Now that I have a kid, my son Seneca, I think a lot about how I desire to raise him. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot about is schooling, particularly modern day schooling.
What is the point of school anyways?
It seems that the purpose of modern day school is just free daycare. For example, most parents must work, and also the modern trend is now both husband and wife both go to work. Or you have a single parent and they are the breadwinner. Thus, when the kid is old enough, what do you do? You send your kid to school because partly you want the kid to become educated, to learn how to do basic things like reading and writing, and basic mathematics. Also, you just need a convenient place to store them while you go to work, or you desire some free time for yourself.
How schooling corrupts kids
The best piece of literature I grew up with as a kid is the Calvin and Hobbes comic book series. I loved it so much because Calvin was indeed a philosopher, and during his nature walks with his tiger Hobbes, he would philosophize and meander on these musings on life.
The first notion is about organized sports. Calvin would love to play stick ball with his tiger Hobbes, in which they were just make up the rules as they went. This was the most fun and entertaining for them. Yet there was a series in which Calvin joins the local school baseball team, and has no fun. He hated waiting around, following orders, obeying foreign rules, etc. In fact, the experience was absolutely miserable to him, and it negatively lowered his self-esteem.
The downside of traditional K-12 education is that all the kids are standardized, put into a box in a rating system, in the ranking system, and in order to succeed, they must follow arbitrary rules. And what is the ultimate goal of traditional K-12 education? It is to score the highest on standardized tests, to do the most virtuous community activities, in order to get into the most high-ranking and most prestigious university, in order to get a high-paying job, or great positions of power.
But what happens along the way? The self-esteem of the child becomes metricated into numbers, percentages, and letter grades. Also, children are beaten into obedience: consider, the first thing you must learn to do as a school child is to become obedient, sit down when you want to run around, and deal with boredom. Also, talking back or challenging the teacher is seen as bad whereas it in fact might be the best thing to do.
Also the problem is that it seems that a lot of teachers don’t even want to be there. That some teachers go into teaching from idealism and eventually get jaded, or burnt out, or some teachers have just been teaching so long that they want to quickly retire and get their pension. Also, even though it is respected in America to be a teacher, you get low pay, and not much prestige. Therefore, most teachers in public schools tend to be middle educated folks, may be graduating from low ranking elite public institution, or a local state university.
With private schools, it seems that a lot of the teachers are actually well paid, and a lot of them are actually PhD graduates, who cannot get a job as a tenured professor. And for the most part, it seems that these private schools are mostly good, but the funny observation that I made in high school was that my friends who went to private school were not actually as smart or intelligent as we were. In fact, a lot of them were actually less motivated, and more cooped up. A lot of the private school kids were much more domesticated.
What I loved about high school
For myself, high school was some of the happiest memories of my life. I was happiest probably from sophomore year onwards, and certainly very happy during junior and senior year. When I was 15 years old, I got my drivers permit, and at age 16 I had a full on license. I had absolute freedom, and because my mom was always working, essentially I had zero parental oversight. I could do it as I wanted. I essentially had 100% freedom. I was the ultimate free range teenage kid.
Also, because I worked and had a job, I could pay my expenses by myself. I actually had great pride that I did not have to depend on my mom for money or things. , Because my mom was a single mom, working class poor, I also knew that she couldn’t give me money on things, even if she wanted to. But I never felt bad about that, rather, I felt pride in working, and buying things that I desired on my own. To me the notion of a handout was downright insulting. Also, I saw spoiled rich kids as inferior to me, because they never had to become self-sufficient to do or buy things and selves.
Homeschooled kids are weird
I encountered a few kids in college who are homeschooled from K-12 education. While they were very very smart, they were very weird, strange social skills. Or very low social skills.
So first of all, I have very little interest in homeschooling Seneca. I actually think that the biggest benefit of sending kids to K-12 education is that it teaches them to socialize. I strongly believe that social skills are the future.
Also, I have very little interest in sending Seneca to a private school. I have zero interest in paying out of pocket to send my kid to school. Furthermore, I do not want Seneca to interact with rich snobby kids.
So what will I do?
I think what I’ll do is I’ll send Seneca through a standard K through 12 public school system, yet, put zero to no pressure on him to get good grades for the sake of good grades.
One of the most interesting things I read from Nassim Taleb is that when he personally went to school, his dad just told him not to flunk. Maybe I’ll tell Seneca the same: to pursue his interests with the greatest vigor, do not get any girls pregnant, and just not flunk out of school. And when he is not in school, I will do my best to help cultivate his personal interests, and spend as much physical facetime with him as possible.
Also, to create and build things with him. If he wants a car, maybe what I’ll do is find some old junky car, and with him, rebuild it, to get it running. Or if he really wants something, I’ll just help him get a job and earn the money himself, and he could buy it himself. I believe in laptops, I’ll definitely buy him a laptop, but I’ll never buy him a phone.