The Student Life

Chapter 3

The development of dreams

Fairy tales tell us a lot about what people want. Girls want to be princesses, boys want to be heroes. And both girls and boys want to be chosen. They want to have the glass slipper fit, or the mighty gods from another planet give them a light that energizes their power ring.

In a kingdom or similarly controlling system, there was no way in the world you were going to accomplish much of anything unless you were selected. It was the best you could hope for. The industrial revolution created a different sort of outcome, a loosening of class-based restrictions and the creation of new careers and pathways.

More people who could pick you (and offer you a job), and thus the dangers were even higher because the odds were better. Not only were there more ways to be selected, but suddenly and amazingly, there was a chance that just about anyone could become powerful enough to move up the ladder. Our fairy tales started to change.

Kids dreamed of walking on the moon or inventing a new kind of medical device. They dreamed of

industry and science and politics and invention, and often, those dreams come true. My dreamed of writing a bestseller or inventing a new kind of car design or perfecting a dance move. We look back on that generation with a bit of awe. Those kids could dream.

Dreamers are a problem

And then school /colleges progressed on mass and scale, and the dreams faded. While these new heroes

created generations of kids who wanted to interrupt the world as they did, they also spread the seeds for the end of those dreams.

It turns out that industry scales. Little businesses turn into big ones. One McDonald's turns into ten thousand..

Fifty years ago, businesses realized that they were facing two related problems:

They needed more workers, well-trained, compliant, and yes, cheap workers willing to follow specific instructions...and they needed more customers. Well-trained, flexible, eager-to-consume customers

watching TV regularly and waiting to buy what they had to sell.

Dreamers don't help with either of these problems. Dreamers aren't busy applying for jobs at minimum wage, they don't eagerly buy the latest fashions to keep happy.

The solution sounds like it was invented at some secret meeting at the Skull and Bones, but I don't think it was. Instead, it was the outcome of a hundred little decisions, the uncoordinated work of thousands of corporations and political activists:

School /colleges a factory, and the output of that factory is compliant workers who buy a lot of stuff.

These students are trained to dream small dreams. What about the famous ones we hear about? Surely the successful people we read about have something special going on....

Dreamers don't have special genes. They find situations that amplify their dreams. If the mass-processing of students we call school /colleges were good at creating the dreamers we admire, there'd be far more of them. In fact, many of the famous ones, the successful ones, and the essential ones are part of our economy despite the processing they received, not because of it. The economy demands that we pick ourselves. School /colleges teach us otherwise. I'm arguing for a new set of fairy tales, a new expectation of powerful dreaming.

Is it possible to teach willpower?

After all, willpower is the foundation of every realized dream. Dreams fade away because we can't tolerate the short-term pain necessary to get to our long-term goal. We find something easier, juicier, sexier, and more now, so we take it, leaving our dreams uncontrolled on the side of the road. But is willpower an essential, genetic quality, something we have no say over?