We Studied for the Wrong Test

A love letter and an apology at graduation

My dear daughter,

A few days ago you graduated from high school, and the rain poured. The beautiful outdoor ceremony that you’d imagined for four years had been moved indoors to the gym – a decidedly un-magical space where you took proctored exams and logged lacrosse practice in bad weather. It was a big disappointment for all of us, and yet it felt like a metaphor for something bigger – like the way I feel right now as a parent, sending you out into a world that isn’t at all what I expected.

For the past four years, you and your friends have become experts at navigating obstacles. You worked to optimize every moment – to get a few more points on an assignment where you got a “bad grade” (translation: a B), to take the slate of classes that would look most impressive to college admission counselors, to assemble a resume of extra curricular activities that promised to convince these unknown evaluators that you were, in fact, a well-rounded young person.

I’d like to protest that I have not fueled this fire, that you’ve absorbed this mantra of achievement by osmosis. But if I’m being honest, I secretly found a sense of relief in all of this, in watching you succeed at getting things right.

But I must make a confession to you now, as much as it pains me to write these words:

We’ve gotten it wrong.

Perhaps I could soften this apology a bit, and say something gentler, like “the advice we’ve been giving you turns out to miss the mark for the existential challenge of the present moment,” but there’s really no way to sugar-coat this message. The bottom line is that I fear we’ve not equipped you and your peers for the college experience that awaits you.

There are plenty of reasons for this, but for the purposes of this letter I will focus on just two of them.

The first reason is that we adults have been parenting you from a place of anxiety. That anxiety was born of love, of course, but also from a constant, abiding worry that the world you’ll be entering won’t offer you an abundant life unless you make all of the “right choices” – get good grades, get into a “good” college, study the right things, and so on. Jonathan Haidt calls you the anxious generation, but I think you first learned to worry by watching us.

I suspect that parents have always worried that their kids will die, get hurt, or make a bad decision that will alter the course of their life in painful, permanent ways. But I think our biggest anxiety comes from the looming threat of the future job market – will you be able to conduct capitalism in a way that provides you a standard of living equal or greater to the one you have enjoyed for the last eighteen years? Faced with the nagging fear of downward mobility, we’ve sought constant reassurance that you would indeed be able to live a life of happiness and security. In the process, I fear that we’ve somehow convinced you that there was only one way to get it right, one bubble-wrapped path that you were meant to follow.

The other reason we’ve guided you so inadequately is that artificial intelligence is changing everything.

I worry about AI for all kinds of reasons, including its impact on the kind of entry level jobs that I would have hoped you might get four years from now. But as someone who works on a college campus, I know too well that it also holds the potential to swindle you out of the opportunity to do anything useful while you’re there. I could say “rob” you of that opportunity, but that wouldn’t be the right verb. To be “robbed” suggests that AI would hold you up at gunpoint and demand that you let it write your research paper. The subtle invitation of this body of tools is much more like someone sidling up to you when you’re tired and stressed and saying “I can make this problem go away if only you’ll let me,” and then asking you to sign a very long contract that you don’t have time to read (as if any of us read all of those digital demands for our consent anymore).

The irony of all this is that the environment in which we’ve raised and educated you is one that could not be more perfect for enticing you to take this kind of shortcut, as we’ve consistently suggested to you and your peers that education is a series of evaluative transactions, a chain of affirmations that matter only so long as they reiterate your excellence and mastery of things. In this way of thinking, the product of education is the series of letters on your transcript. Anything that distracts from those sequential moments of evaluation is a divergence that’s not mission-critical, and therefore, not worth your time.

What we should have been telling you for all of these years is that you are the product, your ability to think and feel and reason and respond – not the things that you produce so that they can be measured by others.

If we think of education in this slightly different way, it tuns out that there is no right path, no road to certainty because you can’t possibly know or prepare for the ways that you will be shaped by the experiences that await you. Education has always held the promise of preparing students to meet the unknown, but we’re now in a moment where we can no longer ignore the mismatch between what most schooling offers and what students most need. Our economic system is being rapidly dismantled, and the only thing we can say with certainty is that workers of the future will need to be flexible, and that human skills of teamwork, relationship-building, critical thinking and interpretation will probably become even more important than they are now.

I hope you’ll take this as a giant permission slip to look at the next four years a little bit differently. You might start to think about high school as the end of finding the right answers, and college as the beginning of answering your own questions. What kind of life do you want? Who are you in relation to others? Where do you want your attention to land? How much of being a person will you hand over to the algorithms? There is no fixed answer to any of these questions; a good life will ask them again and again, finding something new to notice each time.

This is why you should use college as a chance to learn about a lot of things, and then talk to other people about what you’re learning. Take a course that looks interesting without stopping to factor in how it might affect your GPA. Stay after class and talk to your professors, then show up at office hours to ask a question or two. Relationships are essential for learning; make time to develop them.

Resist the temptation to ask ChatGPT to summarize your assigned readings, or suggest pithy remarks that you could add to a class discussion. The point of a discussion is experiencing it with others, feeling your way toward consensus in a shared moment. Most of the texts that you’ll encounter in a humanities class will be about questions that don’t have one, clear answer – what societies of the past can tell us about the future, how to evaluate competing claims to truth, why humans look for meaning in suffering, and what it means to seek out justice.

If you choose instead to approach college as yet another educational transaction, then I fear we’ll be sitting at another graduation four years from now, feeling cheated if it’s raining when we thought we were owed sunshine. But more than that, if you treat college as another search for right answers, then you will forever miss out on the most magical, heartbreaking, vital experience of being human, which is the project of exploring the beautifully incomplete access that we have into the lives of other humans. In the world that AI is building on top of us, this is the last sovereign territory that we have left. Claim it as your own, and we’ll figure the rest out together.

In closing, I think you and your classmates should think of the rain on your graduation day as a hopeful metaphor, not a broken promise. It wasn’t the day we had hoped for, but we opened our umbrellas and forged ahead. It was as if Mother Nature was reminding us that we didn’t – we can’t – make everything perfect. But we can still make it ours.

With love and congratulations,

Mom