Jeanne Ert (4:23)

So it's like what we're doing is not working. And you do such an incredible job of communicating that in this book. So you say the college admissions process, and this is kind of the point. So what we're trying to do is get kids outside. That's it, Bill. Like we're trying to kind of even out in a historically normal way. Kids used to spend probably a thousand hours outside, if not more, throughout their childhood years. Every single year kids are outside. So childhood has radically changed. And interesting you talking about even in the 90s, into the early 2000s, even pre iPhone, that these college students were adrift. But we've shifted to this sort of performance based childhood. And you say the college admissions process casts its shadow back over childhood and adolescence, shaping the way that kids are raised and thus the people they become. And that's the key. Yes, it's like one, what is the goal here? Why are we putting our kids in this, that and the other thing? And it's because the college admissions process is casting its shadow. What is a parent to do?

Bill Deresiewicz (5:22)

Yeah, this is. Listen, so first of all, let me say I was born all the way back in 1964. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and I'm sure I spent way more than a thousand hours outside unsupervised, you know, running around with my friends. I also, when I was really young, like probably eight, would walk to my best friend's house. It was like four blocks after school by myself every day. It's just amazing to me that this is inconceivable now, but what is a parent to do is hard. You know, I've spoken to a lot of parents, parent groups, individual parents, because you do want what's best for your kid. And it is unfortunately true that if you, you know, in order to get into one of these super selective schools or even moderately selective schools, I mean, if you look at the big, the largest universe of selective schools is actually about 250 schools. If you want to do that, you know, you're expected to hit these benchmarks and you feel like you're failing your kid if you don't. And at the same time, I think parents who are tuned into their kids, especially moms, you know, it's usually mostly moms who have come to my talks, they see what it's doing to their kids. Like a lot of parents unfortunately don't or think it's going to be okay. But some parents see what it's doing to their kids and they see how miserable their kids are. Like you said, this isn't working. I mean, it's funny because you could say, well, it works. My kid got into Harvard, my kid got into Duke, whatever. Well, your kids are miserable. And you may not know that. And I didn't even know that as a professor, I said before things that my students weren't telling me. They told me a lot of things, like they didn't know what to do with their lives. But it was only afterwards that I started to learn how. Unhappy, stressed, anxious. There's some great books about this. You've probably talked about them already. The price of privilege doing school books that I learned from back then. So I think parents feel caught in a bind. And I think, and I say this to students too, you have to make a choice. I'm not going to pretend like you can have it all. Like there are no trade offs. There are trade offs. And this sort of, I think Very narrow and artificial and kind of empty notion of success status. You're going to have to give that up or have to give up at least some amount of that. Or your kid, in other words, your kid is. And you're going to have to reorient your goals and really rethink. What does it mean for my kids to flourish, for my kids to be happy? I mean, parents will say I want my kid to be happy. And usually I believe them. I certainly think that they think that. What does it mean to be happy? What does it mean to flourish? What does it mean to live a fulfilled life or as I have come to say it, a life in which you recognize yourself, a life in which the outer life matches or is an expression of the inner life. Like you feel like this is who I meant to. Meant to be, or this is the work that I'm meant to do and to do that. You can't do that if you're just busy all the time jumping through hoops. Because it's precisely in those in between times that you start to figure that stuff out, whether it's outside or with running around or with friends or just having maybe an open ended conversation with your parents, hopefully age appropriate ways. There's a great organization that maybe you've talked about called Challenge Success and they talk about PDF and it's connected. They're sort of connected to Stanford, although they're independent. They talk about PDF, playtime, downtime and family time. Yeah, yeah. And those are important for all kinds of reasons, but I think they're really important for like what I call building a self. Like there's actually somebody there, there's somebody at home who, you know, as you get older, does. Definitely doesn't have all ones. And it's a big task, developmental task, but like you sort of learn who you are, what you care about, what you value, what you're good at and like to do, what kind of people you like to be with, what kind of, you know, which is like what makes you feel alive, what makes you feel energized. Yeah.

Jeanne Ert (9:57)

PDF. Wow, Bill.

Bill Deresiewicz (9:59)

It's good, right?

Jeanne Ert (10:00)

Nobody talks about that at all. I actually think if parents are struggling, a good place to start would be your book. You say we mandate activities, so we reward joiners, we insist on leadership, so we reward climbers. We value those who give us what we want, so we reward manipulators, we punish those who will not play the game. We are robbing children of their childhood and teenagers of their adolescence. We have engineered a vast regimentation of youth. And you're talking about this endless hoop jumping is starting in grade school, that they can't waste any time and they have to be constantly doing these things, things that we put out for them. And they're being not, they're not trained to pay attention to what they feel connected to. They have passion only for success. Their passion is only for success. This is a treadmill to nowhere. They are waking up in crisis, not knowing why they've worked so hard. Well, then you bring in this point that they're going to have to be okay with it. Give if you're going to step off a little bit and you're going to talk about it and talk about why they have to be okay with it. But as a parent, you also have to be okay with it because you talk a lot about this over identification. And I think it's really important to mention that when you have this glittering system of elite higher education that you talk about, you say, what's it for? Students kill themselves getting into it. Parents kill themselves to pay for it and for the opportunities it opens up. You say, but what of all the opportunities it closes down?

