Affluence and our modern sensibilities have removed hardships from most children’s lives, and this is certainly fortunate. At the same time, they also have removed many external demands on children’s time and effort—so much so that the value of effort itself is called into question. The notion of effort as a virtue in itself—the so-called “work ethic”—is rapidly going out of fashion, even in the United States, where it once was considered almost definitional of the national character. Recent student surveys have found that barely more than a quarter of American youngsters place top priority on working hard, as opposed to almost three-quarters of Japanese youth. [L. Cheney, “Hard Work, Once as American as Apple Pie,” Wall Street Journal, December 5, 1993] High school teachers from well-off school districts routinely quote today’s brightest students as saying: “It’s cool to wing it; to do the least work possible and get away with it;” or, “It’s the American way—to get the best results with the least amount of energy expended.” [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 37]
An essential ingredient for growing up with sensible attitudes toward work is the availability of adult models who can teach by example what a young person needs to do to become a productive member of society. Here, too, the current situation leaves much to be desired. As the psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner pointed out long ago, our society is characterized by age segregation to an extent unparalleled in the past. Young people are isolated from adults and tend to congregate with their peers and thus are rarely exposed to role models who are involved in meaningful activities. … When they are with peers, teenagers feel significantly happier but are also less able to concentrate and are less in control of their actions. It is the hedonistic values of the peer culture that are transmitted in such contexts, rather than more realistic prerequisites for a productive adulthood. …
In the imagination of our children, the pendulum has clearly swung away from instrumental models involved in productive activity to expressive models admired for their entertainment value.
Such expressive role models are attractive not the least because our culture presents them as people who enjoy what they do and whose lives are well rewarded and free of care. While engineers and accountants are presumed to lead lives devoid of variety and excitement, rock singers and star athletes have it all. Our culture conspires to reinforce this image and to disguise the reality: how few media stars out of the innumerable aspirants actually succeed and how few of those who succeed lead happy and contented lives. [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 14-15]
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society. [Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930] quoted by [Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From The Torment of Adolescence, Quill Driver, 2010, p. 274]
[F]or most young Americans, the transition to productive occupations has been postponed many years beyond high school graduation. Apparently, the main decision of the last few years of high school is not which career to pursue but which college to attend. The main task of high school is not to prepare students for jobs but to prepare them for further education. [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work, Basic Books, 2000, p. 211]
What school inculcates is not so much the work ethic as the school ethic. … Both school and work teach you to follow orders and cooperate with others. Yet they define and measure success differently. School elevates abstract understanding over practical results, passing exams over passing the market test, and fairness over dollars and cents. Andrew Carnegie caustically captures this tension: …
“[Students] have been ‘educated’ as if they were destined for life upon some other planet than this. What they have obtained has served to imbue them with false ideas and to give them a distaste for practical life. Had they gone into active work during the years spend at college they would have been better educated men in every true sense of the term. The fire and energy have been stamped out of them, and how to so manage as to live a life of idleness and not a life of usefulness has become the chief question with them.” [quoted by Eward Kirkland in Dream and Thought in the Business Community, 1964] …
The imperfect overlap between the school ethic and the work ethic is especially blatant in modern American colleges. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying. Since the early 1960’s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. …
What are students doing with their extra time? Having fun. …
Grade inflation completes the idyllic package by shielding students from negative feedback. The average GPA is now 3.2. Instead of making students conform and submit, college showers students with acceptance. This doesn’t merely fail to prepare students for their future roles; it actively unprepares them. College raises students’ expectations to unrealistic heights, leaving future employers the chore of dragging graduates back down to earth. …
As long as you avoid rare, demanding paths like engineering and pre-med in college, you bask in the warmth of a four-year vacation. If that’s “socialization,” it’s dysfunctional socialization. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 65-66]
“Child labor has not always been thought of as an evil. There have been times when it was treated as unpleasant to the child, but nevertheless desirable, somewhat akin to our contemporary view of education.” [Kaushik Basu, “Child Labor,” 1999] …
Children with joy in their hearts don’t belong in gray workshops, toiling all day long, cogs in the machine. They’re kids, not robots! Well, unless the gray workshop is called a “school” and the cogs earn zero wages. … When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future. …
When researchers compare working students to comparable nonworking students, work has a clear upside and no clear downside. Early job experience has durable dividends, boosting postgraduation earnings by 5, 10, or even 20% for at least a decade. The link between work and academic success, in contrast, is weak. The same goes for crime and other bad behaviors. According to one intriguing study, looser child labor laws cut education and crime; locking work-oriented students in school makes them “act out.” …
[S]chools should make educated guesses about future career opportunities, measure students’ aptitudes, then expose them to plausible occupations. Instead of viewing youth employment as “exploitation” or a risky distraction from school, we should celebrate work as vocational education in its purest form. …
Visualize a world where academically uninclined preteens look up to apprentices instead of delinquents. Visualize a world where students find their lessons either practical or interesting. If we could raise a new productive, independent, engaged generation, wouldn’t that be a great improvement over the bored, infantilized youth of today? [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 230-231, 237]
In 1964, the sociologists Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler surveyed 3,100 American men about their jobs and found that the key to understanding which jobs were satisfying was what they called “occupational self direction.” Men who were closely supervised in jobs of low complexity and much routine showed the highest degree of alienation (feeling powerless, dissatisfied, and separated from the work). Men who had more latitude in deciding how they approached work that was varied and challenging tended to enjoy their work more. When workers had occupational self-direction, their work was often satisfying.
