Parents: Your kids’ grades and performance don’t matter. Here’s what does.

Why are we learning this?

Every high schooler at some point has asked “Why are we learning this?” The answer is different for each school subject, but is often unsatisfying. A lot of what kids are forced to learn in high school is arbitrary and many of the kids don’t feel like going through the motions “just because”.

One of my childhood friends is a high school science teacher. He describes it as “glorified babysitting”. He says they have to fill up the day with something.

Should they teach science in high school? Of course. Should every kid be forced to take it? No. There’s no reason why high schools can’t have just a few required courses and let the students choose majors like in college.

For the most part, what college you go to doesn’t matter anymore like it did in the 80s. Lots of young people are entering lucrative careers or starting businesses without college. Elon Musk only cares about job applicants’ skills, not their grades or degrees.

Grades just show how much students can force themselves to remember in order to pass an exam. The cramming students do for tests is exactly like the cramming witnessed in hotdog-eating contests. If your kid doesn’t have good grades, it’s just because they can’t cram as many information hotdogs down as furiously as some other students.

It’s also because your kids are a little more skeptical about the value proposition of the typical high school curriculum. Maybe they aren’t so easily convinced that “biology” is necessary for their everyday lives. Can you describe the function of the Krebs cycle again? No? I didn’t think so.

Your kid is already perfect.

I promise you, your kid is plenty smart. Have you ever watched your kids play video games? You wouldn’t stand a chance against them. That fancy job you have where you’re the big shot at home who earns all the money? I’m positive your 15-year-old can learn 70% of what you do for work in under a year. In two years they’d be close to your level. Let’s get real here.

I just finished watching the excellent Netflix series “Lost in Space”. The character Maureen Robinson has a saying, “Every problem has a solution.” It was inspiring to watch her and her brilliant daughter Judy solve incredible problems throughout the series.

Find a problem and solve it.

The sole thing that matters is that your children find problems they are passionate about solving. That’s it.

Most low-wage earners were never exposed to enough opportunities to solve challenging problems. It’s a guidance gap. It’s an exposure gap. It’s an opportunity gap.

Your kids are perfect just the way they are – always have been. But they do need to get excited about solving some kind of problem – the harder the better.

If your kids find a good problem to work on, you’ll see them transform before your eyes.

Even kids with good grades won’t go very far if they don’t find good problems to solve. Dogs need to run outside; people need to solve problems. The good feeling you get from solving problems motivates you to solve more problems in a positive feedback loop.

You know what’s a million times better than a resume with a college degree on it? A YouTube video showing your kid solving some hard problem and explaining how they did it.

Talk to your children for as long as they can stand it. Find out what motivates them, what excites them, what they actually like doing, what they’ll actually put effort into. I promise if your kids find a problem they think is worth solving, they’ll burn a hole through it with their Superman heat vision. And it’ll be better than you could have done. And you’ll be shocked.

Once they figure that out, the next thing is to forget about finding a job and to build a business instead. But that’s a subject for a future post…