Bill Deresiewicz (11:25)

Right. That's right.

Jeanne Ert (11:27)

I mean, you have to think about what doors are being shut. So can you talk about the part of, I guess there was two parts. One was, you know, in some sense, you said, and I've never thought about this before, it's safe for an employer to hire someone from a, an Ivy League school because then they can say,

Podcast Host 1 (11:44)

well, if that person is crummy, well,

Jeanne Ert (11:46)

at least I, you know, I knew that they were from Yale or from

Podcast Host 1 (11:49)

Harvard or Stanford or wherever.

Jeanne Ert (11:51)

And so it's not my fault. So there's that piece of it, but then there's also this piece from the parent who is over identifying with the success of the child.

Bill Deresiewicz (12:02)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I sort of said in passing, parents want their kids to be happy, or at least most of them do. I mean, I mean, I think that. But I also think, and a lot of, I mean, I'm not just saying this, I'm not making this up. A lot of parents have talked to me about this, that the status competition among parents in suburban communities, affluent communities, hygiene, whatever, professional communities, is really fierce and intense. We know about the window stickers in the cars or the casually dropped mention at the dinner party or the family event about where your kid is going or where your kid just got in. And that can be kind of toxic. And I think parents need to try to let go of their grip on that. I Mean, in a lot of families, we're already in the second, at least generation of this kind of achievement culture. So the parents grew up this way, which first of all means that they can't maybe so easily conceive of another way to be. But it also means that this attitude that they're being graded on everything extends to their parenting. And I mean, I know especially moms police each other all the time. This is what they tell me. But the ultimate sort of final grade for your parenting is, where did your kid get into college? Which is. Which is messed up. I say to kids, you know, typically I talk to college students, but I've also talked to a lot of high school groups, and I'll say, listen, you don't know me. You have no reason to trust me. You have no reason to believe me. And I'm not asking you to believe me on my say so. I'm asking you to just stop for a second, look inside and just consult your own feelings, like, is this working out for you? And there are some kids, you know, they are. That they might be, like, maybe they have a passion for engineering or medicine, and they just want to do, you know, all the hard courses, and that's fine, that's great. But for a lot of kids, they really are miserable. And that is sort of like. That's like a really powerful motivation to work with, to make change. If you're willing to listen, to listen to that feeling. And on the other side, like, doing things that are meaningful to you, taking courses that you're interested in, spending time with friends, running around outside, whatever. Like, it feels really good.

Jeanne Ert (14:26)

It does.

Bill Deresiewicz (14:27)

And it feels good in a way that, like, I mean, there's some things that feel good, like drinking, but it actually feels good in a completely different way. Right. Like, it feels good in a legitimate way. All these other things, because you feel it. You feel connected to things, you feel connected to yourself, you feel connected to other people. Now with parents, they have to be able to see that in their kids. Right. They have to be able to tune into their kids and see where their kid is at in the negative and in the positive. And that might help them make that hard decision to not push, push, push, push for these external markers of success and to give their kid room to explore and all the things.

Jeanne Ert (15:13)

Yeah. You know, PDF, PDF. Play downtime and family, family time. You talk about the resume, arms race. The only point of having more is having more than everybody else. Nobody needed 20,000 atomic warheads until the other side had 19,000. Nobody needs 11 extracurriculars either. What purpose does having them actually serve unless the other guy has 10? So like giraffes evolving ever longer necks are our kids keep getting more and more deformed.

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Jeanne Ert (19:42)

You talk about that there's this over identification and overprotection and how this helicopter parenting gives this illusion of control and we're treating kids like they can't do anything for themselves.

Bill Deresiewicz (19:54)

Yeah. Yeah. So I should say even though I was born in 64 and I went through the system at a very early point, I'm actually, I actually smiled to myself when you when you quoted me as saying 11 extracurriculars because I think now it's like 15 or 16. Like all junior year, all senior when I was in high School. The kids who got into Ivy League schools would do like three AP courses. Right? I meant APs, not extracurriculars, but whatever. It's both actually. So we would do like three AP courses and then it was 10 and now it's 15. But still, even though it was so much earlier, my parents were immigrants. My parents had very high standards of expectation. And so I sort of did experience this. It took me a while to realize that I had experienced it myself, but I really had experienced it and there was that overprotection. I felt like it actually hurt me a lot. It took me in some ways a long time to grow up because my parents and I was also the baby, I was the youngest of three. Like they really, like there were basic things that I did not know how to do much too late in life, like shop for myself and you know, just sort of manage my life, manage my bank account, all kinds of things like that. So I think, and I think we need to say this, a lot of this, there's the status competition, but I think what maybe more deeply drives this is fear. It's fear. And fear is a very powerful emotion. And I think fear is an understandable emotion, especially when you have fear for your kids. But I think, I mean, a thousand hours outside, like you obviously get this in a very deep way, that parents have become much, much, much too fearful for irrational reasons. Right. Of their kids safety, like you know, stranger danger and like no, your kid's going to be okay. And it's actually much more dangerous if you never let them develop independence. So it's the same thing with sort of college career vocation. I think especially again parents, professional parents, maybe immigrant parents, maybe certain kinds of communities, like they think if my kid doesn't go to a super elite college, if they don't do one of these few professions, then somehow it's sort of an all or nothing mentality, like they're going to end up sleeping under a bridge. And that's nuts. That's just crazy. So I think you need to try to be less, to let go or at least not express some of that fear. And also, this may sound crazy, you need to trust your kids again, age appropriate ways. Age appropriate ways. But like your kid is this amazing thing called a human being who has these remarkable capacities that we are endowed with from birth that unfold as we grow up and we become capable of things that are unimaginable when we were younger, but we do it. And you know what, you parent, you were also 5 years old and 12 years old, and somehow you managed to grow up and have a job and a career and have kids of your own. So, I mean, I'm saying this because I feel like my parents themselves did not understand this. They were so fearful for us. So this is what I'm saying.