More recent research finds that most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling. …
You might think that blue-collar workers have jobs, managers have careers, and the more respected professionals (doctors, scientists, clergy) have callings. Although there is some truth to that expectation, we can nonetheless paraphrase Marcus Aurelius and say, “Work itself is but what you deem it.” Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at New York University, finds all three orientations represented in almost every occupation she has examined. …
The optimistic conclusion coming out of research in positive psychology is that most people can get more satisfaction from their work. The first step is to know your strengths. … If you can engage your strengths, you’ll find more gratification in work; if you find gratification, you’ll shift into a more positive, approach-oriented mindset; and in such a mindset it will be easier for you to see the bigger picture—the contribution you are making to a larger enterprise—within which your job might turn into a calling. [Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Basic Books, 2006, pp. 221-222]
It is clear that, contrary to popular wisdom, most jobs are intrinsically rewarding. In other words, work usually provides the same kind of enjoyment as sports, games, music, or painting. This is true not only of elite professions such as surgery or management, where workaholism is most rampant, but also of such maligned jobs as assembly-line work or filing. True, most of the time when people work they do not realize that they feel better than when they are not working; they are too busy waiting for the day to be over so they can go home.
The reason work is intrinsically rewarding is that jobs are like games. They have clear goals and rules. They provide feedback about how well we are doing. They allow us to match our abilities with challenges. They make it possible for us to concentrate, to become so involved that the problems of daily life are no longer on our minds. They give us a sense of control together with a chance to forget ourselves temporarily. These are the most important reasons that people enjoy playing sports, music, or slot machines, and why many people feel compelled to work sixty hours a week or more. Work’s game-like qualities make it less of a paradox that most jobs provide more rewarding experiences than many leisure activities in which one has no clue what to do or how well one is doing. [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work, Basic Books, 2000, p. 12]
When the child sees only the material rewards from work, he or she has no way to understand how work serves essential social needs and fulfills our personal sense of purpose. The obfuscation of work’s deeper meaning is a breeding ground for apathy and cynicism, because without a positive grasp of its social and personal importance, the child will acquire a view of work as merely an unpleasant but unavoidable burden. …
[I]t is not at all obvious to children that their parents actually take pride in contributing to the world. Children may not even realize that their own healthy growth is a source of satisfaction to their parents—and this, in a very real sense, is a central part of the work of homemakers. Such feelings of pride in work must be expressed and discussed in vivid detail if children are to understand them in all their depth. This requires a frank and open disclosure of the parents’ true feelings about their own purposes in life. Parents who confide in their children about such matters serve as compelling role models. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, pp. 146-147]
Choosing a life’s work that is fulfilling and rewarding is a major problem in our society where the things one has and the style one displays are celebrated more than the quality of what one does. Do you work to get stuff, or have you given up the vision of affluence, ease, and “styling” in order to pursue more fulfilling though financially less rewarding ways of being in the world?
Every young person has to confront this choice and, unfortunately, decent advice that validates inner needs and helps them shape a tailor-made future is not easy to find. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times / Random House, 1989, p. 39]
[In our purpose intervention to motivate young people,] we … informed kids that “making money in the future was hardly ever the only reason—or even the main reason” why students worked hard in school. Instead, we said, most students said they also work hard for personal reasons such as becoming an educated person who has something intelligent to say about what’s going on the in the world, wanting to learn so they can make a positive contribution to the world, or having the freedom to pick the life they want to live. …
Our purpose experiment showed that if you encourage a meaningful purpose for learning—one that involves both contribution to others and the status and respect one can gain from having stronger skills—then you can motivate young people to show the discipline and hard work that adults usually fail to see when they follow a conventional approach. [David Yeager et al., “Boring but Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation,” 2014] quoted in [David Yeager, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2024, pp. 222-225]
The world is full of jobs that hold no intrinsic interest or pleasure. We seem to be adapting our schools to this dullness in life. By compelling our students’ attention to subjects which hold no interest for them, we, in effect, condition them for jobs they will not enjoy.
