Who Cares?

The ascension of achievement and happiness at the cost of caring.

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I recently helped launch an online fellowship for UK teens called “The mathematics of morality,” through which talented maths (I know they’re right about the “s”, but I still cringe) students will explore the mathematical concepts, tools, and careers that are particularly relevant to doing good in the world.

As part of this process I read through hundreds of applications. While this was mostly a hopeful experience, the responses to one prompt in particular — about why studying math might help the applicants achieve their “most important life goals” — brought me back to one of the more frightening data sets about youth that I studied in graduate school.

Respondent after respondent at least implicitly — and often explicitly — framed their life goals in terms of financial security, personal happiness, and career prestige. They wanted to go to a good university, climb the ladder in a respected field, and have enough money to enjoy themselves along the way. Studying math was a readily defensible way to do just that.

Given that they were applying to a program with “morality” in the title, I expected more students to highlight the ways in which they hope to do good in the world. It was as if it didn’t even cross the majority of students’ minds that service to others or to the world could stack up against first being well-off and happy. Even of those who expressed more altruistic motivations, many were still conventional and risk-averse in their ambition, maintaining the primacy of security and prestige (the “I want to help people by being a surgeon” responses).

These British applicants are unfortunately in quite good company with their Gen-Z peers across the pond.

Messaging about Values

Harvard’s Making Caring Common Project studies the shifting values landscape of kids and young adults. In their recent report The Children We Mean to Raise: The Real Messages Adults Are Sending About Values they show — based on a diverse sample of 10,000 American middle and high school students — the extent to which students’ own priorities and their perceptions of the priorities imposed by their teachers and parents are increasingly deprioritizing caring for others in favor of achievement or personal happiness.

Furthermore, these students actually over-estimate the importance of their achievement to their parents and teachers compared to what their teachers and parents say about their own beliefs. Hence the title of the report, which MCC also calls the “rhetoric/reality” gap.

A few specific findings include:

• 80% of the youth report that their parents are more concerned about achievement or happiness than caring for others.
• Teens’ negative perceptions of peer and adult norms can lower their own ethical standards, prompting them to cheat and setting in motion a downward spiral.
• Students were three times more likely to agree than disagree with this statement on our survey: “My parents are prouder if I get good grades in my classes than if I’m a caring community member in class and school.”

Making Caring Common’s work suggests that students, parents, and teachers still do prioritize values like caring and kindness in meaningful proportions, but they are losing ground to achievement and happiness.

Is this any surprise in the landscape in which American students are educated? Charles Munger’s famous aphorism is apt here: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.” We can say to students whatever we want (Be kind! Care about others! Care about the climate!), but the most salient incentive structures (the realities of standardized testing, grades, college admissions process, and career pressure, plus adults’ implied prioritization of these metrics) reward students for behavior that is at best orthogonal and at worst completely counter to being caring. The shifting we see towards self-centered value prioritization is inevitable in this climate.

(Here “self-centered” is intended less to convey a negative meta-value judgement — though I’ll still endorse plenty of that — but rather a more objective statement about the central focus of the value being the self.)

Some amount of financial stability and personal well-being are important ingredients for being able to pursue service to and caring for others, but they are surely not sufficient conditions. I believe (and would argue that conventional wisdom in theory if not in practice still maintains) that success in the former endeavors will often follow — or at least be made irrelevant — from cultivating the latter, but not the converse.

Even when we do quite reasonably want our kids and students to be happy as an intrinsic good — not just as a means to the end of them doing good in the world — we know that helping others is one of the three most essential ingredients (along with gratitude and sleep) for in fact being happy!

It’s one of the most slam-dunk altruistic synergies you can imagine, but instead of cashing in on this for humanity’s sake we’ve set up, or at least been complicit in upholding, an endless staircase of testing achievement pressure where the primary “self-care” respite on offer is an entertainment landscape run by technological addiction and isolation machines. Dead-end achievement for its own sake has supplanted any instrumental, prosocial benefits, and we’ve relinquished happiness cultivation to companies with an incentive to sow the opposite.

Priorities privilege and other pushback

A potential complication to the concern I raise here is that prioritizing caring is a privilege. To problematize parents or teachers for their messaging about values, or students themselves for their discernment about their own values, might be to ignore the systems-level contexts and incentives that make these decisions about values at the individual, family, or community level adaptive and rational. I find two main reasons why I am unconvinced by this pushback:

1. Making Caring Common finds the phenomenon of achievement > happiness > caring particularly prevalent among wealthy suburban students. The applicants to my math program too are largely students who through their educational backgrounds are already in positions of relative financial stability and privilege. It is those who are most well-resourced who are least oriented towards caring, not vice versa. Conventional achievement has yielded wealth, which demands further conventional achievement to perpetuate; caring, on the other hand, often requires relinquishing or redistributing inherited privilege or power.
2. To consider caring a privilege is to restrict the fundamental ability and right for a person of any means to care for another. Many before have captured this idea, from MLK’s “‘Everybody can be great — because anybody can serve” to Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that humans “are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

One might more generally take issue with my concern over this data for the way in which it ignores the obvious rationality of wanting to be financially secure and happy in a time when both are increasingly difficult for young adults.

It is hard to blame Gen Z — also dubbed “generation sensible” — for their risk aversion when it comes to their mental health or financial future; they are, after all, inundated with messaging about (not to mention lived experience with) their collective anxiety and depression, a precarious financial outlook, and an impending future of geopolitical and climate chaos.

Yet it is precisely because of this context that those of us adults who work with students have to insist on making caring for a community beyond oneself a key priority. We have to nurture, celebrate, and demonstrate this priority in all the work we do, for the capacity to care for the people and the world around us is our only hope for surviving the interacting crises that will continue to push us towards more selfish aims.

In practice

My own school has recently been having conversations about our mission and our core values. I do not believe that the “scholarship,” “self-discovery,” and “belonging” that came out of these meetings are empty platitudes nor merely euphemisms for “achievement” and “happiness,” but I do fear that when subjected to the stress test of conventional school culture, which is by and large what we practice even at our progressive private school, this is what they can all-too-quickly become.

On the other hand, for us to explicitly name and prioritize something like “care” or even “community” as a core value would be to wade into a morass of morality. Care for whom? When and in what way? What need we sacrifice for our community? Where does our community start and stop?

To genuinely and deeply act on a priority like “caring” would be to disrupt the whole project of business-as-usual education. If cultivating care in students were priority number one, how would the curriculum have to change? Homework? Assessments and grading? These are much more fundamental changes to the way things are being done than the work that follows from other guiding principles.

But in a world that is pushing kids to think more and more about themselves, some of these changes to the system of messaging and incentives might be exactly what they need.

Starting these posts is second-hardest only to finishing, for I rarely feel as if I’ve expressed myself quite as well as I would like to. To smooth both challenging processes, I have two follow-up posts in the works: One reflecting on a book I’m reading called “Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse” and another exploring how, in cases where we cannot readily change a “What?”, we can change the “In what way?”