Schoolwork as Soul Work: What is Taught Beneath the Teaching

My daughter is six. We are unofficially in kindergarten, which is to say that the question of school is no longer theoretical for us. The decision has been made, the early practice is underway, and I am now in the position of trying to articulate what I think we are actually doing. I mention this at the outset because the stakes are not abstract. This is the sort of thing a person writes when he is already responsible for it and wants to be sure he understands what that responsibility requires.

I should say, too, that the we in what follows is not a rhetorical we. My wife and I made this decision together, after years of the kind of conversations a shared life allows, and the thinking in what follows is hers as much as it is mine, though she bears none of the blame for the sentences. She sees things in our daughter that I do not, and her corrections to my thinking, over the years, have been the best education I have had in what this work actually requires.

The question, then, is a simple one: what are we trying to do?

The easy answer is that we want her to receive a good education. But the more I sit with that phrase, the less it seems to say. A good education toward what end, measured by what standard, in service of what kind of person? These are not questions one often hears in conversations about schools. Those tend instead toward the logistical: curricula, test scores, districts, teachers, extracurriculars, and college trajectories. The question beneath them — what, exactly, is school for? — goes largely unasked, as though it had already been settled.

I am not sure that it has.

A few days ago, I was driving, listening to Russ Roberts interview Ross Levine on EconTalk. They were discussing Adam Smith, and one of his lines from The Theory of Moral Sentiments has stayed with me: “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.”

To be loved is a matter of reception: what the world makes of you. To be lovely is a matter of character: whether you are, in fact, the kind of person who deserves to be thought well of.

Smith’s insight is subtler than it first appears. We want both. He has no patience for the cynical view that we are merely performers chasing applause; the desire to be worthy of love runs just as deep. The trouble is that being loved is easier to come by than being lovely. It can be drawn from the world through flattery, performance, credentialing, or simple conformity, and the world is always ready to offer the first in place of the second. Moral life, for Smith, turns on whether we can tell the difference.

At one point in the conversation, Russ Roberts used a phrase that stayed with me. The work of turning toward the lovely rather than the loved, he said, requires what he called “soul work.” He noted, almost apologetically, that the word has fallen out of fashion, but used it anyway. It can take many forms — religion, great books, meditation, sometimes therapy — but in each case it amounts to the same thing: the cultivation of an inner life substantial enough to withstand the world’s pull.

I have been turning the phrase over ever since. If this “soul work” is what forms a person capable of resisting the pull of external validation, and if school occupies something like ten thousand hours of a child’s most formative years, then it is worth asking whether school does any of that work, or whether, in practice, it does something closer to the opposite.

Before turning to the criticism, it is worth being clear about what modern schooling does well. It teaches children to read, to write, and to do arithmetic. It provides structure, socialization, and discipline, along with an early sense that effort and outcome are related. The teachers, in my experience, are largely devoted people doing difficult work within a system they did not design. What I am describing is not a failure on their part.

But the system itself is organized around a particular kind of output. It measures what can be measured: test scores, grades, class rank, college admissions, and, eventually, income. James C. Scott called this quality legibility :  the tendency of institutions to remake what they touch into forms that can be counted, compared, and administered.

A school, by its nature, must be legible. It must produce signals that parents, administrators, colleges, and employers can read. And those signals are, almost by necessity, signals of the loved rather than the lovely. The grade is what others assign you; the rank is where you stand in their estimation; the admission is their verdict.

This is not a matter of corruption. It is the shape the institution takes under the pressure of operating at scale. The consequence is that children spend a decade and a half learning, mostly implicitly, that the answer to how am I doing? comes from outside. The feedback loop runs from them to the world and back again.

The inner questions — is this work actually good? is this pursuit actually worthwhile? am I, in fact, becoming someone I would admire? — are rarely asked, because the system has no way to register them.

This is the deeper problem Smith was pointing to. It is not that external validation is harmful in itself, but that when it becomes the only signal a person has learned to attend to, the inner standard begins to atrophy. The “impartial spectator,” as he called the internal judge, falls silent. We become, in his phrase, admired without being admirable and lose the capacity to tell the difference.

I can speak to this with some authority, because I lived it from the other side. I was not a good math student. The grades said so, the teachers said so, and, eventually, I said so too: I’m just not good at math. It became a sentence I carried for twenty years, as fixed as my eye color. What I never examined was its source. It had not come from any sustained engagement with mathematics, but from a series of verdicts rendered in a particular institutional setting, which I had absorbed and mistaken for self-knowledge. The spectator I carried into adulthood spoke, on this question, with the voice of a seventh-grade math teacher, and I had taken it for my own.

