Agency is rate-limited by competence

Andrew Bateman believes that agency is rate-limited by competence. His definition of agency is the belief that one "can author my own life".

Traditional education kills agency by removing choice and interest. Progressive education kills agency by removing excellence and competence.

Whilst we should be Deschooling our need for productivity and creating space for high autonomy environments, High autonomy does not necessarily lead to high agency without the ingredients of excellence and competence. So how do we bring those in?

Bateman argues that you need both a range of competencies in a handful of different domains and a learning culture of excellence - an arena to apply it in. I think that this is what Apprenticeships traditionally were, skill acquisition in a nested and related set of domains with an arena in which to apply it that got broader and deeper over time as your competencies grew.

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).^[1]

Choice can be offered and competence can be scaffolded. The hardest thing to solve for, the most developmentally fragile, is persistence.

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.

Despite his initial tweet seeming to be disparaging of "progressive education", I think the rest of his thoughts seem to align quite well with self-direction. Getting joyfully lost in a task first to build the skills is the self-directed process.

I think it is easy to see how to apply these self-directed principles at home. Each person is unique and there may be challenges underneath the hood of these simple principles. Executive functioning skills for example might create extra challenges for neurodivergent young people in developing persistence.

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.

Question for facilitators and youth rights activists?

• What are the implications of that last quote for learning community design for teenagers? For teenagers is this actually the case?
• Erik Erikson
• How do we Create apprenticeships that are scalable so that we can bolster competence and agency?