The 50 Essential Experiences
I got to spend nearly three years doing research on adolescent psychology, development, and neuroscience, in preparation to open Millennium School in San Francisco. I visited schools and researchers all over the world, brainstormed with students, held evening discussions with parents, and spent many an hour reflecting on my own journey through middle and high school. As this went on, I realized it would be possible to get totally carried away thinking about getting the “standard” academics down smoother and faster, how to get test scores up, without ever thinking about what to my mind matters much more: How do you raise good people? People who know themselves authentically, have access to deep love, feel capable and confident in the world, can think in complex and creative ways, can relate openly to others who are different, and can make meaningful contributions to the world? That was much more interesting.
I began asking friends, parents, students, and those same researchers and education innovators: what experiences made the most difference during your adolescence? What were the experiences that made you feel capable, kind, strong, connected to others, able to do anything in the world? Which ones do you still remember clearly and positively now as an adult, times when you got a valuable clue about yourself, others, or the world?
The result of these conversations and all this thinking was a list of about 50 “essential experiences.” It’s certainly not a complete list, and it contains the biases of the people I asked and of memory, culture, and more. But, it’s an interesting starting point. Maybe an antidote to the stress of justifying endless academic crunching for the sake of a future admissions process. It began with a much larger list, and I tried to narrow it down to only those experiences that were backed by developmental research and were concrete, tangible, doable activities.
To make it a little easier to work with, I sorted the list of Essential Experiences into five categories. For each of these Experiences we’ve created curriculum, explanations, and specific activities for young people. So here goes:
Independence
1. Keep a Journal
2. Serve a Good Meal
3. Travel independently
4. Care for an infant
5. Work in a paid service job
6. Open a bank account
7. Perform or present to a large audience
8. Go solo in nature
9. Become an apprentice
10. Teach a complex skill
Connection
11. Belong to a team
12. Express your gratitude
13. Receive mentoring
14. Become an Active Listener
15. Create a work of art that moves others
16. Build a close relationship with someone over 75
17. Set a boundary with someone
18. Work with someone who does not speak your native language
19. Mediate a peer conflict
20. Lead a group
Healthy Body & Mind
21. Create a health habit
22. Earn certification for a physical skill
23. Develop an athletic skill with challenging training
24. Discover your culture's story about how your body should be
25. Discover your culture's story about gender
26. Practice mindfulness daily for a month
27. Learn how to calm yourself in challenging situations
28. Find a reason to celebrate a personal failure
29. Challenge a limiting belief about yourself
Awareness
30. Find awe in nature
31. Spend time in a group where you stick out
32. Visit a place of worship for an unfamiliar religion
33. Connect with your lineage
34. Deconstruct an advertisement
35. Debunk a source you used to trust
36. Discover bias in your thinking
37. Discover your privilege
38. Spend time with someone who is dying
39. Make your own ritual
40. Ask an unanswerable Big Question
Making the World Better
41. Do random acts of kindness daily for a week
42. Give service
43. Forgive Someone
44. Write a personal Credo
45. Be authentically weird
46. Stand up for someone
47. Participate in the democratic process
48. Give feedback to authority
49. Be a mentor or tutor
50. Address an injustice in your community
Not all of these are doable during the era of social distancing that will still shape this summer, but most are. The list is not intended as a “to-do list”. It’s more like a travel guide for an adventure. For an adolescent, it’s a list of experiences that could change you, reveal your talents, or give you insight into yourself or others or the world. Some of the experiences will push you to face fears, and as you do, you may realize that you have more skills and more gifts than you had known.