What Is This?
Simon Sarris's School Is Not Enough argues that modern childhood has become too separated from useful work.
The essay is not a simple anti-school rant. The stronger claim is that formal school can teach knowledge while still failing to build agency. Agency is not produced by worksheets, credentials, and abstract preparation alone. It grows when young people are trusted with real work, real responsibility, visible consequences, and paths into mastery.
Sarris's clean line is:
The purpose of education is to develop agency within a child.
That makes this a useful library article because it reframes education as an agency-production system, not a credential-delivery system.
Why Does It Matter?
Most people treat school as the default path because the alternative sounds reckless. Sarris is pointing at a narrower and more useful question:
If a young person is capable of doing real work now, why do we force them to spend most of their developmental years doing artificial work instead?
The article matters for Jamie because it connects several recurring models:
- Agency: the capacity to act outside the default script.
- Apprenticeship: learning by legitimate participation in real work.
- Mastery: skill built through depth, repetition, and feedback.
- Low-status onramps: doing useful, unglamorous things early.
- Education design: replacing passive preparation with active contribution.
The core update is not "kids should drop out." It is: school should not monopolize the years when a person could be learning how to act on the world.
The Core Model: Useful Childhoods
Sarris starts from biographies. Early lives often show future exceptional people doing meaningful work before adulthood:
- Leonardo da Vinci was apprenticed to Verrocchio at 14.
- Walt Disney was doing jobs, including paper delivery, by 11.
- Vladimir Nabokov published poetry at 16.
- Andrew Carnegie left school at 12 and became a telegraph office boy at 13.
The details are less important than the pattern. They had what Sarris calls useful childhoods.
A useful childhood is not child labour romanticism. It is a developmental environment where the child can:
- reach for real tasks,
- be around competent adults,
- build visible skill,
- contribute to something that matters,
- gain self-possession through competence,
- discover that the world is actionable.
School often gives the opposite: low-consequence tasks, age-segregated peers, external evaluation, and delayed usefulness.
Agency Means Going Off-Script
Sarris defines agency as the capacity to act. More precisely, gaining agency means gaining the ability to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you.
That phrase matters: agency is not motivation. It is the learned sense that paths can be altered.
Children do not get that sense from being told they are talented. They get it from action loops:
try something real
-> hit friction
-> adapt
-> become useful
-> see the world change
-> update self-model: I can act
This is why small real work can be more formative than polished classroom achievement. A child who sells pastries all summer does not only learn pastry. They learn that skill can become value, value can become trust, and trust can become identity.
Why School Alone Struggles To Produce Agency
School is optimized for legibility.
That makes sense at institutional scale. A system needs timetables, subjects, grades, assessments, attendance rules, and age cohorts. But agency often grows from illegible paths: weird interests, apprenticeships, local problems, craft obsession, adult trust, and responsibility before formal readiness.
Sarris's critique is that modern school too often becomes a holding pattern. It says:
You can act on the world later. First, complete the approved sequence.
The sequence is safer than chaos, but it has a cost. If everyone must do the same tasks, it becomes harder for any student to do exceptional things.
The result is an onramp problem. Our era has more learning resources than any previous era, but young people often lack concrete paths into responsibility.
Apprenticeship Explains What School Misses
This is where Sarris connects with situated learning.
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's model of legitimate peripheral participation describes how novices become competent by participating in real communities of practice. Newcomers start at the edge, doing low-risk but real tasks. Over time, they move toward fuller participation.
The important contrast:
- School often separates learning from the real practice.
- Apprenticeship places learning inside the practice.
A novice tailor, designer, programmer, cook, carpenter, founder, or researcher learns not just facts, but judgment: what matters, what good looks like, what failure means, which shortcuts are dangerous, and how competent people carry themselves.
That is hard to simulate with classroom tasks.
The Motivation Layer
Self-determination theory gives another useful lens. Deci and Ryan argue that human motivation depends heavily on three psychological needs:
- Autonomy: feeling that one's action is self-endorsed.