That is the smaller version of the story. The larger version is that this happens to every child, about a great many things, most of them more consequential than geometry. What a child is told she is good at, and what she is told she is like, and what she is told is worth wanting — these verdicts arrive daily for twelve years, and they are absorbed by a faculty not yet equipped to examine them. By the time the impartial spectator is mature enough to ask whether any of it was true, it has already been built partly out of the answers. Math was the subject that happened to me. The pattern is indifferent to the subject. It is how a self gets formed in the presence of a system whose job is to issue verdicts.

The impartial spectator Smith describes — not the seventh-grade teacher wearing his voice, but the more exacting inner critic — had been there all along, asking a different question than the one I had learned to answer. Not am I good at this? but is this worth my attention? The second question, it turns out, is the one that matters.

I do not offer this as a grievance. My teachers were doing their job. The system did what it is built to do: sort children into legible categories and issue legible verdicts. The difficulty arises when that is the only verdict a child hears for twelve years. It tends to settle, and to be mistaken for something it is not. I do not want my daughter to carry a judgment about herself that she absorbed at eight and never thought to question.

The word soul, if we are going to use it, needs to earn its keep. I do not mean it mystically, nor as a stand-in for feeling. I mean something closer to what the ancients had in mind: the ordering principle of a person — the faculty that decides, among competing desires, which are to be acted upon, and which are not; the part that holds a standard the world did not hand it. It is also the part that notices, that registers beauty, that is moved by a piece of writing, that lights up in the presence of something true. The spectator is not only a judge; it is an audience. The faculty that discerns is the same faculty that delights.

The ancients had names for this. Plato called it the well-ordered soul; Aristotle, the condition of flourishing; Marcus Aurelius, the inner citadel; and Adam Smith, two thousand years later, the impartial spectator. They are all pointing to the same faculty: the one that allows a person to answer how am I doing? from the inside.

To neglect this faculty is not to produce someone unskilled, but someone misdirected. This is the failure I fear most for my daughter, and, I suspect, the one toward which modern schooling is quietly inclined. Not incompetence, but competence directed toward the wrong ends: a person capable of almost anything, except deciding whether any of it is worth doing.

What would it mean to organize a child’s education around the soul rather than the signal? What would it look like to give her, at six or eight or twelve, the conditions under which she might come to know her own mind and take an interest in what it finds?

I do not have a system. At best, I have a set of conditions I think are worth trying to create — four of them, as I have come to see it: the kind of internal audience a child develops; the presence of work that cannot be graded; the weight of real responsibility; and the practice of a disciplined curiosity. I offer them in the spirit of an experiment because the work of raising a child is too humbling for doctrine.

The first condition concerns the kind of internal audience a child develops.

The impartial spectator is not something a person consciously constructs. It forms early, through the steady experience of being seen. We learn to watch ourselves because we have first been watched. The infant studies her mother’s face and discovers, in its reactions, the first rough outline of what she is; the child in the classroom reads the teacher’s approval and disapproval and gradually internalizes a version of that judgment she can carry with her when the teacher is no longer there. The spectator begins, in this sense, as a reflection of the faces we have grown up in front of.

The question, then, is not whether a child will develop an internal audience, but whose. The spectator she carries into adulthood will be composed, in no small part, of the judgments that surrounded her early on. If those judgments are primarily about performance — the grade, the rank, the adult’s pleasure or displeasure at her output — then the questions that follow will be of the same kind: Did that impress them? Did I come out ahead? What will they think? Smith’s concern was precisely this — that the spectator, formed by the world, tends to inherit the world’s measures.

School, as it is now organized, does not make this refinement impossible. But it does load the early mirror heavily in one direction, and the reflection has a way of lingering. What I want for my daughter is not the absence of an internal audience — that is neither possible nor desirable — but a wider and more varied set of faces in its composition: the authors she reads seriously, the people she admires, the standards of craft to which she apprentices herself. And, in time, the quieter voice that emerges when all of these have been absorbed — the one that has stopped asking what people admire and begun asking what is worth admiring.

The second condition is work without a rubric.

Most of what school assigns is gradable because it has been designed to be so; the design precedes the content. But the work that most shapes a person — a piece of writing one is genuinely trying to get right, a problem chosen because it is interesting, a craft pursued for its own sake — resists the rubric. There is no answer key. The standard must come from somewhere else: from within, from the demands of the work itself, or from the traditions.

I want my daughter to spend serious time in this territory. A drawing she is still working on after everyone has told her it is finished. A story she rewrites for the fifth time because it is not yet what she meant. A question she cannot let go of even though no one has asked her to pursue it. These are the encounters in which a child discovers that her own judgment is a faculty, and that the faculty can be trained. The rubric, by relieving her of this discovery, relieves her of the encounter.