Jeanne Ert (23:15)

Yeah. Interesting that you brought up price of privilege. I really enjoy Dr. Madeline Levine's work.

Bill Deresiewicz (23:22)

She's amazing.

Jeanne Ert (23:23)

I had a couple opportunities to talk with her. And, you know, her oldest son, I don't know which son, but one of them became a lawyer. And she was talking about how one time she was at the bank and her throat was hurting because she talks a lot at different places. And so her son went and got her a tea. And the. The lady was so impressed, the banker, she, like, offered him a job on the spot. And it's like the. The fear. If only you could know. If only you could know in 20 years, they're going to be a banker and be fine. They're going to be a plumber and be happy. They're going to be a farmer and be happy like you, you could alleviate some of that fear. And so maybe almost you just pretend like, you know, like, how we are, we found our way. They're probably, you know, most assuredly they're going to find their way, too. And so it allows you to let go. Because you say coddling and pushing, stroking and surveillance are actually both forms of overprotection. Each be speaks a misguided belief that you can make the world safe for your children, that if you only do everything right, nothing will ever impede or harm them, that you can shield them. This helicopter parenting originates in the illusion of control. And what is interesting is it's just not working. It's not working. You talk about how there's just so much hopelessness for these college kids. Toxic levels of fear, anxiety, depression, emptiness, aimlessness, isolation. The college counseling services are being overwhelmed. Just, like, skyrocketing. Almost half of them are feeling like they're completely hopeless. Also, Bill. So we've got that part of it right where, like, it's their mental health. Also, we're sending them out into a world that's rapidly changing. And so you have this quote in here that says, the future belongs and to those who can invent new jobs and industries rather than staffing existing ones. The ability to continually learn, grow, and reinvent are critically important. There's little value on content knowledge anymore. But because of this overprotection, which could be coddling or it could be, wait, let me see how you wrote it because it was so good and I've already moved my page.

Bill Deresiewicz (25:28)

Pushing.

Jeanne Ert (25:29)

Okay.

Bill Deresiewicz (25:30)

Like pushing or surveillance. Those are the two halves. Yeah, yeah.

Jeanne Ert (25:34)

It's either coddling or pushing. If you push too much, that's over. If you coddle, that's overprotection. In either case, the child is not really failing. And so you talk about how these college students, they have a violent aversion to risk. Nobody wants to take a chance on a class they might not ace. So nobody is willing to venture beyond the things they already know and do very well. So there's two major problems here. One is the mental health.

Bill Deresiewicz (25:58)

Yeah.

Jeanne Ert (25:59)

Because they don't have control over their lives and they don't know how to do things that are necessary for a thriving adult. And, and also the job market has changed.

Bill Deresiewicz (26:08)

Yes, yes. You actually just made me realize something, I think for the first time, which is great. I mean, I think there are lots of reasons why kids, why these kids have such poor mental health. And I was going to say before that the parents anxiety, like there's a tremendous amount of anxiety. A lot of it is just like the parents anxiety kind of being internalized by the kid. But what you made me realize is that I think one of the things that makes us really anxious in the world is when we feel we have no control over our circumstances, when we feel powerless. Right. Feelings of powerlessness lead to feelings of anxiety for understandable reasons. So if you raise your kid doing everything for them, supervising them all the time, you know, I mean, I can't believe it. But I guess parents sometimes even go to job interviews with kids. Like, this is crazy.

Jeanne Ert (27:01)

Oh no, I just read a whole article. They're making their lunches, they're going to the job interviews, they're going to the job review. Like I got my six month review, the parents are showing up.

Bill Deresiewicz (27:10)

That is crazy.

Jeanne Ert (27:11)

For Gen Z, a high percentage.

