About a year after Britain started its National Lottery in 1994, sharp-eyed sociologists began looking into what had happened to the winners. Had sudden wealth revolutionized people’s lives, freeing them to pursue lives of wild originality? Fascinatingly, the answer seemed to be: no. Most of the nouveau riche remained in their original houses, kept on at their jobs, kept up with their friends, and, if they were married, stayed that way. The template of life that lottery winners followed before they got rich quickly seems to be the one they keep.
It may be that life was already satisfactory, but there is another possible explanation: Complete freedom to do what you want is surely rather scary.
This idea of templates — and the comfort of having one to follow — came to mind in very different circumstances recently.
For a school auction, it was my job to dream up an art project to include in a fifth-grade basket of goodies. The idea is that parents will bid furiously against each other at an upcoming fundraising gala, thus raising money for the school. Our theme was “cooking,” and I had what seemed to me the brilliant Steve Jobs-esque idea of asking each girl to create a menu of her favorite family meal, which we’d pair with recipes to create a rare and wonderful cookbook.
So the teacher and I gave the girls blank sheets of paper, utensils for writing and coloring, clear instructions as to what was expected (or so we thought) and an hour of freedom.
It did not go as planned. Some girls took the entire time allotted just writing out a title. Some colored the page so heavily that their words could not be read. Some created exquisite drawings and lettering worthy of an illuminated manuscript — yet crammed everything up in one corner, or slanting sideways as if melting on the page.
What the girls needed, I realized with sinking heart as I leafed through the wildly varied results of their free expression, was a template. They had ideas, but without some limits they were lost.
A friend of mine remembers going to a toy store once with her 5-year-old son and her father, who didn’t see the boy often. With a grand sweep of his arm toward racks of colorful toys, the grandfather said: “Whatever you want, kiddo! Choose whatever you want!”
The boy burst into tears. It was too much freedom. Without a limit, he was lost. That is when his mother knelt down and said quietly, “You may have one Lego set, no bigger than this,” and she made a box with her hands. Off he went, relieved.
Everyone has the idea that it’s desirable to think “outside the box,” but as the art project, the little boy and even the lottery winners would seem to show, having a box that you can stay inside might actually be a great deal more pleasant.
As for the fifth-graders, we started again by showing the girls a sample page with a title, an illustration and where they needed to write a paragraph. The results were fantastic. Now all we need is for parents to bid energetically.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
