The Week Both Our Cars Got Stolen (And What It Taught Me About Agency)
Friday morning. 6:47 AM.
My wife walks outside to take one of our kids to an early practice and comes back in thirty seconds later. "My car is gone."
We both look at each other. Check the driveway again. Check the street. Gone.
Then I notice, my car isn’t there either…
Both cars. Same night. Stolen from our own driveway.
What followed was one of the most logistically chaotic weekends of our lives. Five kids. Multiple schools. Work commitments. Speaking engagements. Lacrosse tournaments. Rides that needed to happen at the same time in places twenty minutes apart. Insurance calls. Police reports. Rental car negotiations. Borrowed vehicles. Rescheduled meetings. Favors called in.
I could keep going, but most likely you get it. You’ve been there with some type of situation at home, or at work, or somewhere.
Nobody handed us a playbook and there was no step-by-step guide for "what to do when your entire family's transportation disappears overnight with five kids still depending on you."
We just had to figure it out.
Here's what hit me in the middle of all of it. This is real agency. Not a worksheet. Not a choice board. Not student voice in a focus group. The actual ability to look at a broken situation, hold competing demands at the same time, make decisions with incomplete information, keep moving forward, and not fall apart waiting for someone else to fix it.
Agency Is a Skill. Are We Teaching It?
Most schools talk about agency like it's a disposition or simply a personality trait. We act like it is something kids either have or don't.
They're wrong.
Agency is a skill set. It's learnable and it is trainable. It is by far one of the most important things we could be developing in young people, and one of the things K-12 schooling most consistently undermines.
Think about what agency actually requires in practice:
Problem identification. When our cars disappeared, nobody told us what the problem was or what to prioritize. We had to assess the situation ourselves. Most school tasks start with the problem already defined, already bounded, already handed over.
Decision-making under uncertainty. We didn't have all the information. We made calls anyway. Schools tend to reward waiting for the right answer rather than making reasonable decisions with what you have.
Resource mapping. Who can help? What do we have? What can we trade, borrow, or rearrange? Kids who develop agency learn to scan their environment for leverage. Most students are taught to raise their hand and wait.
Tolerance for discomfort. It was a hard week. Things didn't go smoothly and we adapted. Agency requires the psychological capacity to sit in difficulty without shutting down (what researchers call frustration tolerance). That capacity is built through practice, not protection.
Follow-through across competing demands. Work still had to happen. Kids still needed to get places. The world didn't pause. High-agency people don't wait for conditions to be ideal, they execute anyway.
None of these showed up on a rubric. None of them were assessed on a standardized test. But every single one is a skill that will determine how well our kids navigate adult life.
What We're Actually Doing in School
The traditional K-12 model was not designed to build agency. It was designed to build compliance. We both know that is true, because we’ve been through K-12 ourselves, and if you are reading this you are most likely an educator, or parent, or both.
Compliance looks like…
Show up on time. Follow the schedule. Complete the assigned task. Wait for the next instruction. Earn the grade. Move on.
For a century, that was fine. The economy rewarded people who could follow directions consistently and reliably. The industrial model needed workers who fit the machine.
That world is gone. Let’s be honest, it was gone before AI.
What's replacing it requires something completely different. It requires people who can define their own problems, navigate ambiguity, recover from failure, and keep moving without a supervisor telling them what to do next.
And yet we're still running schools like the machine still exists.
What High-Agency Learners Actually Look Like
I want to be specific here, because "agency" can become one of those education buzzwords that means everything and nothing.
A high-agency learner, in practice:
Starts tasks without needing to be prompted
Asks for help strategically, not reflexively
Recovers from confusion rather than shutting down
Makes choices about how to approach a problem, not just which answer to pick
Sees obstacles as information, not as reasons to stop
Takes ownership of outcomes, including bad ones
These are behaviors. These behaviors can be taught, modeled, practiced, and reinforced.
The question is whether we're designing schools to build those behaviors, or to suppress them?
The Practical Stakes
My wife and I got through the week. We even used OnStar to get one car back! The kids got where they needed to go.
But I kept thinking about students I know who would have been paralyzed by a fraction of that disruption. Mostly because no one ever put them in a position where they had to figure something out without a safety net, without a rubric, without someone telling them what to do next.
We have spent 12-13 years training some of our most capable kids to be dependent on external direction, external validation, external structure.
Then we wonder why they struggle when the world doesn't provide any of those things.
Agency is the foundation under everything else and the thing that determines whether all the content knowledge and academic skills we've worked so hard to build actually gets used when it matters.
We have to start treating it that way.