Bill Deresiewicz (27:14)

That's crazy. So you're a telling your kid implicitly that they can't do things for themselves and you're not helping them learn how to do things for themselves in a very practical way. Like they really can't do things for themselves because you've been doing them for them. So listen, I again, I'm not going to pretend that any of this is easy. And I don't think parenting is something you can do perfectly. Right. I mean, there's also this perfectionist culture. It's not the kind of thing you can be perfect at any more than you can be like perfect at marriage. You can be good you can learn to be better, but you can't be perfect. You can never make a mistake. So it's not easy. But I think, you know, if you really want what's best for your kid, you need to be able to leave room for, you know, when they're young, the skinned knee. And then when they're a little older, the sort of crushing disappointment. And then when they're older still, you know, trial and error. And, you know, they didn't get into the college that they wanted or their. Their first job didn't or whatever it is. Right. Because, I mean, this is the analogy. You know, people use it a lot. It's like it's. It's the same thing as the immune system. Right. So why do kids have peanut allergies? Well, really, I mean, apparently it's because parents worry that their kids are gonna have peanut allergies, so they don't give them peanuts when they're kids, so they. Their immune system isn't challenged. I think the term for this is antifragile. Right. Like our immune systems are anti fragile, which means that the more they're challenged, the stronger they get, the less fragile they get. And so the analogy is clear. Like our characters, our souls or cells are the same. Like our immune systems, like, they get stronger from being challenged. I mean, you don't have to fail, but you need to be challenged. You need to risk failure.

Jeanne Ert (29:14)

Yeah. And in this day and age, it's all the more important. Like even more so than it might have been in 1998 or 2005 or, you know, with artificial intelligence. Here you say the prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They have been haunted their whole lives by a fear of failure, often in the first instance by their parents. Fear of failure, the cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. Existential. The violent aversion to risk. Success is understood. I mean, this is huge. Success is understood as the absence of failure. But how is that person, how are they going to succeed in a future that belongs to those who invent the jobs, not to the ones who staff them?

Bill Deresiewicz (30:02)

Right. So I didn't answer that part of your question about the job market. I'm not an expert on the job market, but, you know, I think you quoted me. Quoted. Quoting someone else. And, you know, people. A lot of people have said this. Right. So the whole sort of, you know, sort of SAT GPA kind of admission system and the whole way we think about that developed at a time when the Economy was much more stable and it was dominated by large corporations and large institutions. And it sort of made, like I say in the book, it made a kind of demented sense to give everybody one test and then slot them into their place in the social mechanism because the social mechanism was, you know, was relatively stable. And you could have a job for one job for, with one company or one institution for your entire career. We all know that that's not what the job market looks like anymore. So partly that makes people even more anxious. But it also means that the skills you need are going to be different skills. And the most important skill is that ability to continuously reinvent, learn new things, be resilient in the face of uncertain situations. Like you're going to be navigating an uncertain situation. It's not going to be here, kid. This is a worksheet with multiple choice questions. Everything is laid out, everything is cut and dried. Just give us the answer. That is not how much of the economy works anymore. You need to be able to figure out the questions that need to be answered. You need to be able to navigate in situations where there's not enough information and you need to work with it anyway and maybe go out and find your own, you know, the figure out the information that you need and know how to go out and get it. All of these things, you know, require independence from an early age to start to learn how to do.

Jeanne Ert (31:49)

And you can't do it if you have 11 extracurriculars. You just can't. You have to have the PDF. The you say the best reason to fail is to learn that failure is not the end of the world. Then there was this interesting part about conformity. So obviously we're in this day and age where so much is going on. So much is changing, it's rapidly changing. I read a statistic that said that graduates will have seven careers. So talking about a different world where you're going off into one career, this is seven careers, a job change every 18 months to three years. And Dr. Madeline Levine says the fear has caused, caused us to double down on the old ways. So we're doubling down on the standardized testing. But that doesn't make sense in this day and age. And you said, and I think this is so important for parents to know. If your child goes off to one of these schools and they're interested in maybe a more out of the box type career, you say at the career services, they have little or nothing to say to students who are interested in something other than the big four of Law, medicine, finance and consulting. And also there is this quote, okay, if kids got off the treadmill that takes them to Wall street, they would still make mistakes, but at least they wouldn't all make the same mistake.

Bill Deresiewicz (33:01)

That's right.

Jeanne Ert (33:02)

It's so much conformity, and so conformity no longer really works.

Bill Deresiewicz (33:07)

That's right. And I just want to say, and this shows the age of the book, that the Big four, like I said before, it's now the big five. And obviously tech is hugely dominant in these kind of elite college career choices. I mean, but I would have students, I mean, I literally would have students who had gotten jobs at fancy Wall street banks come and say to me, I'm miserable, but I don't know how to get out of this because I've become addicted to the money is actually what they would say. But they really weren't happy. And they felt like they had missed their shot at life. They had missed their shot at what they really needed to do, what, what they wanted to do, what they should do. So, I mean, one of the things that I've noticed about all five of those careers is that especially in the first few years right out of college, the work all resembles a form of homework. Like, you're still doing homework. Wow, you're fine. You know, you're going to law school or medical school, you're literally doing homework or, you know, writing legal briefs, or you're doing spreadsheets for the consulting firms or coding for tech, just like you did in college. And so it's really hard for these kids who, again, have all the advantages in the world and a huge amount of talent. It's like so hard for them to just step off into that unknown. But that unknown is where the whole big world is. And those are the opportunities that they miss out on. Those are the opportunities that go to having an elite education takes away, as you quoted a few minutes, some minutes ago.

