Happy Friday, everyone.
If I had to choose one adjective for our approach to education, it would be “high-agency”. As in: Guidepost offers high-agency education. We offer an education that cultivates agency.
An agent is someone who is active in the world. An agent is a cause, a doer, a bringer about of things. To stress agency, to say that it can be higher or lower and that it’s good when it’s higher, is to stress the active, self-moving part of living. It’s to say that what’s important is our power to take circumstance and make something of it—exactly which something to make being part of what is in our active power to decide.
Agency is, roughly, what Montessori meant by “independence”. It’s choice, but it’s more than that: it’s the power to choose, and also to follow through with self-direction, and to do so competently. When I talk about a person being “high agency”, I mean all of these things. Being high agency is possessing high intentionality about what to do, high willingness to do it, and a high degree of ability to succeed at it.
Seeing this mixture of will and skill all together—seeing them all as one really huge, really important thing: agency—is not the most natural perspective. Potential confusions abound, and so do alternate, more simplistic understandings of agency:
Agency is more often thought of merely as choice, as what you consciously choose to do. Someone who is “high agency” might be pictured as a rebel, a loner, someone with a high degree of independence from common standards. And agency is not commonly seen as something that develops; some people just seem naturally higher agency than others.
Some months ago, when delivering a teacher training on agency, I wrote out 20 short bullet points meant to clarify what agency is, in light of what I regard as common confusions. These aren’t arguments, they are just a blast of perspectives, an enumeration of facets, meant to ease one’s orientation to this idea of agency. My students found them helpful, and so I offer them to you here:
Traditional education kills agency by removing choice and interest. Progressive education kills agency by removing excellence and competence.
Agency is rate limited by competence.
Being trait agential usually flows from developing solid baseline competence in a handful of different domains. Like: one technical domain, one intellectual domain, one interpersonal domain, one creative domain.
Build a shed, develop informed opinions about history, resolve your social anxiety, learn an instrument. These and like victories are the countless premises from which the conclusion “I can author my life” follows.
Being high agency doesn’t mean being a lone wolf, it means creating your pack.
Conversely, belonging is downstream of agency, especially in adolescence and beyond.
There’s a common and wrong idea of agency in which it is exercised in selecting something from the menu but not in eating it. Agency is self-direction more broadly, not choice or selection.·
Choice is big muscles, an initial lift; competence is small muscles, granular control; persistence is endurance, sustained interest. Agency is the sum of these (and more).
Choice can offered and competence can be scaffolded. The hardest thing to solve for, the most developmentally fragile, is persistence.
Having your own standards doesn’t necessarily mean having different standards. Living differently is a dramatic illustration of agency, not a definition of it. Being high agency can look quite normie.
Relatedly, getting too deeply sucked into the aesthetic of being non-standard is low agency. To be reflexively non-standard is to be beholden to the standard.
“Critical” thinking" is not higher agency than thinking. Critique is not the only way to be thoughtful, to be intentional, to form knowledge. It is one way, and a way that is often suboptimal way.
Agency is not a natural state. Removing blockers to agency is important but it’s more important to build the scaffolding of agency, which is not there by default.
It’s most important to think about the big things agentially—the arc of your life, relationships, work, beliefs and values—but the small things also matter. Fix small problems with low-hanging solutions. Cold? Buy a space heater. Too much TV? Make a date night.
History, done right and with a progress bent, helps bring agency into focus. “We can’t—” —Shh. We went to the moon.
The endurance part of agency is built first by getting joyfully lost in a task. The capacity to occasionally do things you don’t like comes in large part from developing the capacity to do things you do like. Most people never develop the latter and so struggle with the former.
Content itself can be higher or lower agency. Teaching things historically, as having been discovered, created, established by human effort, is a high agency curricular frame. Teaching history intellectually, as driven first by ideas, beliefs, values, is high agency.
Playing sports, learning an instrument, putting on a play, getting a job, making an app—if the education you’re offering isn’t actively helping with these and cognate modes of developing agency, then it had better not be blocking them.
Many of the components of education thought to be low-agency are actually perfectly suited for high-agency education. Practice. Repetition. Memorization. These are good methods by which to intentionally shape your own soul.
Agency is for everyone. It’s like honesty. It’s a virtue to be cultivated, not a lucky personality trait.
Have a great weekend,
Matt Bateman
Executive Director, Montessorium
> Agency is rate limited by competence.
And power? Kids often lack power, which is why stories about wizards and superheroes can be so appealing.
As a kid, if you really want to author your own life, you'll need to cultivate certain virtues that lead to power. For example, adults will happily cede control to young people who are reliable and trustworthy.
Thank you, Matt.
Agency is the term I've found is a great substitution for the idea of Free Will. The words, "Free Will," mean being in charge of your own life and making choices, is a conceptual phrase, representing the single concept, agency. People have been debating Free Will for two hundred years, and most schools teach that free will is a myth and determinism is inherent.
No such problem adheres to agency. A person can develop a confirmation bias toward determinism or to agency. Both biases are cultural, the result of thought, training, and development. In primitive societies, the chief's children have agency, the other children do not. It's that simple. In totalitarian societies, the elites have agency, the others have less. In a laissez-faire society, the job of parents is to raise their children to grow into agency.
Agency as a concept for children is probably the best thing a parent or teacher could ever impart to the child. I know from personal experience. When I was in fifth grade, I took up the clarinet. The instrument was stiff and new, very difficult to play. Miss Howden, my music teacher, was patient. She was a thin, elderly spinster. When the school choir didn't behave, her chin would tremble and her eyes would tear up.
She gave me a piece to learn for a music festival. It was not a hard piece but to get any good sound was a challenge. She worked with me two or three days a week before school and in band after school. I was very nervous. She made me see how my success was important to her. I practiced a lot, and I won a blue ribbon for my solo. That was nice, but what she told my mother was priceless, and has informed my actions ever since.
Miss Howden was very proud of my blue ribbon and said to my mother, "That girl is going to accomplish in life whatever she sets her mind to."
Her words were a challenge and a burden, and I cannot tell you how many times those words scared, sustained, and inspired me to push forward. Miss Howden gave me agency by way of my mother.
I never fell for the determinism crap, the multiculturalism hash or the "oh, poor me mentality."
Thank you, Matt for this article. The children you are teaching and their parents are getting a priceless gift, and I hope that my story will help you show its value.