- Competence: feeling able to affect outcomes.
- Relatedness: feeling connected to others.
Useful work can satisfy all three when designed well. A young person chooses, struggles, improves, and becomes needed by others.
Bad school environments can frustrate all three: little autonomy, competence reduced to grades, and weak connection between effort and real contribution.
So the deeper issue is not school versus no school. It is whether the learning environment gives the learner a path into autonomy, competence, relatedness, and real responsibility.
Why Smart People Get This Wrong
They confuse knowledge with agency
A student can know many facts and still not believe they can act. Agency requires action loops, not just information transfer.
They confuse safety with preparation
Keeping young people away from real responsibility may reduce short-term risk, but it can create long-term fragility. Preparedness comes from graded exposure to reality, not endless rehearsal.
They romanticize credentials
Credentials can be useful signals. But they are not the same as mastery, taste, judgment, courage, or usefulness.
They assume alternatives must be totalizing
The choice is not "school forever" versus "drop out and hustle." Better options include apprenticeships, project-based work, family businesses, maker spaces, studios, online mentorship, community projects, and part-time real responsibility alongside formal education.
How To Use This
1. Ask what the learning environment is producing
Do not ask only: what curriculum is being covered?
Ask:
- Is this building agency?
- Is the learner becoming useful?
- Is there real feedback?
- Is there a path into mastery?
- Does the work matter outside the institution?
2. Look for onramps, not just content
The internet solved access to content. It did not automatically solve access to responsibility.
The scarce thing is not another tutorial. It is a believable next step into real practice.
3. Treat useful work as identity formation
When someone becomes useful, their self-model changes. They stop seeing adulthood as a distant permission state and start seeing the world as something they can act on now.
4. Preserve school where it works
Sarris's argument is strongest when school crowds out meaningful work. School is still useful when it provides literacy, numeracy, peers, structure, specialist teaching, and social mobility. The mistake is letting school become the only serious developmental container.
Practical Takeaways For Jamie
- Agency is built through real action loops. The learner needs to see effort alter the world.
- Useful work is not a distraction from education. It can be the mechanism that makes education stick.
- Apprenticeship is an underrated learning primitive. Low-risk real tasks beat artificial tasks when the goal is judgment and agency.
- The bottleneck is onramps. The internet gives resources; learners still need paths into responsibility.
- School should be judged by what it produces. Credentials are secondary to agency, mastery, and self-possession.
Key Terms
- Agency: the capacity to act and alter the default path.
- Useful childhood: a developmental environment where a young person does real, meaningful work early.
- Mastery: deep skill developed through repeated practice, feedback, and responsibility.
- Legitimate peripheral participation: Lave and Wenger's term for how newcomers learn by taking real but low-risk roles inside a community of practice.
- Community of practice: a group organized around a shared craft, profession, or activity.
- Self-determination theory: a motivation framework built around autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
- Onramp: a concrete path from interest into real participation.
Recall Questions
- What is the difference between knowledge acquisition and agency formation?
- Why does Sarris emphasize useful childhoods?
- How does apprenticeship solve a problem that classroom learning often struggles with?
- What are the three self-determination theory needs, and how can useful work satisfy them?
- What would an onramp-rich education system look like?
Best Resources To Learn More
- Read Sarris first for the core agency argument.
- Pair it with Lave and Wenger for apprenticeship and communities of practice.
- Pair it with Deci and Ryan for the motivational layer behind autonomy and competence.
Sources
- Simon Sarris. School Is Not Enough. Palladium Magazine. 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/06/school-is-not-enough
- Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press. 1991. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511815355. https://www.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815355
- Lauren Margulieux. Book Summary: Lave & Wenger (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. 2018. https://laurenmarg.com/2018/09/07/book-summary-lave-wenger-1991-situated-learning-legitimate-peripheral-participation
- Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist. 2000. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68.
- Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective. Contemporary Educational Psychology. 2020. https://stial.ie/resources/Ryan%20and%20Deci%202020%20self%20determination%20theory.pdf