Thread by @doctorow

This week on my podcast, I read "Give Me Slack," my latest column for @Medium, about the second (and third, and fourth) chances I got growing up, and how scary it is that my kid - and yours - won't get those chances.

doctorow.medium.com/give-me-slack-…

From the fourth through the eighth grade, I attended a groovy, publicly funded alternative school in Toronto. Much of the student work was self-directed, and they even kicked us out of school on alternating Wednesday afternoons, sending us out into the world to learn.

I started my high-school in a very straight-laced traditional institution, but I hated it.

By the middle of the first semester, I'd stopped going to classes altogether - instead, I used my subway pass to ride down to the Metro Reference Library, where I spent my days requesting esoteric books from the stacks and looking up weird newspaper articles on microfilm.

Eventually, the school administration called my parents, and after a raging argument, I transferred to a public alternative high-school that was structured a lot more like my K-8 school. Then I transfered again, to an even looser, less-structured public high school downtown.

It took me seven years to get a four-year diploma, in part because I spent a year organizing demonstrations against the first Gulf War, and another year in Mexico, writing.

I did graduate though, with honors, and enrolled and dropped out of four universities in quick succession. Three years later, I got a job in the tech industry, programming CD ROMs.

I went on to be a web programmer, then a freelance CIO, then founded a startup, then went to work at @EFF.

In the years since, I published more than 20 books, including several international bestsellers.

I got an honorary PhD. I've got appointments at three universities on two continents. I've been a UN delegate.

I feel like I got a lot done, and I'm certain that it's because I was able to mess around, drop out, direct my own learning, and take a couple extra years here and there.

In other words, I had #slack, that prize of the Subgenius. And kids today do *not* have slack.

15 years ago, I taught on a Fulbright Chair at USC. My students were brilliant and driven, but when they described their path to a top university, I was horrified.

When they'd entered high-school, their guidance counselor stressed the importance of top marks throughout their tenure there.

They'd been advised to take electives they were already good at, and to keep up that channel through their high school careers, right up to their AP classes. This, in turn, determined what undergrad majors they were qualified for.

In university, their undergrad counsellors worked mightily to keep them from taking electives unrelated to their majors, lest they change majors and incur another year's tuition - the price of a luxury car. Their undergrad degrees prefigured their grad-school careers, of course.

So I had PhD candidates - brilliant, driven, exciting kids - who were carrying six figures in debt, and who had been discouraged from taking a single intellectual risk since their first day of high school.

They had been exquisitely trained for careers that might not even exist by the time they graduated.

Today, it's even worse.

My kid is a freshman at a great, public high-school in a great public school district, and I find myself fretting about her grades, even though my own ninth grade career was such a freewheeling chaos.

The university system she's being streamed into is even more expensive and confining than the one I was embedded in 15 years ago.

Not only that, but the world she's inheriting is even more chaotic than the one my students graduated into.

Whole industries are being liquefied overnight by pandemics and the climate emergency. She's going to have to place a ten-year bet on a career track, when some of our major cities are unlikely to survive that long.

We can't prepare a generation to thrive in a world of flux and crisis by training them in rigid, preordained programs. I want my kid to be able to do what I did: goof off, screw up, drop out, drop in, change her mind.

Not just because that was so beneficial to me, personally, but because it's essential preparation for the coming chaos.

It's not just my kid who needs slack. Yours does to. As do you and I.

But as I write in the column, slack is in very short supply indeed.

We've made "a world where everyone gets one guess at what they should do for the rest of their life — and the best case scenario for the majority who guess wrong is debt-servitude and a life where curiosity is a bug, not a feature."

Here's the podcast episode:

craphound.com/news/2021/12/0…

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive, they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

archive.org/download/Cory_…

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca…

@internetarchive ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/sol…