This matters because taste is as much a moral faculty as an aesthetic one. It is what the impartial spectator is made of, refined over years of the work of looking at one’s own work and being honest about what is there. A child raised entirely on rubrics may come out skilled, but she will not come out discerning, and discernment is what allows a person to tell being lovely from being merely praised.

The third condition is real responsibility.

Schools run on artificial stakes. The consequence of a bad grade is another grade, and the consequence of that grade is a future grade. The system is self-referential; nothing in it quite touches the world beyond itself. Children are not slow to notice this. What follows is that the feedback loop meant to shape character — I did this, and this happened because of it, and I now understand something about myself I did not understand before — begins to break.

I want my daughter to have experiences with real consequences. A garden that fails if she neglects it. A small venture that loses money if she prices poorly. The specifics matter less than the structure: a cause traceable to her own choice, and an effect she cannot explain away as a grader’s verdict. Responsibility of this kind is how a self acquires traction on the world and how the spectator learns, through consequence, to take itself seriously. It is the mechanism by which a child comes to know, not abstractly but in her bones, that her actions have weight.

The alternative is a person who has lived, at seventeen, through a thousand artificial consequences and no real ones. Such a person tends to emerge with a peculiar combination of high competence and low self-knowledge; she has performed constantly but has rarely had to answer for anything. The self that needs traction on the world has had, up to that point, nothing to push against, and so has not formed the part of itself that knows how to push. 

The fourth condition, which runs through the other three, is disciplined curiosity.

I mean something different from the ambient version schools sometimes celebrate: the casual sampling that treats knowledge like a buffet. Real curiosity is a practice: following a question past the point of comfort, reading beyond what is assigned, wanting to know the thing itself rather than the grade it produces. It keeps one in the presence of great minds long enough to be altered by them, which is, in the end, the only reason to read them at all.

Meditations does not yield to a skim for the sake of a test. It yields only if one sits with Marcus Aurelius long enough for his voice to begin to argue with one’s own, and sometimes to prevail. The same is true of any serious book, and any serious pursuit.

Curiosity of this kind determines what the soul encounters, and, over time, what it becomes. Without it, the other conditions remain inert, because the spectator is given nothing of consequence to attend to. A child with ungraded work but no curiosity will not pursue it. A child with real responsibility but no curiosity will discharge it and then move on. Curiosity is what gives the soul its material. It is the condition under which the other three begin to compound.

These four — an internal audience, ungraded work, real responsibility, disciplined curiosity — are not a curriculum. They are conditions. They do not tell you what to teach a child on Tuesday morning; they tell you what the teaching, whatever its subject, is meant to serve.

I am aware of the risks. The most obvious is that a child raised this way may not align neatly with the conventional markers of success. She may not test as well, or credential as cleanly, or move through the sorting mechanisms of the world as frictionlessly as her peers. This is a real cost, and I do not pretend otherwise. It is possible to get this wrong — to produce someone with opinions but no competence, interiority but no capacity, depth but no purchase on the world. I take that risk seriously.

But I take the opposite risk more seriously. The alternative is a person highly capable of executing against goals she did not choose, measured by standards she did not set, in pursuit of recognition she has never examined. Effectiveness of that kind is not nothing. It can build a career, even a comfortable life. But it is effectiveness unmoored from any judgment about whether the thing being effected is worth effecting. The order matters. A person who is directed can, over time, acquire whatever effectiveness her direction requires. A person who is effective without being directed has no mechanism by which to ask what her effectiveness is for, and is therefore at the disposal of whoever sets her targets. 

I want my daughter to be directed first, and then, from that place, as effective as she cares to be. A person who is directed first also, I think, finds the world more interesting than a person who is effective first. Direction is what allows a life to have subjects rather than only tasks, and the person who has subjects is rarely bored.

None of this is settled. We are at the beginning of it, and I know enough about theory to know how little of it survives first contact. We will adjust. We will fail at parts of it, and discover that we were wrong about others. In ten years, this essay will likely read as naive. That is as it should be.

In practice, it reduces to a handful of questions I find myself asking at the end of most days. Whose voices are composing the judge she is learning to hear? Is there any work before her that no one will grade? Do the consequences of her effort belong to the world itself, or only to a chart on the wall? And is she being allowed to follow a question as far as it will take her, or only as far as the lesson plan permits?

If she reads this one day, and I hope she does, though she will be a different person by then, and so will I, I want her to know that the point was never to shield her from the world. The world is too immense and too generous and too strange to shield a child from, and a child shielded from it has been cheated. The point was to make sure she had something of her own to meet it with.

The world will shape her. There is no version of her life in which it does not. The question is whether she meets it with an inner standard already forming, or whether she learns, slowly and without noticing, to accept its standards as her own.

I am not sure I can do this. I am sure that I have to try.

The question is not how to prepare a child for the world.

It is how to ensure the world does not become her measure.