Edweek does a good job summing up the new book, ”The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life” by Stanford University psychologist William Damon. If that link doesn’t get you through, try this version or look it up on Amazon.

 Damon looks at the lack of “engagement” by young people:

 Among the disconnected youths the researchers came across were people like Tommy, an 18-year-old from Pennsylvania, who tosses a coin to select his college courses and is candidly unbothered by his lack of goals or ambition.

 Damon’s work mirrors foundation research attempting to measure the size of this group. Here’s an excerpt from this editorial I wrote three years ago:

Young people who aren’t in school or the workforce are dubbed “non-engaged” by the annual Kids Count report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But “lost” sounds just as accurate. About 3.8 million youth ages 18-24 belong to this group, roughly 15% of all people of that age. Though there are no gender breakdowns for this group, the pathways leading to this dead end — dropping out from high school, emerging from the juvenile justice system — are dominated by boys.

This is the serious side of what Hollywood dubs the “failure to launch” syndrome. Leonard Sax had a great op-ed in the Washington Post laying out the realities behind the humor.

I have not had a chance to read Damon’s book so I don’t know if he attempts to separate the disengaged by gender. According to the Education Week review, Damon blames current school reforms:

But the author’s main target in education is the current emphasis in schools on testing students, exemplified in part by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. He criticizes that trend for narrowing the curriculum and imposing what he sees as shortsighted educational goals on students.

“Unfortunately, all the emphasis on high-stakes testing has squeezed out time for guidance, the time that teachers can take to impart the usefulness and meaning of the skills they teach, activities like writing for the school newspaper or joining the French club,” Mr. Damon said in an interview. “Not every kid is going to find meaning in the three R’s. We are single-mindedly focusing on test scores as if the test scores in and of themselves are some kind of important goal for education.”

I’ll wait to read the book before fully commenting on that, but I’m skeptical that high stakes testing plays a major role. Boys aren’t doing well in school, period. Their grades, compared to girls, are awful. Testing is just a way to pick that up. Schools are not engaging boys, prompting them to space out and drop out, taking up interests such as video games that then get mistakenly blamed as the cause. The real solution is figuring out a way to re-engage boys in school.

Tags: disengaged

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