COWEN: You’re an opponent of what you call
age segregation in education, and I think,
more generally in life. Tell us why.
SASSE: If you brought people from 300 years
ago or 3,000 years ago to live among us now,
if you dropped them out of a time machine,
I think the first thing that would stun them
is just simply our material abundance and
our tools, and especially our digital tools.
We have more built stuff than anybody in human
history by huge magnitudes. I don’t think
you could possibly arrive here and not first
be surprised by our material abundance.
But if those folks stayed with us for a while,
30 days later, that would wear off, and the
thing that would be most striking to people
from other times and places living among us
is how age-segregated we live. It is a really,
really weird thing to allow our 17-year-olds
to believe that the world is mostly made up
of 17-year-olds. It’s strange, it’s not
healthy, and it’s not true, and that’s
the way we raise our kids. They are hyper,
hyper age-segregated.
As the father of 15- and 13-year-old girls,
I get that the pure slight of a 13- or 15-year-old
girl really hurts. But it’s not really enduring
if you have any wisdom. Right? If your 13-year-old
knows 60-year-olds and 75-year-olds, and they’ve
been through a lot of life experience, another
13- or 15-year-old girl saying something trite
and mean to you, it’s water off a duck’s
back if you have any perspective.
I don’t think we’re serving our kids very
well by allowing them to live these hyper
age-segregated lives. And that’s closely
connected to the core driver of our perpetual
adolescence category, which is that our kids
don’t know the distinction in their belly,
they don’t feel the distinction between
production and consumption. They know aging
through grades in school as their productive
work time, and then the rest of life is just
different forms of consumption. That’s really
unsatisfying and it’s really unfair to them.
Again, this book is not a blame-laying book,
but if I were laying blame in this book —
COWEN: And he’s not. [laughs]
SASSE: — I would not be blaming millennials.
I would be blaming we parents and grandparents
that we’re not helping think with our kids
about the fact that we’re not celebrating
scar tissue with them. Scar tissue is the
foundation of future character, and they are
able to persevere, and they need to develop
a work ethic. They just happened to live at
the richest time and place in human history,
and so they live a life that’s almost entirely
separated from productive work environments.
That’s never been the case of anybody who’s
ever grown up before, that they didn’t grow
up around work.
One of the most basic things that makes you
happy in life is thinking that you’re needed.
My work, our work is needed. Not “Does my
back hurt at the end of the day?” or not
“Do I think I get paid enough money?”
or not “Is there some annoying person three
cubicles away who talks too loudly on his
or her phone?” But when I leave home on
Monday morning or whatever day you begin your
workday or workweek, “Do I think anybody
needs me?” If you think that, if your work
matters to somebody, if you have a meaningful
way to contribute to your neighbor, you’re
basically going to be happy.
And if you don’t have that, you’re almost
certainly not going to be happy. And right
now, we’re raising our teens segregated
from work, and therefore, segregated from
any clear sense that they’re needed now
or going to be needed in the future, and that
ends up feeling a lot like cotton candy. It’s
pretty Peter Pan–like and pretty miserable.
COWEN: I’m actually a fan of the older 19th-century
British Lancasterian system, where when possible,
you have these somewhat older children teach
the younger children, and the older children
also learn through teaching — not just
by being students — and you mix roles
that way because you have a natural way to
mix ages where there’s some rationale for
it. I worry also with people aging and going
more into nursing homes, we will become more
of an age-segregated society.
There’s a lot of worry about racial segregation,
gender segregation; but age segregation is
hardly mentioned. But if you think about it,
how old you are is a pretty fundamental fact
about your life and I’m very glad to see
your book is drawing attention to this issue.
I hope that gains some traction.
SASSE: Thanks, and it isn’t just the older.
I want to underscore your point, Tyler. It
isn’t just 13-year-olds being around 60-
and 75-year-olds, though it should be that
because the pattern of life is, you start
needing diapers, and you end up needing diapers.
We ultimately become dependent again, and
that means there are a whole bunch of people
that need us, that they need our help.
Our kids shouldn’t live the narcissistic
13-year-old consumer experience of thinking
there’s this fountain of youth and if only
they could consume more, they’ll be happy.
All the data shows that that doesn’t actually
make you happy. There are older people who
need us, but there are also younger people
who need us, and there’s a really good way
to get outside your own education, to think
about how you pass along education. I do think
there’s a benefit to our family structure:
providentially just happens to be 15-year-old
girl, 13-year-old girl, big gap, providential
surprise son.
COWEN: [laughs]
SASSE: It is a gift for my daughters that
they have to help teach my son, as it pulls
them out of the narcissistic experience of
being 13 or 15. He needs them. They matter,
and they learn about their own learning by
doing that.
One last point: When I was a college president,
we used to host these dinners for donors at
our house. We would do these rolling salons
of 8 and 10 and 12 people all the time. And
one of the questions that my wife and I started
to ask people, and it was fun if you were
talking to a 45-year-old or an 85-year-old:
“How do you recognize whether or not a kid
or a grandkid is mature?”
And one time we were hosting this party, and
this woman said, “Oh, that’s easy. For
a boy I know for sure. If a boy is old enough
that I would trust him to be alone with my
baby for 90 minutes, such that he might have
to change a diaper during the time he’s
there, he’s a man. And if he’s not, he’s
still a child.” And all these 30-year-old
guys around the table started squirming in
their seats . . .
[laughter]
SASSE: “Yes, I guess my man cave really
is a place that I escape to be a little kid
again.” But it was amazing. Immediately
every mom around the table said, “Oh yeah,
that’s it.” If there’s an 11- or a 13-
or a 15- or a 17- or a 19-year-old boy, and
you’d think he could take care of a one-year-old
for 90 minutes and not have the kid die, he’s
mature; if not, he’s immature.
[laughter]
