How We Fail Most Children

I have always been passionate about education, more specifically, the fact that most Americans reach adulthood lacking most of the soft skills that are required for great success in our culture and economy.

I attended a well funded, highly rated high school from which I went to an excellent university, and I came out with a cum laude degree and almost none of the skills or knowledge that I would need to be successful beyond academia.

It is no mystery what I needed to know, nor are they difficult skills to teach: business planning, goal setting, salesmanship, networking, and the like. Furthermore, I was fortunate to have learned that our economy is such that opportunity still exists and that you need to know to look for it. Too many young adults do not know this, which is why some of the best minds of my generation are flipping burgers or working at the mall.

With the birth of my daughter, I have given a great deal of thought to this over the past few years. Knowing that the education system will fail to provide her this array of skills and knowledge, how will I supplement that education to prepare her for success?

The juxtaposition of a number of interactions with particular people and groups this week has reminded me that this is a much broader problem affecting almost every young person approaching adulthood, but that there are resources which could be mobilized to help.

The fundamental problem is that education has been structured by experts who are focused on the acquisition of knowledge who lack expertise in how that knowledge is executed to create results in adulthood. The focus has become testable knowledge: accountable, concrete, useless. We can talk about test scores doing this or that without recognizing that many high achieving students become low achieving, unhappy adults.

The solution is simple but not easy.
We must teach our children that opportunities exist if they are bold enough to seek them.
We must teach them the basic skills for success in adult life: networking, salesmanship, grit and resilience, goal setting and achieving, and business concepts such as marketing, bookkeeping, and the like.
We must teach them the value of entrepreneurship, whether in terms of running their own business or simply thinking of themselves as the masters of their own commercial destiny rather than drones in a vast capitalist machine.

These things are not difficult to teach, and the first step would be to teach them to the most motivated to learn: the top and bottom students. The top students are eager to learn and succeed and they desire to know how to succeed at the next level. At the other end of the spectrum, many very intelligent students drop out, burn out, or tune out because they have not learned these things, and they would benefit the most from them because the lack of this knowledge is why they have disengaged from the educational system.

They could be taught in afterschool programs. They could be taught as courses in school. They could be directed independent study projects. There is a variety of options, but it must be done. An entire generation of millennials have fallen into adulthood, saddled with student loan debt, unprepared for a dynamic and changing economy, and we are all suffering for it.

This can be better. Together we can find a way.

If They're Bored, Then You're Boring

June 3rd, 17 days before graduation, beautiful sunny day, an hour before the end of the school day.

Standing before a group of about 20 high school kids I have never met before.

Teaching them about sales technique and tactics.


From what I hear, many would think of that as a very difficult situation, but I held their attention without disruption for 40 minutes.

I am not a professional teacher of teenagers my any stretch of the imagination, but this was where I was this afternoon. I was in front of Ledyard High School's journalism class, which is the group that puts out their news magazine The Colonel. I will admit that this is an elective class I was in front of, making my job easier, but I found them to be completely respectful and quite interested.

Did I mention that my topic was sales? Would you sit attentively through a 40 minute talk on sales? I know I would, but apparently I'm abnormal.

The reason I was there was that I had read a few weeks ago in The Day that the powers that be in the town of Ledyard were cutting the entire school paper's budget as part of a sweeping half million dollar budget cut. The article suggested that without the funding, the paper could no longer be printed.

So, emailed the address I found for The Colonel and arranged a meeting. I met with the student editors as well as the faculty adviser, Mr. Bill Frisky. We discussed the possibility of using ad sales to replace the budget, and a plan came together.

About 20 students comprise the class that runs the publication, and a year round ad in all 8 of the issues is $300. If each of the 20 students sold one year-long slot, it would replace much of the lost funding. The only problem was that the students who had tried to sell ads met with great frustration, as any novice, untrained salesperson might. So, I agreed to come into the class and give a tutorial on the selling of ads.

Today was that day. I discussed the 7 steps of the sale, prospecting techniques, appointment setting, needs analysis and more. I also answered many questions. At the beginning of the class, many students cringed at the idea of trying to sell ads, and looked at me skeptically as most audiences, especially young ones, do with an unfamiliar speaker. At the end, I asked for a show of hands as to how many felt comfortable trying to sell ads now, and most of the hands went up.

I'm not going to suggest that I had their attention because I am such an engaging speaker or I know some secret of working with teens. The fact is that what I was teaching was relevant. I was able to show them how it applied directly to a problem they face now, how it would be valuable to them in the future, and how it could even be the basis of a backup career in the future.

Obviously, it was relatively easy for me to hold their attention because I was giving them the roadmap to save their paper. The relevance was obvious.

What about other subjects? Every subject that is taught in schools is there for a reason. It's not like there is some History Lobby that pushes for history to be taught for their own benefit. Every subject has value to the students, and if that value can be portrayed then their attention can be easily held.

English? Literature provides a window to gain understanding of how people operate, granting insight as to how to work with people to achieve one's goals. Writing is a vital skill in any field of endeavor.

History? It provides valuable insight and perspective on how people, societies and nations operate. It is amazing to read about Roman politicians, FDR's government, and the conduct of the local town government and realize that all three of them interact more or less similarly to the Come Again Player's leadership, ConnectiCon's leadership, and Pi-Con's leadership. People are people, and the lessons learned here are valuable there.

Math? I use math up through Algebra on a regular basis. Determining how to allocate ConCardia cards to print sheets uses it. I also use mathematical techniques when I program the simple applications I use in by business. Arithmetic is useful on a daily basis.

Science? Society is making decisions today regarding science that will have profound implications for generations to come. Without an understanding of these decisions, we are at the mercy of others. Furthermore, an understanding of basic scientific method will provide a basis for rational thought throughout a person's life.

Teachers spend a lot of energy thinking about classroom management, but very little time thinking about how they can sell what they are teaching to their students. It is assumed that teachers will push knowledge and students will resist. But what if teachers sell students on the value of what they teach? Students will clamor for the knowledge they offer.