Adolescence and Education

Adolescence is the Initiative's second great theme. The research position, argued across two decades, is that adolescence is a critical evolutionary adaptation, a period built for risk, apprenticeship, and growing autonomy, and that secondary schooling systematically misreads it by extending dependency exactly when young people are wired to take responsibility.

The book that named the crisis

John Abbott's 2010 book Overschooled but Undereducated is the fullest statement of the argument: the crisis in education jeopardizes adolescents specifically, because the system asks least of them at the age when they can carry most. The founder's page places the book inside the Initiative's longer story.

Reviews and field studies

The archive's review of Patricia Hersch's A Tribe Apart follows three years inside adolescent America and the distance that grew between teenagers and the adults around them. The dual review of The Homework Myth and The Case Against Homework examines what the evidence on homework actually shows for this age group.

Adolescents, autonomy, and AI

New essays in this pillar are in preparation, including a reintroduction to adolescence as adaptation and a thirty-year retrospective on learning that goes with the grain of the brain. For the machine-intelligence side of the question, see AI and Learning; the restored corpus lives in the research archive.