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- Beyond K12 - The Who-What-How Approach To Decision Making
Beyond K12 - The Who-What-How Approach To Decision Making
Education & Catastrophe 85
John Tan
January 28, 2024
Hey y’all. This is John.
This newsletter is about human flourishing. Ostensibly it’s about better parenting and fixing education, but ultimately what I really care about is helping young people flourish.
Last week, I wrote about former Yale professor William Deresiewicz’s childhood trauma seeking approval from an overbearing father, and how he only got over that trauma late in adulthood. Continuing on the theme of seeking approval and chasing achievements, this week we
explore the different ways individuals assess their options beyond K12 education
discuss the who-what-how approach that can lead to better outcomes
So, as you know, we wrote an entire book about this called Choosing College, which perhaps is misnamed because it focuses on college when really what we’re talking about is any post-secondary education option…so anything after high school from a short MOOC to a one-off YouTube video to a much bigger degree program. What we found was that individuals were trying to make progress in five different ways, basically is the way I would say it.
Some of them were trying to get into the best program for its own sake, sort of a mark of prestige, if you will, and the classic college experience.
A lot of them were trying do what was expected of them, which I will tell you — and this is not surprising to you — that’s not a good reason to attend a college program. It should be much more intrinsic and our data was clear on that: people who enrolled to do what others expected of them just did not do well at all.
The third group was a group that was going into a college or post-secondary program to get away from their current reality. So, it was less about what they were moving toward and more just like, I need to get out of this job and college is a way I can escape, or this training program is a way I can escape. Unfortunately — because they hadn’t done much of the thought about what they were trying to escape to — those outcomes weren’t all that great, either.
Unsurprisingly, chasing prestige and/or doing as they have been told by parents are common reasons young people take on student debt to go to college. William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep - The Miseducation Of The American Elite & The Way To A Meaningful Life dives deep into the phenomenon of young people striving for “the shining destination toward which their entire childhood and adolescence had been pointed.” The problem with this approach? “Once they’re through the gates at Amherst or Dartmouth, many kids find out that they have no idea why they’re there, or what they want to do next.”
Going into a college or post-secondary programme to get away from current circumstances is not a great reason either. It’s one thing to want to get away from something. It’s another knowing where you want to go.
Far better were the next two we found. The first was learners trying to step it up in their lives, to take that next step and they were super clear about the credentials they wanted, what were the skills they needed to get and what would it produce? Something like three quarters of our dataset experienced success when they enrolled in those circumstances.
Michael Horn found that learners who knew where they wanted to get to and the skills and credentials they needed to get there were far more successful. This is what I call the ‘who-what-how’ approach.
Who am I? What drives me? What gets me out of bed in the morning? What do I find personally meaningful? Answering these questions requires a deep understanding of oneself that comes from experiences and introspection. Trying a bunch of different things is the best way to figure out what you enjoy, what you find meaningful, and what you are good at. Taking the time to reflect on those experiences is key to developing that sense of self-identity and self-awareness and building the confidence to be able to say, ‘This is who I am, and this is what I want to achieve’.
What do I want to do in the next 5/10/15 years? What are my short, medium and long-term goals? Where do I want to get to? These are the follow-on questions once you have figured out who you are as a person and what drives you. The biggest risk here is answering the ‘what’ without first answering the ‘who’. For many people, their ‘what’ is shaped by parental expectations. “My parents are successful lawyers, so I went to law school as well” type of examples. It’s one thing to pursue law because you are driven by intellectual curiosity and an appetite for deal-making. It’s another to do it because it runs in the family and it’s just the thing to do.
How do I get to where I want to be? How do I learn the skills and earn the credentials to pursue my life or career goals? This is the final step of the ‘who-what-how’ approach. Notice that deciding on which post-secondary education option to take comes last after figuring out who you are and what you want to do. The problem with many people is that they decide on their education pathway first, then try to figure out what is it they want to do (most people don’t get to the ‘who’, unfortunately).
The final one was sort of what I think of as the lifelong learning job. It was, “Help me extend myself. I have the time and the money. I’ve always wanted to invest in this. It’s okay if it doesn’t work out, but I just wanted to learn more and challenge myself in some meaningful way.” Those people are overwhelmingly happy because anything is gravy almost to them in many ways. The biggest risk for them was that they didn’t take the step to try more learning because, why not?
An alternative approach that can yield success is to pursue learning for the sake of it. Intellectual curiosity, developing a new skill, challenging yourself. Growth mindset, in other words. Albert Einstein’s quote about not having any special talent but just being passionately curious comes to mind.