Why High Agency seems to be elusive
The impact of the environment we swim in on agency. Thoughts on immunization.
The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught. - Richard Feynman
A comment on my previous article revealed a widely held belief that high agency is actually an elusive trait. Little Johnny is either born with it or not. Let’s explore where this common belief comes from and to what degree it is true..
I will assume that some traits are inherited and others arise or diminish by exposure to a certain environment. We can’t tell the proportions exactly as it is not fixed in stone. Even something like height, which is pretty clearly genetic, can be changed by the environment: if you deprive children of food, it will impact their height.
I thus believe there are two key inputs that can be varied:
1. Environment. We become what we are mostly exposed to.
2. The chosen objects of one’s attention & focus.
You can be a child in an unhealthy situation, but if your will is strong enough, your attention and focus can be radically targeted at ‘being elsewhere’ whilst you increase your understanding to transcend the environment and get out.
This is brilliantly pointed out in the book Troubled. The writer, Rob Henderson, spent his childhood moving from foster homes (and an addiction to marijuana aged 10), to a Phd in psychology from Cambridge and being a best selling author.
His book stresses that he is not an exception but that personal agency matters. His is such a refreshing read, because we somehow believe it takes a rare, special, person to break out of his environmental conditioning and acquired belief structures. But how come this belief is so common?
The environment adolescents swim in
When they taught you in school about the achievements of the likes of Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or Galileo, did the teachers spend time discussing how much they had to go against convention? Was it emphasized how much resistance they got to achieve what they did? Or was it kind of rushed over and just the Galileo prosecution is discussed, perhaps because it was so long ago in the ‘dark ages’?
If you take an average school or family, how many children do you think are exposed to adults who tell them it's ok to explore if rules and conventions should be questioned and broken? How many are told that their personal reality can be changed to an unrecognizable degree by … themselves?
There are certainly awesome teachers out there fighting a tough battle in the system. But realistically, what do you think is the percentage of those comfortably stretching the kids’ horizons to an extent that is bigger than their own? How many teachers will be tempted to imprint their own beliefs and preferred agenda onto their pupils, as opposed to guiding them to start a personal exploration of where their natural curiosity leads them?
Psychologist Carl Rogers reviewing his experience as a teacher of teachers in the book “On Becoming a person”, concludes:
My experience has been that I cannot teach another person how to teach
It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another person is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significance on behavior.
I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior
I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self appropriated learning .
Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.
I concur that beyond basic skills like math and reading, all the learning that I think was useful in my life was self-directed and self appropriated (during and after school/university). Everything else went into one ear for the purpose of passing the exam and straight out the other ear after it.
So what we have is a clash of two paradigms of what education should be about:
Paradigm 1. A world with little change, rules and knowledge are static and it is beyond the power of students to discover knowledge. “The goal is to get into the students head a series of assertions, definitions and names as quickly as possible.” as eloquently described in “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” by Postman & Weingartner. This book (from 1969!) describes the agency-curtailing paradigm prevailing in the majority of educational institutions. Not much has changed since then for the vast majority.
Paradigm 2. Change is constant and accelerating. Abilities that are required to deal with rate of change adequately can only be accessed when the individual has developed the ability to ask new questions and engage in meaning making. It is an inquiry focused method. The student feels free, safe and confident to develop and grow his inquiry and meaning making abilities in pursuit of what works and better explanations. The learning that works is self-discovered and self-appropriated. You will find this in Montessori like schools for the younger kids and for later ages in a few relatively new facilities where the teachers have transmuted into guides and facilitators. For now, a very small percentage of educational facilities functions like this.
I think because of the accelerated changes in our economy, paradigm 2 is starting to become more of a pressing necessity.
The things society needs and rewards have moved from assembly type and fact cramming professions towards less teachable qualities being in demand: curiosity, out-of-the-box and meta thinking, persistence and appreciation of mastery, creativity and originality, self directed focus and attention abilities. Everything in paradigm 1 is going to be covered by machines and pretty much already is.
The Learning Game by teacher Ana Lorena Fabrega is starting to champion a move to Paradigm 2. Ana provides ideas on how the education environment should be transformed and gives a good overview on how kids learn best.
The “environment” is of course not only school and parents - it is also the exposure to low quality opinions of others that are pumped into your attention span at every opportunity.
It is a parent’s job to model discernment and agency over one’s attention given the reality that we live in. I wrote about getting kids to value attention agency here.
