Cheat codes for the game of school

Teens can smell BS a mile away.

And like good old Holden Caulfield, they ignore their own; they’re far more focused on the BS of the adults around them.

They are likely to find a lot of it. On an individual, institutional, and societal level, we give them misleading, disingenuous, or downright scary messages designed to elicit desired behavior and attitudes. And many of them know instinctively that it’s a crock.

This is unbelievably irresponsible when you think about it. Why would we betray a person’s trust “for their own good” when we could simply tell the truth?

We certainly ought to keep this in mind for heavy conversations about sex, substance abuse, and mental health. But conversations about education also seem to trigger high readings on the adolescent BS-o-meter.

A whole bunch of talk about realizing one’s potential, planning for the future, the joy of learning…none of that will land. Because that’s not really what high school is about.

The main thing that students need to understand is that school is a game. If we deny that it is a game, we do students a disservice. Because just like any game, the game of school has rules. If you don't know the rules, it's pretty hard to win.

In the typical school environment, the rules are concealed. In this particular game, everyone pretends that it’s not a game.

But we can give the kids the cheat codes. We can share the map. We can make sure that students understand what they are doing in school and why.

Specifically, in order to succeed in high school, students need to understand that there is a lot of work that you do just for the sake of showing that you're someone who is willing to do the work. It stops being about your aptitude for the work (i.e., how smart everyone says you are), and more about your willingness to put in the effort. That is how you please your teachers, earn good recommendations, and prepare to do the same grind in college.

Cal Newport's excellent How to be a High School Superstar presents a new way of winning the game of school in order to get into the college of your choice. His proposed path is just one on a menu of options that open up for teens when we give them the information to make their own choices. And there are choices — concealing them now will do nothing to encourage positive relationships with the young adults they will become.

It doesn't seem to be standard practice to tell kids this stuff. For instance, we don’t usually explain to kids that if you can manage to take Algebra I in eighth grade, you don't have to take it in high school, and then you can take calculus in high school and potentially even skip college math. Useful information — why do we withhold it? Maybe we think they’re too immature to understand. Maybe it's because we want to maintain the illusion that school is about learning and self-actualization, when for so many people it's actually about convincing the college of your choice that you're the best bet for them.

If we give kids the truth, which is that high school is about getting prepared for college (or a job, if you're not headed to college — gasp!), we can get them to buy in. Adolescents are highly pragmatic and very tuned in to the "what's in it for me" factor. If we can help them to see that what we're asking them to do is an effort to help them achieve their desired future, they are more likely to buy in.

Along those same lines, it's important that we help them understand that there are plenty of options for higher education besides the most elite universities and colleges in the nation. Many students are incredibly anxious in the upper grades because they're afraid that one bad grade means that they aren't going to get into college at all. This is simply false.

To go even deeper, it may be useful to talk about options after high school more generally so that college can be an informed decision -- that, too, may increase buy-in. For lots of families, questioning whether college is the best choice is verboten, so that idea is scary. Still, I encourage you to consider having these conversations with your child. Their future is their future, after all.

Of course, the degree to which you want to pursue these kinds of conversations about the nature of school and the competitive aspects of it is up to you as a parent. But I have seen over and over again that kids appreciate being given the real scoop and make surprisingly shrewd decisions with this information. This makes sense -- if they have the facts, aren't they going to make better long-term decisions? Giving them the truth that they've long suspected (school isn't always about learning) may help them to be more willing to either follow the plan that they are required to follow, or map out something that is actually more effective for creating a future they feel good about. We may still be in for a nail-biter of a journey, but when was it ever going to be a smooth ride?