abused in order to improve his character... He later said the faculty had discouraged him from writing in general, causing him to enter a state of depression”. Beatrix Potter, the author of the whimsical fairy tales about Peter Rabbit, admitted “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”
Children in the U.S. may spend 17 years in school if they attend college for four years and forgo graduate education. This is overschooling. Learning useful skill should not take this long. Worse, the 17 years do not guarantee any useful job skills – frequently, the young people are catapulted out of college into a spotty work world without any applicable skills. The lucky ones, who do find a job, frequently feel like apprentices and start learning meaningful skills at the job.
As every extreme gives rise to another extreme, the overschooling has given rise to the unschooling - read Hewitt B. We Don't Need No Education, Magazine, September 2014.
“The best way to predict your future is to create it”, said Abraham Lincoln. We should create the future of America by educating and preparing our children for the real world. However, the future is glum, if we rely on the current educational system. The present overschooling prunes the children’s imagination into a shriveled trunk without brunches and flowers, diminishes the future children’s productivity, and tempers with their health. As a result, we squander our greatest potential, our children, and jeopardize their future.
Compare the current overschooling, the lack of responsibility among our children, the scarcity of job opportunities to the responsibilities given to young people a century or more ago. We delay and postpone adulthood as long as possible. And yet, it is worth remembering that at 17 years of age, George Washington left home to become a surveyor; and a few years later, he was appointed as a district adjutant, with the rank of major in the Virginia militia.
At age of 21, Emil Herman Grubbe, assembled the first X-ray machine in Chicago and used it to treat a woman with recurrent breast carcinoma.
At age of 26, William Bradley Coley joined as a medical doctor the staff of the New York Hospital and at age of 29, he injected his first patient with streptococcal microorganisms to treat a malignant tumor. Today, Coley is considered "the father of immunotherapy".
Is there any good reason to keep the young in school for a long time? Since I am a biologist, I have read that the biomedical knowledge doubles about every 19 years (Smith, R., What clinical information do doctors need? BMJ, 1996. 313(7064): p. 1062-8). It is true that technology and science are dynamic; however, is this is a good excuse to keep the young people longer in school? If yes, the same logic would imply that we should stay in school forever, as new discoveries and knowledge are reported every day. It is obvious that only basic, foundational knowledge and critical reasoning skills should be acquired in school. In addition, there should be novel educational models that support ongoing knowledge upgrades for professionals without taking them away from their families and jobs.
My random lessons/concepts for today are: shorten the schooling period, give our children job responsibilities earlier in life, and prevent the children from inflating their lifestyle.
The wings of Imagination, Knowledge, and Practice, these are the wings for my child, and I wish that the school helped me in providing these. Imagination I am not sure that anything has changed within the past century or so in our schools in terms of recognizing, celebrating, and encouraging the human imagination. Do you remember the works of Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter? The creator of the most exquisite fairy tales and the narrator of Peter Rabbit are two examples of how imagination is either suppressed in school (Andersen), or is allowed to thrive outside school (Potter). Hans Christian Andersen recollected that his years in school were the darkest in his life, and that the teachers discouraged him from writing, causing him to enter a state of depression. Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, happily stated, “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” Can you imagine the world without Andersen’s Little Ida’s Flowers? Or without Potter’s Peter Rabbit being chased by Mr. McGregor? Today schools are still imagination-stifling institutions. In addition, schools physically restrict children. Have you read about the “isolation rooms” in our U.S. schools? But it seems that this is OK, because in such rooms “…a child isn't locked away and isolated; an adult must stand outside the door and watch the child though a window.” Yep, exactly like in a prison or a zoo. Knowledge Our schools fill the young brains with irrelevant to life information. As the knowledge of humanity increases, we should remember that the human brain does not evolve in a way to accommodate all additional new knowledge. We also need to leave some breathing space for curiosity and allow the children to ask and look for information that they are excited about. Otherwise, how would we know what each kid is good at? The solution is to curate the information that is currently offered. The best teachers should be distinguished by a special title of “Curator of knowledge”. Practice Practice makes perfect, right? Benjamin Franklin said, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” In medical schools, students are presented with simulations of real-life situations and patients. In a similar way we should encourage our children to explore different professions – through simulations and apprenticeships. After middle school, we could introduce rotation apprenticeships that allow students to explore several fields of interest.
And yes, I agree with Mr. Money Mustache: there should be a red button in the school hallways and everyone should be allowed to spill the music by pressing the button. We should take equal care of both the brain activity and physical activity of our kids. Let the children move, play, dance, and daydream! They spend most of their waking hours at school. If we steal these hours from the children we will cripple them – physically and emotionally, and they will never fly.