Jeanne Ert (34:38)

So, yeah, the book has so many answers, though. It's so many answers. So it's just great because you, you like, look, you gotta form a sense of self. You gotta start making your own decisions. You talk about what is college for? You say you need to get a job. Yeah, sure, do, you have to get a job. But you also need to get a life. That's part of what this growing up thing is, is getting a life. And you say, for well over 30 years, we've been loudly announcing that happiness is money with a side order of fame. So no wonder students have come to

Podcast Host 1 (35:07)

believe that college is all about getting

Jeanne Ert (35:09)

a job, you say. What's at stake when we ask what college is for is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.

Podcast Host 1 (35:16)

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Jeanne Ert (37:43)

so I want to ask this question and I feel like it could trickle down. So if, if you're a parent listening in or if you're a young adult listening in or a teenager listening in, I think this could apply to any stage of life that you're in. But you talk about like, take the summer off. Don't do something for the sake of how it's gonna look on your resume. I actually want to read it because it's so well written. First of all, you talk about gap years, increasingly popular and increasingly encouraged. But you say take a summer off, for heaven's sake. Don't do an internship, don't do a fellowship, don't do anything, do anything to advance your career. Just go somewhere and breathe. Take time off. It's. It's once, it's after college. It's called life. So the answer is, at least for a small amount of time though, to step out of it so that you can see what else is out there. So that, to me, I think would work for any age of anybody who's listening.

Bill Deresiewicz (38:42)

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that, that those periods of reflection that I think used to be built in to our culture, often in a religious context. I think the old idea of college was that in some ways college would be four years of that. I don't want a slight vocational preparation. That's also really important. And I try to be really clear in the book that you can't neglect that. But there should be, there must be, and there definitely is room for the other side of it, which is, you know, the process of stepping back. Yeah, I say, you know, take a gap year or don't plunge immediately into the job market after you graduate in the most conventional way or take time off during college if you need to. And I say that I had students who did that. I mean, usually you're not in a happy place when you do that and you feel like you need to take a leave of absence a semester, a year. But it was, I would see it be so beneficial for these young people and they would come Back to college. They were developmentally, like, the fear is like, oh, no, I'm going to be a year behind my classmates and I'm going to graduate a year later. But they are actually so far ahead of their classmates developmentally. They came back as adults, basically, they came back as adults ready to do their last year or two of school knowing much better who they were, what they wanted out of college. So many people finish college and feel like I kind of missed something really important. But even, I mean, it's kind of crazy to say this, but even just like taking a summer quote unquote off, like when, I hate to say when I was a kid, but it's true when I was a kid, like, your summers were off when you were in college, like you would do something. I had jobs, but it's like I didn't feel the need to build my resume. So even just taking the summer off of resume building is kind of a radical thing. So, so two things. It gives you some time for that reflection, but it also. Well, maybe it's three things. It also just breaks the cycle, right? It's like it breaks the habit. It breaks the habit of constant productivity, this idea that every waking minute needs to in some way go on your resume. But I think the most profound thing it does, and this goes for PDF time, it goes for outside time. It goes for just reading a book that's not on the syllabus, is that when you do something that is its own reward, that isn't for the sake of the resume, the sake of achievement, you are also giving yourself the message that you yourself are valuable in yourself. You can do something that's valuable in itself just because it's enriching for you, like reading a book. And you can do that because you have value in and of yourself. You are not valuable only in terms of what you can do for someone else, what you can do for an employer. If I could just. Very quickly, a quick anecdote. I was on like a Zoom. I was on, like this panel over Zoom for. It was actually about Japanese universities. It was in Japan, but I mean, I was here, I was over Zoom. And they were. They were talking about their university system and what it was for. And people kept using the term human resources. They want, you know, they sort of want to think in terms of human resources for global corporations. And I finally heard that phrase in a different way for the first time. Human resources, like humans are resources. And I said, you know, our students aren't resources. They're not like oil and gas Fields or global corporations or anyone else. They're human beings. And human beings are. I mean, our religions teach us this, Philosophical systems teach us this. People need to be treated as ends in themselves, as values in themselves. And students need to learn to see themselves that, that way.

Jeanne Ert (42:47)

And they're not getting it. You say a large number of very smart but completely confused graduates are entering into the workplace completely confused. Very smart students stumble for years not knowing where their passion really lies. So one answer, and this goes for, I think whatever age you are in the childhood, teen, college spectrum, if you got a three year old, let them take some time off. Preschool, you know, if you're starting, because sometimes it's starting that young bill, like the preschool, the elementary school costs $35,000 a year. You know, it's starting so young, step out of it. If it's a summer, if it's a semester, can you step out of it? You say take time off. Take time off to slow down, to give yourself perspective, to break the cycle of incessant achievement, to get away from constant supervision, to see that there's a world outside of school, to develop skills and explore capacities you haven't had a chance to cultivate. This goes for everybody. And that's one, that's one solution here. As you say, the irony is this. Elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of very few similar things. Whole fields have disappeared from view. Everybody does the same thing because everybody's doing the same thing. And they just do it because that's what everybody else is doing. And that goes back to the very beginning, that quote where you talk about what's, what's been cut off for them. Like we're just losing opportunities because everyone is just rowing the same direction. So that's one, that's one idea. Take some time off. Take some time off from the resume, resume building. Okay, Reading, that's another idea. And people are not reading. I just talked to this man, his name's Doug Lamov, and he wrote this textbook about the science of reading. And he had all the statistics in there. And Dr. Jean Twangy talks about this too, about how the kids are not even reading whole books. They're being assigned magazine articles or things that are shorter because they won't read whole books. And you say that books are maps. They are maps of possible futures. Why is it so important they. We have to read the maps of the possible futures?

