On average, my students today are considerably less patient than those of twenty years ago. They get twitchy if they are asked merely to think about something. They don’t know how. My sense is not that they are lazy: in fact, it’s perhaps just the opposite. Just thinking about something feels to them like idling, and after they have given it a good thirty seconds, they sense that it’s time to move on to something more productive — or at least more objectively measurable. They don’t seem to believe that they are accomplishing anything unless they are moving stepwise through some defined process that they can quantify and log, and that can be managed and validated by their parents or teachers. It doesn’t matter how banal or downright irrelevant that process might be: they are steps that can be completed. A secondary consequence is that if they start to do something and don’t see results in a week or two, they write it off as a bad deal and go chasing the next thing. It is no longer sufficient for a return on investment to be annual or even quarterly: if it’s not tangible, it’s bogus, and if it’s not more or less instantaneous, it’s time wasted.
On average, my students today also have their time booked to a degree that would have been unthinkable in my youth. When I was in junior high and high school, I did my homework, I had music lessons, and I was involved in a handful of other things. I had household chores as well. But I also had free time. I rode my bicycle around our part of town. I went out and climbed trees. I pursued reading that interested me just because I wanted to. I drew pictures — not very good ones, but they engaged me at the time. Most importantly, I was able (often in the midst of these various undirected activities) simply to think about those open-ended questions that underlie one’s view of life. Today I have students involved in multiple kinds of sports, multiple music lessons, debate, and half a dozen other things. There are no blank spaces in their schedules.
I can’t help thinking that these two trends are non-coincidentally related. There are at least two reasons for this, one of them internal, and one external. Both of them need to be resisted.
First of all, in the spiritually vacant materialistic culture surrounding us, free and unstructured time is deprecated because it produces no tangible product — not even a reliable quantum of education. One can’t sell it. Much of the public has been bullied by pundits and advertisers into believing that if you can’t buy or sell something, it must not be worth anything. We may pay lip service to the notion that the most important things in life are free, but we do our best to ignore it in practice.
As a correlative, we have also become so invested in procedure that we mistake it for achievement. I’ve talked about this recently in relation to “best practices”. The phenomenon is similar in a student’s time management. If something can’t be measured as progress, it’s seen as being less than real. To engage in unstructured activity when one could be pursuing a structured one is seen as a waste.
This is disastrous for a number of reasons.
I’ve already discussed here the problem of confusing substance and process. The eager adoption of “best practices” in almost every field attests the colossally egotistical notion that we now know the best way to do just about anything, and that by adhering to those implicitly perfected processes, we guarantee outcomes that are, if not perfect, at least optimal. But it doesn’t work that way. It merely guarantees that there will be no growth or experimentation. Such a tyrannical restriction of process almost definitionally kills progress. The rut has defined the route.
Another problem is that this is a fundamentally mercantile and materialist perspective, in which material advantage is presumptively the only good. For a Christian, that this is false should be a no-brainer: you cannot serve both God and mammon.
I happily admit that there are some situations where it’s great to have reliable processes that really will produce reliable outcomes. It’s useful to have a way to solve a quadratic equation, or hiring practices that, if followed, will keep one out of the courts. But they mustn’t eclipse our ability to look at things for what they are. If someone can come up with better ways of solving quadratic equations or navigating the minefields of human resources, all the better. When restrictive patterns dominate our instructional models to the point of exclusivity, they are deadening.
Parents or teachers who need to scrutinize and validate all their children’s experiences are not helping them: they’re infantilizing them. When they should be growing into a mature judgment, and need to be allowed to make real mistakes with real consequences, they are being told instead not to risk using their own judgment and understanding, but to follow someone else’s judgment unquestioningly. Presumably thereby they will be spared the humiliation of making mistakes, and they will also not be found wanting when the great judgment comes. That judgment takes many forms, but it’s always implicitly there. For some it seems to have a theological component.
In the worldly arena, it can be college admission, or getting a good job, or any of a thousand other extrinsic hurdles that motivate all good little drones from cradle to grave. College is the biggie at this stage of the game. There is abroad in today’s panicky world the notion that a student has to be engaged in non-stop curricular and extracurricular activities even to be considered for college. That’s false, but it’s scary, and fear almost always trumps the truth. Fear can be fostered and nurtured with remarkable dexterity, and nothing sells like fear: this has been one of the great (if diabolical) discoveries of advertisers since the middle of the last century. Fear is now the prime motivator of both our markets and our politics. It’s small wonder that people are anxious about both: they’ve been bred and acculturated for a life of anxiety. They’re carefully taught to fear, so that they will buy compulsively and continually. The non-stop consumer is a credulous victim of the merchants of fear. We need, we are told, to circle the wagons, repel boarders, and show a unified face to the world. Above all, we should not question anything.
Though we seem more often to ignore it or dismiss it with a “Yes, but…”, our faith tells us that perfect love casts out fear. The simple truth is one that we’ve always known. Fear diminishes us. Love enlarges us. What you’re really good at will be what you love; what you love is what you’ll be good at. Which is the cause and which the effect is harder to determine: they reinforce one another. You can only find out what you love, though, if, without being coerced, you take the time and effort to do something for its own sake, not for any perceived extrinsic reward that’s the next link in Madison Avenue’s cradle-to-grave chain of anxious bliss.
There’s nothing wrong with structured activities. If you love debate, by all means, do debate. If you love music, do music. If you love soccer, play soccer. If you don’t love them, though, find something else that you do love to occupy your time, stretch your mind, and feed your soul. Moreover, even those activities need to be measured out in a way that leaves some actual time that hasn’t been spoken for. There really is such a thing as spreading oneself too thin. Nothing turns out really well; excellence takes a back seat to heaping up more and more of a desperate adequacy. In my experience, the outstanding student is not the one who has every moment of his or her day booked, but the one who has time to think, and to acquire the unique fruits of undirected reflection. They can’t be gathered from any other source. You can’t enroll in a program of undirected contemplation. You can only leave room for it to happen. It will happen on its own time, and it cannot be compelled to appear on demand.
The over-programmed student is joyless in both study and play, and isn’t typically very good at either one. Drudges who do everything they do in pursuit of such a phantom success will never achieve it. The students who have done the best work for me over the years have without exception been the ones who bring their own personal thoughts to the table. For them, education is not just a set of tasks to be mastered or grades to be achieved, but the inner formation of character — a view of life and the world that shapes what their own success will look like. Our secular culture is not going to help you find or define your own success: it’s interested only in keeping you off balance, and on retainer as a consumer. Take charge of your own mind, and determine what winning looks like to you. Otherwise, you will just be playing — and most likely losing — a game you never wanted to play in the first place.