The Unravelling of a Seamless Education

Every May, I watch them leave. They cross the stage, collect their diplomas and walk out carrying everything they have learnt – and earnt – with us: the confidence, the university places, the carefully cultivated ability to read a room, assess what’s needed and deliver it. They are, by any measure we use, well prepared.

Is this enough? I’m less sure than I used to be. Because what we prepare them for is the morning of their lives – the years of building, achieving, proving themselves. We are very good at the morning, but recently I have been thinking more about the afternoon.

We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning, Carl Jung observed. For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. I don’t mean the midlife crisis of cliché – the sports car, the affair, the sudden urge to learn pottery. Jung’s point cuts deeper: the skills which make you successful in the first half may, if left unexamined, become the source of unhappiness in the second.

At school, we reward adaptability, resilience, the ability to move between cultures and feel at home anywhere. And for a while, often a long while, it works. Our students get the university places, the jobs, the career success. They shape-shift with remarkable skill, adjusting to each new context, apparently seamlessly. From the outside, it looks like flourishing.

Sometimes, anyway. I recently met a former student, call him Andrew,  at an alumni event, about eight years after he’d graduated. He’d done everything right: top university, competitive graduate scheme, rapid promotion. So I was surprised when he said I’m not unhappy, I just don’t recognise myself.  He wasn’t in crisis, but he was experiencing something perhaps even more unsettling: the realisation that the person he’d become was a reflection of other people’s specifications. Andrew was describing what the artist Dipa Halder calls the exhaustion of constantly working against your own grain – shaping yourself to fit what you think people want until you can’t tell the performance from the person. From the outside, everything looks fine, but you’re quietly disappearing inside a life designed for someone else.

I say this not as a critic of my own school. At UWCSEA, we think a lot about the question of who our students are becoming. We build programmes around character, service, self-knowledge; we talk explicitly about purpose and identity and we do not treat exam results as the finish line. It’s been central to what we do for decades. And still Andrew came back and said what he said.

But then there’s Vik. Vik was not, by any conventional measure, a success story while he was with us. He was the kind of student everyone liked but nobody quite reached. Bright enough, but he floated through school in a way that frustrated his teachers. He was all there as a person – you couldn’t miss Vik – but he coasted. By the usual metrics, he underachieved and left without the gleaming trajectory that Andrew carried so effortlessly. Life after school was uneven for many unexpected reasons, but he stumbled into business, found his footing – and then, somewhere in his twenties, something shifted. When we spoke, he had a different sentence: I think I finally know what my purpose is. He’s now building something in sustainability that matters to him in a way his earlier success never did. What strikes me is that while some seeds were planted at school, nobody engineered, or could have engineered, this. If anything, Vik’s morning was defined by friction – and maybe the friction itself was what saved him. He never built the seamless performing self that eventually trapped Andrew, so there was nothing to dismantle.

Two students, two very different paths to the afternoon. Andrew did everything the morning programme asked of him and lost something of himself in the process. Vik resisted the programme and took much longer to find his footing. But both arrived, eventually, at the same question: what is this actually for? Which suggests the question isn’t whether we’re doing it right or wrong. It’s whether any school can do more than set the conditions – and then wait. I wouldn’t want to let us off the hook entirely – I am sure we could do better, and perhaps I’m rationalising. But I suspect the deeper truth is that the afternoon is not a knowledge problem. Life will happen to everyone regardless of what we teach; we can give people the language to recognise the afternoon when it arrives, but we can’t live it for them.

So what can we do? Not, I think, deliver more talks about finding your purpose. We’ve been doing it for years already, and in any case teenagers tend to be allergic to that kind of thing (the rolling eyes are not only confined to parents). What we can do is something both simpler and harder: cultivate the habit of self-examination. Know thyself was carved into the stone at Delphi not as a suggestion, but as a prerequisite for entering the sacred space. It matters not because it solves the afternoon, but because without it you won’t even recognise the afternoon when it arrives. Andrew’s problem wasn’t that nobody warned him – it’s that he never developed the reflex of asking whether the life he was building was actually his. That’s a self-awareness gap, not an information gap. And self-awareness is something schools can genuinely cultivate – through the right questions, the right conversations, the right relationships – even if we can’t guarantee the outcome.

I still worry, though, because I know it won’t be enough. The real difficulty is that the afternoon can only be understood by someone who is already in it. We can’t expect young people to prepare for a version of themselves that doesn’t exist yet – not because they’re not listening, but because they would need to be a different person to understand it, and becoming that different person is precisely what the next twenty years will do to them. As Kierkegaard put it, life is lived forward and understood backward. There’s a freedom in that, if we let ourselves see it. We can give young people a great deal: knowledge, skills, confidence, even the language of self-reflection, but we cannot give them a self to reflect on. Nor should we want to – the self is theirs to build. It is assembled slowly, through experience, friction, loss, and the accumulating weight of choices made and not made. The identity you build in the morning – competent, adaptable, impressive – may become the very thing you need to escape in the afternoon. And no one can tell you that in advance, because the person who needs to hear it is still in the process of becoming.

I find this consoling. It means that the limits of what we can do for our students come from what it means to be human. Every generation of educators and parents has watched young people walk into lives that will reshape them in ways nobody can predict, and every generation has had to make peace with the fact that whatever happens in formal education, life will do its own teaching. We let them go, trusting that the same life which will unsettle them will also, in its own time, teach them what school couldn’t. 

Further Reading

• George, B., Sims, P., McLean, A. N., & Mayer, D. (2007, February). Discovering your authentic leadership. Harvard Business Review, 85(2), 129 – 138.https://hbr.org/2007/02/discovering-your-authentic-leadership
• Halder, D. (2022, November 15). The exhaustion of the performative self. International Schools Network. https://isn.education/articles/wellbeing/the-exhaustion-of-the-performative-self/
• Jung, C. G. (1969). The stages of life (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Structure & dynamics of the psyche (2nd ed., Vol. 8, pp. 387 – 403). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1930)
• Kierkegaard, S. (1938). The journals of Kierkegaard (A. Dru, Ed. & Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1843)