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

Two new essays open the pillar: Adolescence as adaptation: a reintroduction, which restates the Initiative's evolutionary argument for 2026, and The grain of the brain, thirty years on, a retrospective on learning that goes with the brain's grain rather than against it. For the machine-intelligence side of the question, see AI and Learning; the restored corpus lives in the research archive.

How this pillar connects to academic integrity

Adolescents are the students most exposed to the integrity question, because secondary school is where unsupervised written work carries the most weight and where a false accusation does the most damage. The Academic Integrity pillar takes that up directly: what a falsely accused student can show when a detector score is the only evidence, and why a short oral exam gives an adolescent the chance to demonstrate command of their own work that a marked script never did.