Entrepreneurship: a possible cure for high school navel-gazing
Random site
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in a myriad of petty, unsexy ways every day.” — David Foster Wallace
I’m a big fan of meditation, reflection, and even of introspection. In fact, I try to practice all three. It seems healthy to slow down, to look inward, and ask the big questions that we sometimes become “too busy” to ask.
But it’s a slippery slope. Too much introspection can plunge us flailing into a deep state of navel-gazing. Picture Hamlet after his father was murdered, or go talk to just about any high school senior who gets rejected from his or her top-choice college.
Scratch that. Just picture me and you. We’re both navel-gazers. Whether you and I like it or not, this is our default position. David Foster Wallace explains this far more eloquently than I could in his commencement address at Kenyon College called “This is Water”:
“We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. There is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor…Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.”
And school doesn’t help. The entire system compels students to focus on THEIR grades, on THEIR SAT scores, on where THEY might get into university. We even go so far as to denigrate students who help each other by calling them cheaters.
But let me be clear. I’m not blaming schools for our solipsism. Like David Foster Wallace, I think we’re all naturally prone to spend disgustingly long periods of time gazing at our own navels. I’m simply pointing out that school doesn’t help, and I think it could.
This is the role — even the beauty — of living in a tight-knit community where we have to look out for each other. Schools could teach students how to add value to those around them from an early age. Imagine, for example, if students noticed a classmate who was falling behind as a reader. Imagine the teacher encouraging her students to help out their classmate. Better yet, what if the teacher took the time to teach them how to help — how to give feedback, how to scaffold the reading. Then imagine this conversation: “What did you do in school today, Charlie?” “Nothin’ much. I just helped Ronnie read better so he didn’t fall behind the rest of our class and spiral into a cycle of future academic failures. Then I ate a worm during PE.”
And this is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching entrepreneurship in the Innovation Academy. Seniors learn immediately how important it is to get over themselves and to begin thinking more about their customers and the people working with them. Through the real businesses they create, they learn that businesses only survive if they bring actual value to other people’s lives.
It’s certainly not a permanent cure for high school navel-gazing, but it’s a start.