So what is the best environment possible? What to aim for?
I asked myself the other day - what would be the characteristics of a world, where I can say the environment most kids grow up in has become good enough?
The answer was a world where there is no demand for life/career/leadership coaches and psychologists from adults. (With exceptions for those who are exposed to significant traumatic events like serious abuse, disease, death, war).
In a world I see as possible, healthy adults see these types of coaches as suboptimal to accessing their own inner resources leading to no demand. Adults are equipped to be their own “coach” in any personally specific mental matter. They have the agency to acquire whatever skills that suit their interests. They are not afraid to follow their unique, authentic path and don’t require hand holding to do so. The natural outcome of this would, I believe, would be more problems solved, a renaissance of quality in art and more interesting, delightful outcomes in all spheres.
It’s not enough for a handful of progressive rich self-sufficient entrepreneur parents to instill a questioning, can- do attitude into their kids. An environment fostering high-agency should be a public good available to all kids. The way it’s going, the future of civilization could depend on it. From Lessons of History from Will & Ariel Durant who studied what makes us move forward or collapse:
“If we put the problem further back, and ask what determines whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer depends upon the presences or absence or initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which is almost a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situations (which is almost a definition of intelligence)”
Whilst others rightfully focus on saving the environment and scientific innovation, I think my evolving niche has something to do with removing the blocks to high-agency in the current environment.
For now, we are in a society where low to “normal” agency is normalized, so high-agency indeed seems an elusive quality. But the environment can be adjusted or… one can become immune to it.
Immunization
Let’s say the school and media environment that destroys agency is what it is. You really can’t change your child to a more alternative education option. What can be done then?
Don't delegate all the kids' education to schools, as Ana Lorena argues here . You can offer a lot and have deep exploratory conversations with your child yourself. Making sure he/she has a rock solid crap detector, will allow them to traverse any environment with high agency intact. But what if you don’t feel like you have enough knowledge to do philosophical enquiry? Not to worry:
Get inspired. An interesting resource is this Youtube channel from the founder of the socratic experience school (I am not affiliated in any way). He basically has socratic conversations with his friend's daughter recorded from age 4 to 10. (There is enough material there to talk to kids even if they are older). You can see different subjects covered and how critical thinking develops through just asking the child questions and ‘loving the child's mind’. You can see many adults would struggle with articulating thoughts like the girl does at 8-10 years on subjects like; how do you know if something is true, what is knowledge, causation, mastery, map not being the territory and other useful topics. If a parent is struggling for inspiration on how and what to talk about, there is a lot there.
There are also plenty of activities and ideas in my previous article on High Agency that can spark conversations.
Stop fixing all your kids' problems and give them the freedom to sort theirs
I was at a Jonathan Haidt event the other day. One teacher in the audience mentioned that since the early 2000s a shift happened in UK education, where striving for excellence was replaced by making sure everyone feels good. This impacted not only performance, but also lowered kids' wellbeing. (Another perfect example of ‘trying’ to smooth out any rough patches having the opposite effect). This same focus on preventing kids from feeling any adversity can be observed in the parenting trend of past 30+ years as described in Haidt’s book.
A common occurring concern amongst Gen-Z is that they feel their life is meaningless. Given the above, how many parents/teachers/ counselors will now tell the teens that it is on them to start making their own meaning as opposed to inventing something just to make them feel better? Or will they think it’s too harsh?
Who will tell the teens that if they feel lonely they have to take matters into their own hands? Yes - this involves risking rejection and ridicule. Maybe organize a group activity, a spontaneous dance party, park debate or something. No one might show up, but so what? Instead of adults attempting to sort their meaningful engagement or social life… maybe they should be given the freedom to suffer through trying it themselves? Without constant parental planning and oversight? Whatever perceived disadvantage the generation might have gotten due to unhealthy premature access to social media does not have to be a fixed diagnosis. Plenty of people have transmuted themselves out of far worse conundrums.
To wrap up..
Given that the environment for the majority (and this includes private schools) is indeed agency - neutering, it is not surprising why the quality seems elusive. We become what we are mostly exposed to, combined with where our attention and focus lies. A parent that prioritizes kids agency, focus and independence of mind, will develop the necessary understanding needed to nurture and grow those qualities, against the odds of them being chipped away at by the environment.
Next time I will try to crack the subject of how kids start valuing mastery.
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