Getting what you want, part 2

It took me several days -- into the middle of this week, before I was able to write out a reply to Wife's e-mail about her frustration when Son 1 doesn't take steps -- what seem to her obvious steps -- to get what he wants in life.  But in the end, here is what I wrote her:

I’ve wanted to reply to this e-mail of yours for a few days now (you sent it on Saturday) but I haven’t had the time. You bring up some really important points about the boys’ futures, and what it takes for them to prepare themselves for those futures. But I also find that I see the same points just a little differently than you do, in ways that may be important.

First, there are some important places where we agree. I totally agree that the boys shouldn’t graduate college saddled with debt, although I think there are more opportunities to locate college funding than high school funding. (Scholarships, ROTC [at least for Son 1], and so forth.) I totally agree that Son 1’s social skills are off the charts, and what a blessing. And I totally agree that the competition for the service academies is ferocious.

Where I see things differently is a bit more subtle. If you’ll permit me, I think I can summarize the main thread of your argument below something like this:

1. Son 1 wants to be a fighter pilot for the Marines or the Air Force, and he wants to get there by going to Annapolis or Colorado Springs.
2. Competition for those programs is very tough. The service academies take only the best of the best, and only the best of the best OF THEM get to be fighter pilots.
3. In order to make it into these programs, Son 1 needs better grades than he has right now. That means he has to buckle down and study far more diligently than he has till now.
4. Hogwarts can give him what he needs academically to get where he wants to go, but they can’t spoon-feed it to him. He has to go get it.
5. If he doesn’t do the extra studying and take the personal steps to squeeze every last drop out of the academic program at Hogwarts, he won’t make it to the goal he wants to reach. And that means he will have wasted the opportunity he has right now, which would be very frustrating. And sad.

Is that about right?

My opinion is very close to agreeing, but not quite. To break it down, …

• I totally agree with (1) and (2).
• I mostly agree with (3) and (4).
• And while I agree with the first part of (5), I totally disagree with the conclusion.

Let me flesh this out a bit.

I think the core difference between how you see these things and how I see them is wrapped up inside this question: how bad is it when you don’t attain your heart’s desire? If you fail to reach the thing you have held all your life as a guiding goal, what then? You use words like “very disappointed”, “very unhappy”, and “thwarted”. OK, I understand that. But the reason I see it differently is that from my perspective nearly all of adult life consists of not getting what you want. Maybe that’s cynical, but I don’t think so. I think that’s just how it turns out for most people most of the time. We all want this or that or whatever, and we set out to get it, and somewhere along the line we get derailed off track and wind up with something else instead. And this happens over and over. And the really critical part is that notwithstanding that we hardly ever get what we want, life is still good anyway. It is still better to be alive than dead. It is still better to wake up each morning with a new day in front of you, despite the fact that your new day looks totally unlike any day you ever planned or imagined for yourself. And so you get up, dust yourself off, and try again.

So what do the boys need to get out of high school? Well sure, other things being equal it would be nice if they got the tools they needed to compete successfully for the things they want. Other things being equal it would be nice if Son 1 got high-enough math grades to get him into Annapolis, and then high-enough scores in whatever else he has to do to get him into the fighter program. But the way I look at it, it’s probably not going to happen … and what’s more it probably would never happen even if he started scoring perfectly in math. My guess is that the number of spaces in the fighter pilot program is so small that even if Son 1 suddenly revolutionized his whole approach to his studies and worked his little fingers off, even if he came out tops in everything from here on out … even then he might not make it because they will end up with a pool of the guys who are perfect at everything, and they’ll start going down the list to pick out fighter pilots, -- and they’ll fill their recruitment quotas somewhere in the middle of the S’s. Fred Smith will get in, and Max Sutcliffe won’t because they’ll be full up. Son 1’s last name is Tanatu and that starts with T, and so he’ll miss the cut. It could end up being that arbitrary, because there are so few slots available and so many guys who are really, really good who want to do it.

That being the case – or rather, that being at least a strong possibility – I think what Son 1 will need most of all in life is a thick skin. He’ll need the ability to pick himself up from failures, or from just not getting what he wanted even if it was through no fault of his own, and come back the next day with a smile on his face. And the only way to do that is to exercise, not his intellect but his character. The work needed to develop that ability to bounce back is not academic exercise but moral exercise.

This is one of the benefits that I see in boarding schools – not all boarding schools (I was never too sure about Beaxbatons*!), but at least Hogwarts and Durmstrang. You have pointed out that there are classes at the local public high school which are just as challenging as any classes the boys are likely to take at Hogwarts and Durmstrang, and of course you are absolutely right. Looked at academically, our local public high school really is a first-rate school. But what I don’t see there, or in any public school, is a conscious, deliberate program of moral development designed to educate a student’s character. And yet, adolescence is the time when it is most important to focus on character. Little kids have to learn the basics of getting along with others: sharing politely, saying Please and Thank You, using the bathroom correctly. In college the focus is resolutely intellectual, or it had better be. But it is in those middle years that the student’s spirit is malleable; it is then, above all other ages, when the spirit can be bent into the shape it will have for the rest of life. And so it is then when it is most critical for the adults around a student to set up circumstances that will call out the student’s best responses from a moral perspective … to train the student’s character to be the best it can be. Of course if the boys were living at home we would do the best we could. That’s what most parents do. If the boys were going to the local public school, that school would leave that stuff to us. But speaking only for myself, I fear I am a real amateur at that sort of thing and it is too important for me to be willing to botch the job. Which I would probably do, just through inadvertence.

Hogwarts and Durmstrang, though, have each one given a lot of thought to exactly this topic. They have come up with somewhat different answers, but I trust both schools to do a good job here. It’s not that I think any single one of the teachers there is so much wiser or more mature than we are; but I think that the institutions have built up a kind of institutional memory about how to educate adolescents, which helps them make the right choices more often than not when it comes to questions of character development.

This isn’t the only advantage I see to these schools, but it is a big one. And because of this, I think that their educations at Hogwarts and Durmstrang (respectively) will be valuable even if neither boy ever achieves his heart’s desire. I think the educations they are going to get in high school will stick with them through all the ups and downs of life. And therefore I think that those educations will absolutely not be wasted, no matter how the boys turn out.


* I have used the name "Beauxbatons" to stand for a third boarding school that both boys applied to and neither one got accepted by. I don't know why. Son 1's theory is that Beauxbatons is a school for rich kids (plus a few scholarship cases they can feel self-righteous about) and we just didn't have enough money. Maybe, or maybe not. I don't really know. What I do know is that as a school it may have a more impressive reputation than either Hogwarts or Durmstrang, but I was never persuaded that they paid as much attention to their students' moral development. So I wasn't terribly sad that neither boy got accepted there.