Sections
Life Prep: Introduction to the Series
The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.
When I first started out in education some forty years ago, I rarely, if ever, heard the young men in my classes say they were stressed. Perhaps they were—though they did not seem to be.
Today, it would be surprising for a teacher to go a day without hearing at least one student at his school say they are stressed about something. This makes sense, given the fact that according to the CDC one in three U.S. high school students report their mental health being “not good” most of the time or always in the past thirty days. What is more, the stressed out high school student is only a minor league version of the zombie-like university students that William Deresiewicz described in a 2014 article sub-titled, “The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.”
Two Causes of Adolescent Anxiety
There are certainly many causes of such adolescent anxiety. The academic-professional rat-race and the athletic industrial complex are two which are particularly relevant to educators.
As they enter late middle school and high school, many students feel they have started down an inevitable and always moving runway, the end of which is success, most often meaning professional success measured in monetary terms. They feel, moreover, that if they make a mistake on this runway, they may fall off—never to get up again.
A similar fear plagues athletics, which have become fiercely competitive. Many children are unable to simply play a sport for the sake of enjoyment. Youth sports, rather, have become unhealthily professionalized—only those making the money are not the athletes themselves, but the coaches and sports clubs who convince them that they have a real chance to make it big.
Whether academically or athletically, far too often the prospect of not being successful terrifies students even more than any particular vision of a good life motivates them.
In fact, the fundamental problem is often that young students have not thought much about what makes for a truly good life. Instead they have a few vague ideas in the back of their minds as to what it consists of, driven mainly by what the current culture and their own passions present them.
Beyond College Prep and Pre-Professional Training
If parents and educators want to help students, then, an important part of the solution will require them to recast high school not as college prep, or training in professional skills, but as life prep—a life which may likely include college and will certainly include work in one form or another. Part of a high school student’s education, in other words, ought to be learning how the parts of his life cohere into a whole, discovering what the point of his life is. Greater clarity in one’s vision of a good life orients his decisions and, when stressful moments come, allow him to step back and see the difficulty in light of the bigger picture.
Approaching high school in this way is also good in itself, regardless of the current statistics on student stress. It is equally important for the boy who is not stressed about the future because he has not thought much about it as it is for the student who is stressed about it because he feels uncertain about the outcome.
The idea of seeing high school as life prep originated in a seminar for young men entering high school, which I used to lead back in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Run through a supplementary education center that focused on character formation of boys, the seminar aimed to help freshman boys reframe their high school years—to broaden the scope of what their aim ought to be for the next four years. And, of course, to help them translate this broader vision into practical strategies for how to make the most of high school.
The idea for the seminar came from an old mentor of mine, James B. Stenson. Jim put together the curriculum for the weekly seminar, which I led for several years.
My first goal in the seminar was to get the young men to think beyond the immediate concerns of high school—classes, extracurriculars, social life, and so on—and even to think beyond the immediate next step of college. To do this, I would present the boys with a hypothetical timeline of how their life could go starting freshman year until death. Here is how the timeline would look if I were giving the seminar to high school freshmen this fall:
- 2030: graduation from high school
- 2034: graduation from college
- 2034-35: first full-time, post-graduation job—official start of professional life
- 2038: graduation with some type of advanced degree
- 2040: marriage (28 years of age is not too young!)
- 2041: first child
- 2055: oldest child enters high school
- 2070: first grandchild
- 2098: death
The years reflect statistical probabilities—not a source of quibbling. The point is not that every boy ought to go straight from high school to college, nor is it to argue that he should get married by twenty-eight—or whether he ought to be younger or older. This was simply the statistical reality of the young men in the seminar, even if some would not go to college but join the military or study a trade or become a young successful entrepreneur.
The exercise, rather, was meant to lay before the eyes of the entering high school freshman what his life might look like for the purposes of then discussing with him how he should approach high school so that he may more likely be personally and professionally successful.
Encouraging boys to do an exercise of this sort as freshmen in high school is particularly important. During these years, boys are developing the sense of who they are—what their persona is. And unless he is helped to think beyond immediate concerns, unless the horizon of his reflections is expanded, many boys are likely to limit their thinking to particular and relatively short term goals—and to tie their sense of self to these goods. The boy who sees himself as the athlete, for instance, may focus his energies on athletic goals; perhaps he sees his ultimate aim in life as getting a D1 scholarship. The academic may do a similar thing with grades, seeing entrance to a prestigious college as the end goal.
These are good goals, and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. The challenge is being able to see these goods in light of the bigger picture of one’s life. What boys need help with often is this: learning how to properly order these parts, integrating them into the whole of a life.
The Most Difficult Problem in the World
Over the next few articles, I will present more key ideas from that seminar, originally designed for students, now with parents and educators in mind. The purpose of the articles will be to help you help your family and school to approach high school as life prep. We will cover topics such as: how to help your son discover the point of his life, how to teach boys financial management, physical education for boys—and more.
My hope with this series is to equip you with some ideas for how you can help your sons and students solve what Cicero called the most difficult problem in the world. As he put it, “We must decide who and what manner of men we wish to be and what calling in life we would follow; and this is the most difficult problem in the world. For it is in the years of early youth, when our judgment is most immature, that each of us decides that his calling in life shall be that to which he has taken a special liking” (De Officiis, 1.117). Whether they realize it or not, high school students are constantly making life decisions, and they are doing this when they are least prepared to make them.
Those who are most prepared to make such decisions are those for whom it is too late to do so for themselves—that’s you. Of course, you can’t make the decision for him. The one thing a coach cannot do is play the game. But we can be mentors and guides, sharing our own wisdom—even the wisdom won by learning from our unwise decisions.
About the Author
Alvaro de Vicente
Headmaster of The Heights School, and an advisor to hundreds of school leaders, both of start-up schools and established schools seeking to revamp their offerings, especially for boys.