In an excellent recent longform essay, Tim Urban of Wait But Why unpacks How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You).
I want to highlight one idea from early in the piece:
Kids in school are kind of like employees of a company where someone else is the CEO. But no one is the CEO of your life in the real world, or of your career path—except you. And you’ve spent your whole life becoming a pro student, leaving you with zero experience as the CEO of anything. Up to now, you’ve only been in charge of the micro decisions—”How do I succeed at my job as a student?”—and now you’re suddenly holding the keys to the macro cockpit as well, tasked with answering stressful macro questions like “Who am I?” and “What are the important things in life?” and “What are my options for paths and which one should I choose and how do I even make a path?” When we leave school for the last time, the macro guidance we’ve become so accustomed to is suddenly whisked away from us.
This, I think, is one of the main failings of institutional schooling. It is a pervasive oversight that we fail to offer chances for our children to be CEOs as students – starting in elementary school and with ever-increasing frequency and weight.
If we want to train leaders (and one of Urban’s points is that we are all leaders, at minimum of our own lives) then we must train leaders. Currently, we train employees.
Urban says that we leave schools as “pro students”, with “zero experiences as the CEO.” But this is not a given, and teachers, principals, superintendents, and educational policymakers should think carefully about why we are not choosing to offer experiences for every student to be a CEO.