People are always saying to me, “But how will your free children ever adapt themselves to the drudgery of life?” I wish that these free children could be pioneers in abolishing the drudgery of life. [A. S. Neill, Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood, 1960, St. Martin’s Press, 1992, p. 43]
Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications that they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know and are able to do, not where they learned it or how long it took them to learn it. We need certifications, not degrees.
Certifications already exist. Examples include bar exams, board certifications for medical specialties, and journeymen’s tests for various crafts. For our purposes, the most applicable certification is the CPA (certified public accountant) exam. … The CPA exam score does not completely eliminate the importance of the BA or of the school where it was obtained, but it goes a long way toward leveling the playing field. …
Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it’s what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certification for degrees would be a big step in the right direction. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, pp. 156-158]
What can schools do to moderate the competitive scramble for grades? This scramble is activated largely by the fact that too many individuals are chasing too few positions at the top of the occupational ladder, such that 80 percent of our young people aspire to 20 percent of the available jobs (Covington, 1992; Paterson, 1956). This mismatch is driven in part by positive factors—by youthful exuberance and the natural desire of individuals to excel. Unfortunately, it is also propelled by wishful thinking and ignorance, and sometimes by parental pressures even when the children’s interests and talents may lie elsewhere. …
[W]e argue for providing students with sufficient information and self-understanding to make informed judgments about which kinds of jobs would be most meaningful to them personally. Among other things, this involves helping students assess the risks, challenges, and satisfactions associated with different careers and encouraging an understanding that occupational satisfaction depends largely on matching job demands with one’s interests, personal styles of thinking, and tolerance for risks (Andrew & Grubb, 1995; Spenner, 1985). [Martin Covington, The Will to Learn: A Guide for Motivating Young People, Cambridge UP, 1998, p. 251]
Mr. Dewey wants to concentrate on the study of occupations because he thinks that they will arouse real interest and lead to real learning. But the interest of the young in occupations is neither intense nor permanent, except in the case of an individual with a very special, overwhelming bent, until the time is almost at hand at which they have to make up their minds about the choice of their careers. Even then they can learn little about them until they have engaged in them, as the apprentice does, under the conditions under which they are carried on in the world. They cannot understand them; least of all can they understand their social and economic and political contexts, until they have had some experience as wage earners and citizens. I say again that imitation experiences in the classroom are not a substitute for actual experiences in life. Such experiences can lead only to illusion: they lead the pupil to think he understands something when he does not. [Robert Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, pp. 13-14, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
[B]y and large our economic society is not geared for the cultivation of its young or the attainment of important goals that they can work toward.
This is evident from the usual kind of vocational guidance, which consists of measuring the boy and finding some place in the economy where he can be fitted; chopping him down to make him fit; or neglecting him if they can’t find his slot. Personnel directors do not much try to scrutinize the economy in order to find some activity that is a real opportunity for the boy, and then to create an opportunity if they can’t find one. [Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, Vintage, 1960, pp. 28-29]
Intellectual confusion exacts its price. We preach the virtues of hard work and restraint while painting utopian pictures of unlimited consumption without either work or restraint. We complain when an appeal for greater effort meets with the ungracious reply: “I couldn’t care less,” while promoting dreams about automation to do away with manual work, and about the computer relieving men from the burden of using their brains. …
Many have no desire to be in [the production stream], because their work does not interest them, providing them with neither challenge nor satisfaction, and has no other merit in their eyes than that it leads to a pay-packet at the end of the week. If our intellectual leaders treat work as nothing but a necessary evil soon to be abolished as far as the majority is concerned, the urge to minimise it right away is hardly a surprising reaction, and the problem of motivation becomes insoluble. [Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 1973, Harper / Perennial, 2010, p. 266]
[T]he modern economist has been brought up to consider “labour” or work as little more than a necessary evil. … Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment. …
The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. … To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure. …
[T]he Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products. …
If a man has no chance of obtaining work he is in a desperate position, not simply because he lacks an income but because he lacks this nourishing and enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace. [Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 1973, Harper / Perennial, 2010, pp. 57-59]
Related:
– How does our culture view college and vocational choices? How does this effect our systems of education?
– Why is it important for young people to take on responsibility? What opportunities do they have for substantive responsibility?
– What is the reality of the university?
– Strategies for Cultivating Vocation