Your Child Is Doing Exactly What You Asked For

A Harvard headline made the rounds in education circles this week: starting fall 2027, no more than 20% of any undergraduate class (plus four extra students) can receive an A. The dean of undergraduate education wrote to faculty this summer urging them to start applying the cap this fall. Students on campus are already scrambling, hunting the class-review sites for so-called "gems," backing away from anything that looks like it might drag their GPA down.

Your first reaction to that news might be: good, about time. Ours is different. We want to tell you what Harvard is actually working on right now: using a rule to shove curiosity back into an undergraduate's schedule, something that shouldn't need a rule.

How did this generation of the country's most accomplished kids lose their curiosity? Bloomberg went to ask. One rising junior, Colleen Meosky, said: "I'm just not being as adventurous as I was my first year. I don't see learning for the sake of learning outweighing future job prospects." That is a devastatingly honest sentence. She isn't wrong. And what she's describing is exactly what our generation of parents, over the last fifteen years, patiently taught her.

Do you remember how you talked to her back then? "You have to work harder." "You need this grade to get into a good school." "You need this school to get a good job." "Take piano to grade ten." "Add another project, your resume needs it." You didn't mean harm, you're the one who crossed the narrow bridge yourself, and you know better than anyone how thin the plank is. You just handed down, as honestly as you could, the survival rules you had learned.

And this kid, she rose to it. She really did. She's at the school you told her she needed to be at. But she brought with her a side-effect you didn't plan for: she is no longer able to simply be curious. Every choice has to be run through the calculator of "does this help my next step?" She has been running that math for so long that even one afternoon of no-strategic-value has started to feel like guilt.

And now her dean, a dean, at the school that arguably has the best instruments in the world for evaluating student potential, is having to ask professors: please make your courses harder. Please make an A rarer. Please make curiosity a thing worth doing again. Which means: your child is doing exactly what you asked her to do. Harvard is now trying, after she did it, to bring her back.

This isn't a piece written to make you feel bad. What you did was fight, inside the rules you could see, to give her the widest possible opening. We just want to ask you, the next time she comes home for a break, to do one different thing:

Ask her about one thing that has nothing to do with her future. Something like: have you been curious about anything lately, not because it's useful, just because you wanted to understand it? You don't need to give advice. You don't need to comment. You just need her to notice that the parent who has been pushing her all these years is giving her permission to have one part of herself that doesn't have to be converted into return.

You may get an awkward silence. She may not have an answer right away. That's fine. The question itself, coming from you, is a gift, you are handing something back to her. The thing you are handing back is what she still had, whole, when she was five years old, walking up to you with a pebble in her hand and saying "look, doesn't this one look like a heart?"