Remolding Humans

A lump of clay begins its journey with endless possibilities.

In the hands of a potter, it slowly becomes something meaningful. A coffee mug is shaped to hold warmth on a cold morning. A flower vase is designed to display beauty, to hold beautiful flowers. A storage jar protects what is valuable. None of these are superior to the others. They simply serve different purposes.

The important part is this: once the clay has been shaped, the potter doesn't throw it back into the wheel every few years and decide it should become something else.

Yet that is exactly what we do with children.

We spend the first decade of their lives fitting them into one mold. Memorize. Repeat. Score well. Stay inside the lines.

Then they reach college, where we break that mold and press them into another. Build projects. Join clubs. Learn programming. Publish papers. Network. Collect certificates. Chase internships. Become "industry ready."

Finally, when they enter the workforce, companies ask for specialists. People who have spent years mastering a craft.

But how could they?

For nearly two decades they have been rewarded for becoming generalists of whatever system they happened to be inside. Every few years the definition of success changes, and so does the mold.

The result is a generation that has sampled everything but mastered little.

Like a clay pot that was repeatedly crushed before it could be fired, many graduates reach industry carrying the shape of countless expectations but the strength of none. They have grown in breadth, accumulating fragments of many disciplines, yet rarely in depth where true expertise is forged.

This is not an argument against learning broadly.

Breadth creates perspective. It allows ideas to cross-pollinate and helps us understand the world beyond our own discipline.

The problem begins when breadth never gives way to depth.

A musician who is forced to become an engineer. An engineer who secretly wanted to be a designer. A scientist told to become a manager before mastering science. Every transition is another pair of hands reshaping clay that was already beginning to take form.

Education should expose us to many paths early, then allow us to commit deeply to the one that resonates. Instead, we often spend our most formative years optimizing for the next examination, the next entrance test, the next placement season.

By the time we finally have the freedom to choose, we've become experts at adapting to molds rather than discovering who we were capable of becoming.

Perhaps the goal of education shouldn't be to produce identical, polished pots.

Perhaps it should be to help each piece of clay discover the shape it was always capable of holding, then give it enough time to harden into something that lasts.

We were taught a little of everything, until we became a lot of nothing in particular. We grew in breadth, but never in depth.