Bill Deresiewicz (44:58)

Yeah. So, I mean, part of this book, and I know this sounds very Maybe old fashioned at this point, but I was an English professor and I got into this because I love, not only because I love literature, but because literature formed me in many ways. It saved me. So part of this book is urging people to give the humanities a look in college. It doesn't mean you have to major, right? I mean, we're very lucky in America because in pretty much every other country when you go to college, you only study one thing. Like you don't major in chemistry, you just study chemistry or political science or anything like you only do. So we have this unique system where, you know, a major is like maybe between a third and a half of your classes, not 100%. And so you have all this other room to explore. So you could, you know, you want to major in English, God bless you, but you don't have to. You can major in engineering, but you can take classes in philosophy, literature, history of religion, art history, history, great. What the humanities do, I think they are different from the other fields is that they, one way or another, give you a way of thinking about your life. I don't want to sound grandiose. Think about what it means to be human. Think about what? I mean, that's, you know, I mean, philosophical works confront those questions directly. Literature sort of puts them in the form of stories, right? So when I say books or maps of possible futures, you, in this way, that's, that's hard to kind of put your finger on because it doesn't have to be explicit. But you sort of think, you think about your life by thinking about the choices. You think about your choices by thinking about the choices of these imaginary people we call literary characters. So I taught and studied Jane Austen, among other authors, and Austen is a perfect example of this because we have these in each of her six novels. We have these young women who probably would go to a selective college if they were alive today. They're all really smart, interesting young women. And they have to think through the choices of that exact period of coming of age. I mean, for them in their society, it's about who you're going to marry, but it's about what do I value? What does Elizabeth Bennet value in Pride and Prejudice? Is she going to marry for money? Is she going to marry because. Or is she only going to marry someone that she can respect, who she thinks is a good person, Right? So as we think as we read and carefully and discuss and debate the choices, the lives of these literary characters, these imaginary people, we are building our ability to think through our own choices. And that's why I think studying the humanities for at least part of a college is a really valuable developmental tool. I just want to say so, first of all, I mean, the book came out in 2014. Facebook already existed, but really social media, mainly because the iPhone had only just come out at that point with the front facing camera. The whole thing that we know now, I didn't even talk about it because nobody really talked about it with me. So now there's that whole other layer on top of it the kids are dealing with, with and parents are dealing with. And it has to do with their mental health and it also has to do with their attention span, their ability to read. And we know that that's one of the big things or the thing that's denigrating, that's degrading the ability of kids to read. But I think a lot of kids want to read.

Jeanne Ert (48:32)

Yes. Oh, that gave me chills. Yes, of course they do. Of course they do. I talked to this man, his name is Dr. Nicholas Carderis. And he works. This makes me emotional because I think about, like, how influential you're talking about.

Podcast Host 1 (48:46)

Philosophical.

Jeanne Ert (48:47)

This book is so philosophical. Your book, your book.

Bill Deresiewicz (48:51)

Thank you.

Jeanne Ert (48:51)

You know, beyond, you know, you can read about, you can read fiction and novels and things and you can put yourself in the position of that character and it helps you to, to tease out different ways your life could go. But this book is like, what is life about? Like, why are we jumping through all these hoops and why are we having our kids jump through all these hoops? And is it all just a big old game? And, and what if we did it different? Could we do it different? What would that look like? And so reading like, I'm only here because I read. I only have a podcast because I read. I only took our kids outside and did things different than, like, I had my kids enrolled in all sorts of stuff, Bill. And then I started to read books about how no, like they need downtime and they're supposed to play and they should have hours in a row. There's a woman, Charlotte Mason, from the 1800s, said kids should be outside for, for four to six hours a day whenever the weather's tolerable and you start to be exposed to these different ideas and you try them out. Dr. Nicholas Cardera said he is talking to college students who can't even form mental imagery when they read a book. They would read about Jane Austen or they would read about, you know, where the environment where someone lived or this time period and they can't picture it because they've never used their own imagination. They've only consumed other people's imaginations. And, and I can't imagine being super successful at life without these inputs from those who have gone before us and learned.

