All About The Brand

I would not be the person I am without my wife. I sit back in my seat, and comfort myself with the knowledge that he will gradually find his way through this. He will find his voice. Our kids’ resilience doesn’t absolve us, though. It is time, now, to start to dismantle it, and gradually reassemble it into something centered on each child. First, reveal what our schools are currently doing to hurt us so much, and pinpoint which practices must be removed from our schools for good. And second, in parallel, create a blueprint for a better system, something that all of us can rally behind and on which each of us can take action. Hetherington’s dogged faith in my ability to learn Latin. These outstanding teachers are doing their level best to help each one of us learn and grow. And yet they are doing so, in many cases, in spite of rather than because of our educational ecosystem. At the most basic level, school is for childcare. The industrial revolution took labor outside of the home for the first time, and so it required a system set up at scale to give parents the confidence to leave their kids for ten to twelve hours a day.

Every Thought Is A Battle

School was that system. School was, and is, for childcare so that we parents are freed up to contribute economic output. School lets us go to work. This latter group was kept in school and taught how to think by exposing them to great works of literature, history, and philosophy. This worked quite well for decades. An increasingly literate population could participate more in the country’s growing economy. Literate people bought more. Today, as odd as it is to say, the importance of this purpose has diminished. Yes, it still makes sense to teach our children how to read and write, but beyond that, fewer and fewer of the skills and facts they’re being taught at school will help them excel in their chosen professions. First, because the jobs they will be getting in ten years’ time when they graduate haven’t even been invented yet, so it’s impossible for school to be preparing them for these jobs. And second, because even those jobs that appear to be perennials, such as nursing, or auto construction and repair, or selling, or hospitality, are changing at such a rapid pace that companies’ greatest challenge is reskilling their current workers. So, if this purpose has been outpaced by the speed of change in today’s working world, if school is no longer for preparing the students for their future careers, then what is it for? Why do we devote so much time and energy and money to it, and invest so much of our own parental prestige in how our kids perform in this thing called school? What is school for that it can dominate us and ruin us, financially and morally, for decades? For sorting students into categories and levels of proficiency.

Its A Mean Old World

You go this way, you go that way. You jump up here, you stay down there. Who wants this sorting? The working world does. The working world’s companies and organizations are the customers of schools and colleges. They are what colleges and schools serve. They demand this sorting of students not least because it makes it easier to know where to go to recruit the right kind of employee. Under pressure from the working world, colleges double down on their sorting mission. What’s the difference in functionality between a Samsung phone and an iPhone? Nothing, except that Apple’s brand carries stronger positive associations than Samsung’s brand. What’s the difference between a Tesla Model 3 and a Polestar? In terms of mechanics, range, and safety, basically nothing. Polestar, as yet, has zero brand credibility, and its sales will suffer until it fixes this. It doesn’t need to share the same brand as Tesla, it just needs to identify and then amplify a brand of its own. Colleges work the same way.

Endless And Deeply

And look, there is nothing wrong with this fixation on brand. Every single organization needs to find a way to differentiate itself, and colleges are no exception. They should take their brand seriously. The damage occurs because they’ve chosen to use our children as the raw material for their brand building blocks. It’s a branding ecosystem, a marketing machine in which the child is the mechanism, not the purpose. Their brand is the purpose. This is why some parents contort themselves into such desperate displays in order to get their kid into the right kindergarten. Put them in a Tesla, and they are made for life. Look at schools through this sorting/branding lens, and the point of all kinds of strange rituals suddenly becomes clear. Why is Cal Poly sending Myshel’s son a recruiting brochure? She leaves it there because she genuinely believes that Cal Poly might want him, and that if she can lure him into being interested in it, then she might have helped him climb into a Tesla. But, of course, Cal Poly doesn’t want him. Well, it might, but it didn’t send the brochure to him for this reason. Nor did the hundred other colleges send their brochures for this reason. They want a low admissions percentage. Because this helps their brands. The more students who apply, the lower their admissions percentages will be, and the more they’ll be able to build their brands around how selective they are. This rankings list has great power over you and your kids. So yes, colleges will do everything they can to generate as many applications as they can, knowing that they will accept very few, because then they might rise a couple of spots on the list, the working world will pay them more heed, the alumni will pay them more money, and they’ll be able to build that new library, or aquatics center, or rose garden. If the high schools could find some way to quantify the academic prowess of their students.