Mat Messerschmidt
The Lost American Childhood
If ever I want to feel old at forty, I can think back to my childhood, which seems to have taken place in a different world than that inhabited by children today. My childhood was very free, by which I mean, above all, free from school. Every child feels put upon by school, but, having taught high school in Europe, I can now say that my grade school years were really not that encumbered by it, comparatively. We had incredibly long summer breaks, which were spent, from a young age, freely roaming a suburban neighborhood built around a park that took up a whole block, adjacent alleys, and nearly-public front lawns. There was time to get into trouble, time for trial and error, time to invent games.
By high school I had moved to a different suburban neighborhood in a different state, but again, reflecting in hindsight as an adult who taught school for five years, what strikes me is how free my new friends and I were. At the beginning of high school I had brain surgery and could no longer anchor my sense of self in sports, so I joined a group of renegade readers, all of whom saw themselves as too smart for school, because they were. We were an ideologically shifting but radical crowd who spent hours at a time (often the hours when physics class was in session, just after the lunch break) arguing about the organization of society in light of whatever we’d just read. At one point we were a right-wing apologist for feudalism and monarchy, an anarcho-socialist, a libertarian, a passionate union advocate, and one individual who was relatively politically unaligned, as far as I remember. But our allegiances shifted – mine certainly did. We argued and we rethought. We published proclamations in the official school newspaper and at one point some of us formed a renegade newspaper. We all disagreed on everything; we all said preposterous things and then at some later point realized they were preposterous. But we were united by the conviction – pretentious and elitist, but also accurate – that what we were doing was superior to school, that reading or arguing about Kant or Marx or Hayek during physics class was superior to taking a physics quiz, not because physics was a fallen subject but because school was a fallen place.
Having spent a great deal of my adult life in Europe, four of them teaching school, I’ve come to understand this childhood as deeply American, for better and worse. Even in the college town in which I went to high school, the public school serving the children of professors had standards that were unconscionably low by European standards. Sometimes the disparity between European and American education is exaggerated both in intellectual discourse and in the public imagination, but it is real, nevertheless. American education demands less. Yet the laxity of American school also created a free space for experimentation. I call it “laxity” because I don’t want to romanticize it (it does, in plenty of students, result in laziness), but this paradigm of freedom from school had an upside. The nostalgic narrative of the poor student finding his genius by renouncing or abandoning school could be called a piece of Americana if it were not so incredibly well-worn that Americans have failed to recognize that it is not the worldwide standard, that the perennial return to that story is in fact an American thing. American business leaders, inventors, rock musicians, and artists seem to begin their origin stories more frequently with the moment they quit school than with any other watershed moment in life. This story is told as that of a risk that pays off: creative power, shackled by school, is finally set free. But even those who stayed in school, when I was a child, were relatively free from school, as inhabitants of the American system, and everyone in the ideologically diverse group of friends I just described had absorbed this messaging that opposed school to the intellect and imagination set free. Bill Gates and Lady Gaga, famous dropouts, and deeply American ones, may have found their business and artistic genius by not taking schoolbooks too seriously, but I found my way to academia, and the love of books implied by that profession, by not taking schoolbooks too seriously. The “think for yourself” imperative implicit in American school skepticism may have nurtured a will to intellectual independence and free exploration on more than one occasion in my generation and before.
I think, though, that the world of American childhood freedom that I have been describing is a world of the past. It would be one thing if this were the result of some new higher set of standards, as if every American high school student now needed to read Homer and Shakespeare in order to graduate, and it was readings like these that were cutting into students’ once-glorious summers, but no one would ever think of saying that that is the case. Students’ lives outside of the classroom has simply been stripped of the freedom I just described as a basic element of my own childhood. The logic of the division of labor, articulated in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, no longer governs strictly economic activity, but has permeated the lifeworld and determined the character of parenting, creating a paradigm in which expertise is felt to be needed for every aspect of life that happens after school: parents need self-help books telling them how to parent, and a different professional to help them with every aspect of their children’s development. In addition to various after-school activities oriented toward boosting a skill or a resume, psychologists, another form of specialized help, often serve to outsource emotional care. Children are not reading more or doing more math, but minutes of their lives are allocated more consciously than ever before.
But beyond the blunt reality of diminished unstructured hours, we have created a world in which the luster of the risk-taking and experimentation my agemates and I engaged in has diminished, and the punishment for it has become more devastating. Elementary school children do not choose the emptiness of the green park, a blank space in which to invent games, over the sensory fullness, or even sensory overload, of video games that adults have designed for them. High schoolers do not choose to sit, monarchist next to anarchist, in lunchtime reading groups, penning for the school newspaper what would today be cancellable manifestos, because adults have created a world in which Democrats unfollow Republicans on social media for being Republicans, and have let teenagers into this world of childish adulthood by allowing them social media accounts. Students are not learning more in school than when I was a child. But, in the world outside of school, which, in the America of my childhood, seemed like a very rich place to learn, they are certainly learning less today, because they are exploring less, venturing less, risking less.
The beauty of childhood, when I was a child, was the opportunity to get things wrong. I skipped physics class countless times and then was hired as an educator; my friends and I wrote ridiculous things out of juvenile political conviction and then rethought them, ending up as political organizers or, in my case, a teacher of college political theory courses. The freedom to fail that we enjoyed has been stamped out of very online children who see that to say or do one ill-advised thing means mass condemnation in the age of the algorithm, children who have been fed injections of dopamine via TikTok instead of being encouraged to seek out thrilling – and potentially risky – experiences themselves.
Adults built the world that has made American childhood in its former sense impossible. This could occur without widespread self-flagellation on the part of American parents because their basic crime was not that they took some great risk-laden action that turned out to be a mistake, but that they did nothing: they were utterly passive in the face of massive technological change that severely stunted the world of children. By and large, they didn’t resist video games; they didn’t resist smartphones for every child; they didn’t resist the “there’s an app for everything” mentality that compelled them to believe that every second of their child’s life needed to be curated according to professional recommendations. Because adults have behaved like children in the worst sense, children cannot behave like children in the best sense.
INDICAȚII DE CITARE
Mat Messerschmidt ,,The Lost American Childhood’’ în Anthropos. Revista de filosofie, arte și umanioare nr. 7-8 / 2026
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