Bill Deresiewicz (50:21)

Yes, yes, those who've gone before us. It's very nice for me to hear that you found my book meaningful and philosophical. I just want to say that I could never have become the person who wrote that book if I hadn't been immersed in literature and in thinking through these questions, also debating and discussing. I don't even like the word debating. Just like lots of intense conversations with people about, I mean partly students, partly in class, partly in office hours, but also when I was an adolescent. Again, I don't want to nostalgicize my adolescence but like we had a lot of downtime and we spent a lot of it doing the things that adolescents lessons do, which is like talking about life. And maybe, you know, if I could eavesdrop on those conversations, some of them would be a little cringy because when you're 16, you know, but those are like really, and you use the word existentialist a lot but like those are really important. Those are really important. And that's when you start to think through these kinds of questions that I try to talk about in the book. There's something else that I had never thought of until this just now and it's about reading, right? So I've heard like everybody that kids can't read anymore, adults can't read anymore. I've never heard that parents don't still read their kids children's books when they're little kids.

Jeanne Ert (51:45)

It's true.

Bill Deresiewicz (51:46)

So kids are still being read to and probably for a few years still reading children's books. So kids imaginations are incredibly engaged by the imaginary stories of others because it helps them learn about the world, learn about all the things that doesn't stop. That doesn't stop. I mean I don't think it stops for adults either. Although I also don't read as much fiction as I'd like to. But it certainly doesn't stop in adolescency and young adulthood, those intense periods of development. So I know that the way, you know, the world, the life that kids that age live now can make it really hard for them to do that. But I think their hunger to do it and to go from, you know, Harry Potter or whatever to like the next step up, you know, the book that's appropriate for the 14 year old, the book that's appropriate for the 17 year old. You know, you could start reading Jane Austen at that age or whatever it is, given the opportunity. It's the opportunity that's missing. But given the opportunity, I think a lot of kids would love of would just drink that down.

Jeanne Ert (52:50)

That's right. They need it. They need it. They need this grounding. You say War and Peace doesn't tell you the same kinds of things that you learn from a blog post or a Wikipedia entry. Not even 1400 pages of them. It needs to be big and complex because it tells you something that is big and complex. It doesn't give you information, it gives you life. Yeah, a real reader creates her own canon for it consists precisely of those books and that she has used to create herself. Like books have created me. They have created me.

Bill Deresiewicz (53:22)

Yes, yes, me too, me too.

Jeanne Ert (53:26)

And our kids need that. So they need breaks. They need breaks from the achievement they have to read. Tell us about your Jane Austen book.

Bill Deresiewicz (53:33)

Oh, yeah. So I was one of these arrogant young literary men who thought that Jane Austen was dumb because I never read her. And I happened to take a class in graduate school for other reasons. And the first book on the syllabus was Emma and I. And it took me a few pages like, what is this? And then I'm like, oh, I see what she's doing. And what she was doing was sort of helping me get inside of social relationships. I mean, I was like a 26 year old guy and I really, I mean I had friends and I'd had girlfriends, but like I was not great at relationships and at listening and at paying attention to all the subtleties and all the things. And that just completely opened me up. And I ended up writing my academic book about Jane Austen and teaching Jane Austen. But in those crucial years when I was in graduate school, like between 26 and 32, which is when I met my wife. And I never thought I'd get married, but here I am and it's been 27 years, one after another. Those six books taught me, I don't want to say life lessons because that kind of trivializes it, but like really, really important things about life. And so I had wrote this academic book, but when I became a full time writer, my first book was called A Jane Austen Education. And it was about that. It's framed as the story, my story in those years, but it's mainly about the novels. Six chapters, six novels, six themes moving me in six stages from this unbearable 26 year old to the person who could meet someone and marry someone.

Jeanne Ert (55:23)

I love that because you talk so much in this book about what is education. Education isn't something you consume. It's an experience that you have to give yourself over to. You say your classes should be fun. Like they should be fun classes. Enjoy it and enjoy it. And you say, you know, that there's all sorts of things to learn outside of the 55, 000 a year education, like how to prime a wall or build a wooden table or balance a restaurant budget. So, you know, you talk about being

Podcast Host 1 (55:52)

a leader in education.

Jeanne Ert (55:53)

It's like you have to listen. This is so good. If you're going to be the leader that your education is supposedly preparing you to become, then you need to question the very terms of that education itself. So I love that you wrote a book called A Jane at Austin Education. It's so out of the box. It's not a Stanford education is a Jane Austen education.

Bill Deresiewicz (56:12)

I never thought about it that way.

Jeanne Ert (56:14)

I love that. I love that. I want to read this. The whole. This one was like, okay, wow. It's where we're at. The whole of childhood and adolescence across a large swath of society is now constructed with a single goal in mind. All the values that once informed the way we raise our children. The cultivation of curiosity, the inculcation of character, the instillment of a sense of membership in one's community, the development of the capacity for democratic citizenship, let alone any emphasis on the pleasure and freedom of play, the part of childhood where you actually get to be a child. All those are gone. We are not teaching to the test. We are living to it. Can you even believe you wrote that? This is the crux. This is the crux. We are not teaching to the test. We are living to it. And you talk about was so interesting to me, Bill. I actually didn't know this, that the SAT scores, they're just basically like right in line with people's wealth. And. And so, you know, I mean, what a joke.

Bill Deresiewicz (57:24)

Joke.

Jeanne Ert (57:24)

What a joke. That, that it. Oh, I can't find it. I have so many notes here.

