School Choice: An Elon Musk School or a Mother Teresa School?

Earlier this month, I spoke at a gathering of public charter school administrators. We all agreed that school should be about more than grades and test scores. We all agreed that teachers should do more than teach math and science, and English and history. We all agreed that part of the mission of the school should be to teach character and virtue. 

But which virtue? What sort of character? That's where people disagree. 

School administrators fall into two camps. One camp wants to talk about grit and passion. Go for it. Start your own company. "Move fast and break things." Have a growth mindset. You can do anything if you try hard enough. Their role models are often men like Elon Musk and other billionaire entrepreneurs. 

The other camp talks about service and self-sacrifice. Treat others the way you would like to be treated yourself. Love your neighbor. "Everybody can be great because everybody can serve." Their role models are Mother Teresa, Dr. Martin Luther King, and, often, Abraham Lincoln. 

Over the past 22 years, I have visited more than 460 schools. I have observed that a school can be either an Elon Musk school or it can be a Mother Teresa school. But it can’t be both. 

One school administrator (not at the recent conference) put it bluntly. “I don’t think it’s our job to teach kids about loving your neighbor and all that stuff,” he said. “That’s the parents’ job. Our job is to give each kid the skills they need to make their dreams come true. So yeah, if I have to choose, I’d say we are more about Elon Musk than Mother Teresa, definitely.” 

Elon Musk or Mother Teresa? This choice influences every aspect of what a school does. At one school I visited, where every student has an iPad, each 5th-grader was assigned to make a commercial on his or her device to showcase their talents and abilities. At a Mother Teresa school, the students would have been assigned to make a commercial about a great American, such as Dwight Eisenhower or Martin Luther King—someone other than themselves.

Many schools I have visited promote what I have come to call “the middle-class script.” The middle-class script reads as follows:

1. Work hard at school so you get into a good college
2. Work hard at college so you can get a good job
3. Get a good job and you will have a good life

The implicit assumption of the middle-class script is that having a good job—which at these schools always means a job that pays well—is the key to happiness. But the evidence doesn’t provide strong support for that hypothesis. Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found, in an oft-cited study, that beyond a threshold income of about $75,000, more money doesn’t buy more happiness. This finding was validated and replicated in a recent study of more than 1.7 million individuals worldwide, although this finding has been challenged by University of Virginia researcher Matthew Killingsworth.

If money doesn’t guarantee happiness, what does? The answer is the quality of your personal relationships, beginning with your family. A good marriage and a loving relationship with your children are the best predictors of long-term health and happiness, far more so than household income. 

Apparently, most American parents don’t know that. The Pew Research Center recently surveyed 3,757 parents nationwide. A large majority—88%—said that it was “very” or “extremely” important for their kids to be financially independent, which is a nice way of saying financially well-off. But only 21% of parents thought it was important for their kid to get married, and only 20% thought it was important for their kid to have a child of their own. Fully 46% of survey respondents said it was “not too important” or “not at all important” for their kid to get married or to have children of their own. 

This is weird. This was a survey not of the general population but of parents with children under 18 at home. Don’t the great majority of parents want to have grandchildren some day? Apparently not. 

The middle-class script leads to a rise in the proportion of young people who are living alone, who prioritize their work over marriage, family, and friendships. The proportion of young Americans living alone is higher than it has ever been. In 1960, single-person households represented only 13% of American households. By 2021, that percentage had more than doubled, to 28 percent. And many young adults are simply “failing to launch.” In July 2022, fully half of young adults age 18 to 29 were still living in their parents' home. A 29-year-old man living in his parents’ home doesn’t count as a single-person household, but he is often a failure to launch, a failure to fulfill his potential to become a father. In another recent survey from the Pew Center, nearly six in 10 single adults said that they were not even looking for a relationship or even casual dates.

Many of these adults are so thoroughly immersed in the belief that work is the most important element of life that they aren’t even interested in having a relationship. “My job is my life” is a phrase I often hear from such people. These adults have succumbed to what Derek Thompson christened “workism,” an ideology in which one’s job has morphed “into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community”: the belief that work is, and should be, “the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.”

But here’s the twist: More than 90% of the adults I see in the office don't like their jobs. In a culture that preaches “get a good job, have a good life,” they are miserable. They don’t have a good job so they believe they don’t have a good life. “Your life is not your work,” I tell them. Sometimes they hear what I’m saying. More often, they don’t. A 10- or 20-minute pep talk from a family doctor (me) can’t undo the years of brainwashing from a culture that holds up achievement at work as the best guarantee of personal happiness and fulfillment. 

There is nothing new about people not enjoying their work. More than 150 years ago, Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden that most men lead lives of “quiet desperation.” What’s different today is that young people are immersed in stories of billionaire entrepreneurs and YouTube influencers and TikTok celebrities who endlessly promote themselves and their brand. 

Researchers distinguish between self-transcendence, which means looking outward at others and at nature; vs. self-enhancement, where the priority is on maximizing one’s own achievement and prestige. Self-transcendence is linked empirically with prosocial behavior and with empathy. Self-enhancement is linked empirically with selfishness.

How to promote self-transcendence rather than self-enhancement, in a culture which is all about self-enhancement? One study suggests an answer. Researchers randomly assigned undergraduates to one of two conditions. In one condition, undergraduates spent one minute outdoors looking up at towering, 200-foot-tall eucalyptus trees. In the other condition, undergraduates spent one minute outdoors looking up at a tall building. Looking up at tall trees did indeed lead to feelings of awe, as the researchers expected, whereas looking up at the tall building did not. The students who had looked up at the tall trees were subsequently more likely to help the experimenter after a carefully staged accident in which the experimenter spilled a dozen pens on the ground. And the students who had looked at the trees felt significantly less entitled, less likely to agree with statements such as “I’m just more deserving than others.” After just one minute of tree-gazing! 

As I have written previously on this blog: when parents are choosing a school for their child, too often their first question is: Where do graduates of this school go to college? The more prestigious the college, the more likely parents are to send their kids to that school. But I think that question is the wrong one. A better question for parents to ask is: Is this school an Elon Musk school, or a Mother Teresa school? 

Choose the Mother Teresa school. Choose a school where kids learn to look outward: at nature, at other people, other places, other galaxies. Those schools are out there. I’ve visited them. My daughter attends one. It matters. 

Leonard Sax MD PhD is a practicing family physician and the author of four books for parents. More information online at www.leonardsax.com.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.