We Are Raising the Most Educated, Least Capable Generation in History

I have stood at the front of a classroom for 1o+ years.

In that time I have watched something quietly catastrophic happen, and almost nobody is willing to say it out loud. So I will.

Children today are more credentialed than any generation that has ever lived. They have more tutors, more enrichment, more screens, more counsellors, more awards on the wall, and more letters after their tenth birthday than I had after my master’s degree. And yet they cannot tie their own shoes without YouTube. They cannot sit alone with a thought for ninety seconds. They cannot lose a game without renegotiating the rules afterward. They cannot read a difficult page without a translator app. They cannot finish what they started.

This is not a moral failure on their part. They are the smartest, kindest, most globally aware students I have ever taught. The failure is ours.

We have spent the last two decades engineering childhood for outputs we can measure and quietly stripping out everything we could not. Boredom is gone. Struggle is gone. Unsupervised time is gone. Loss, embarrassment, the quiet ache of having to figure something out by yourself, all gone. We replaced them with packed schedules, scripted lessons, and the constant background hum of adult management. And then we are confused when an eighteen year old shows up at university unable to make a doctor’s appointment on their own.

Let me say something uncomfortable.

The crisis of teen anxiety is not a mystery. It is what happens when you raise a human being who has never been allowed to be uncomfortable. Capability is built through difficulty survived. Take away the difficulty, and you take away the capability. We did this on purpose. We thought we were being kind.

I have watched bright children who were once fearless turn into fragile applicants by sixteen, terrified of any grade that is not perfect, any peer who is more impressive, any future they cannot fully control. They have been trained, all their lives, that their worth is a number on a transcript. So of course they are anxious. We built that anxiety brick by brick, with the best of intentions.

The schools are not blameless. I work in this system. I know it. Somewhere along the way we stopped trying to form whole human beings and started optimising metric outputs. Reading scores. Test scores. College/university acceptance rates. The things we cannot put on a spreadsheet, things like patience, courage, attention, kindness under pressure, we quietly stopped teaching, because nobody could rank them. And what cannot be ranked, in this culture, ceases to exist.

But the truth is, parents are the bigger lever. I say this with affection, not accusation. I am a parent too. We have outsourced the hardest parts of raising a child to institutions that were never designed to do that work. We send them to school for academics and then ask the school to also handle character, emotional regulation, social skills, motivation, ambition, and grit. Then we are surprised when the school cannot deliver any of it.

Here is the heretical thing I want you to consider.

A child who has read fewer books but finishes the ones they start is more educated than a child who has skimmed a hundred. A child who can sit at a dinner table and hold a conversation with a stranger is more prepared for adulthood than a child with a perfect SAT. A child who has been bored, truly bored, and learned to invent their own afternoon, has a creative engine no enrichment program will ever build. A child who has been told no and survived it is closer to real confidence than a child who has been told yes for their entire life.

If you want to give your child a real advantage in the world they are about to enter, do not buy them another course. Give them responsibility. Give them silence. Give them a job that has consequences. Let them fail something that matters. Let them be ordinary for a while.

The most powerful gift you can give a child in 2026 is no longer information. They have all of it, on a device, in their pocket. The gift is the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a person who can do hard things. That work cannot be downloaded. It has to be lived.

A decade in, this is the only thing I am sure of anymore.

We do not need smarter children. We have those already.

We need stronger ones.