Bill Deresiewicz (57:30)

Yeah, it's not that as an individual, your SAT score correlates with your wealth, but if you, but if you look more, you know, more broadly, if you. On a society wide level, you know, with all, all the people thrown together, it is remarkable that SAT scores do correlate with wealth. They do correlate with income. So you wonder what they're measuring. And to a great extent now, in this meritocratic rat race that we've developed really since the mid, like late 60s basically, we're measuring how many educational resources a kid has had stuffed into them. Did you go to a really good private school? Did you have the chance for all these enrichment experiences and overseas travel and your parents could buy you a musical instrument and your parents could like, like pay for a private, you know, for, you know, these horrible, like, youth sports leagues?

Jeanne Ert (58:25)

Oh, gosh.

Bill Deresiewicz (58:26)

Another thing I didn't know, I didn't know about until my, my wife's uncle, who was a gym teacher told me about these horrible things. Right. So basically, you know, in the, at the broadest scale, that's what the college admissions process is measuring. It's measuring how much money your parents invested into your education. And that's really screwed up. I mean, one thing we haven't talked about is how unfair all of this is at the societal level because it really just sort of like makes the rich richer and most kids really don't have a legitimate shot at participating in this, you know, contest.

Podcast Host 1 (58:58)

Yeah.

Jeanne Ert (58:59)

And in some ways it ultimately fails. I mean, in some ways it feels like a privilege. Like, here you are, you're at the top of your game, your, your parents, invested, invested. You got to jump through all the hoops. And now what? Now you're in a spot where you have five career choice paths and you feel like you have to do what everybody else is doing and you're miserable, too. It's like it not working for anyone. You said there's a book called the Price of Admission, How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges. You say you can't read it without wanting to vomit continuously. You said if you were going to go speak at one of these, like, commencement ceremonies, you'd say you may be smart, you may be hard working, but what you mainly are is very lucky. So many of your peers, 90% were excluded from the race before it even started. Yes. So there's that whole point too.

Bill Deresiewicz (59:43)

Yes. Yes. I think, I mean, we probably don't have time to get into this, but I think some of our political ills have to do with this, have to do with the sense that people have this legitimate sense that most people have that this is not a fair system, that they didn't really have a chance. And the irony is, and this is kind of like how I wind up the book, like all these things that affluent parents are doing to give your, their kids unfair advantage end up making their kids really, really unhappy.

Jeanne Ert (60:13)

Bingo.

Bill Deresiewicz (60:13)

Really unhappy.

Jeanne Ert (60:14)

Bingo. And you said this, this is such an important part of life. If you grow up with less, you are Much better able to deal with having less. And that in itself is a kind of freedom.

Bill Deresiewicz (60:27)

I got. I got a lot of. I got the apparent people who were really bothered by that, but there were people who grew up with money, and they don't understand because I saw this. I would never. I mean, you know, my dad was a college professor. I grew up in middle class. I did not really know working class people, but I had some working class student, and they helped me see this. That, like, they were much less locked into a limited range of career choices, because they did. I mean, basically, it's really hard to choose to have less money than you grew up with. Like, it can happen anyway, but it's really hard to choose that. So they had actually much more freedom. They didn't feel like they had to be rich like they were. They just had to be, like, middle class. And they were like, it was better than what they grew up with.

Jeanne Ert (61:12)

I. I had read a book recently that said what a gift it is to learn to make do with what you have. If you can learn to make do with what you have, you're. If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less. That in and of itself is a kind of freedom. This book about breaking free, it is such a good book, and I'm so thrilled that you said yes. Bill, he was a moral. Courage can be lonely indeed. People don't mind being trapped as long as no one else is free. But stage a break and everybody else begins to panic. It's time to stage a break. For the sake of the mental health of our kids and our teens and our college students. Stage a break. And this book is going to give you the courage to do it and so much to think about. So much. I love this quote, this from Dwight McDonald. We think it odd that a man should devote his life to writing poems, but natural that he should devote it to inducing children to have breakfast on Crunchies instead of Krispies. You know, I mean, it just. It just makes you think about so much of what we do and why we do it, all the way back to the very beginning. That the college admissions is casting its shadow backwards over the entirety of childhood and adolescence in shaping the way that kids are raised and thus the people that they become. So stage a break. Stage a break. Bill, what an honor. Thank you for saying yes. We always end our show with the same question. As we're kind of wrapping up here, what's a favorite memory from your childhood?

Podcast Host 1 (62:27)

That was outside.

Bill Deresiewicz (62:29)

That was outside. You know what it was those thousand days. Not a thousand hours, but those thousand days were me and my friends. And it's like you're eight or nine years old and. And life is still a circle and time is eternity. And there was a little ball field right near. Right in our neighborhood. And we would just, you know, we would just go and play softball or just, you know, hang out. And that was great. That was childhood.

Jeanne Ert (62:57)

Yep. Yep. And kids still need that. They still need it. The PDF. Thank you so much for being here.

Bill Deresiewicz (63:03)

Thank you so much, Jenny. This was really fun. And thank you for reading my book. Book with such attention. And it's. I mean, thank you so much.