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Children have to go to school in some manner. Sure, the “going to school” might be more metaphorical as their parents teach them at home, but the requirement is that kids get an education.
However, not everyone wants to take on that responsibility. Plenty of parents figure that homeschooling is a hassle (spoiler: It kind of is, it’s just worth it) and since public schooling exists, they might as well just send their kids to school.
Especially since compulsory education makes a lot of parents nervous. It’s required and the easiest way to comply is to simply send your kid to a state-run school.
And as the good folks over at the Foundation for Economic Education point out, there are some potential pitfalls for this.
Prior to the rise of compulsory schooling, it was common for young people to take on adult-level responsibilities at puberty. Indeed, in indigenous cultures, a rite of passage around puberty led to a transition to adulthood. Thomas Hine’s The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager documents just how common it was for teens in the US to take on significant responsibilities prior to the rise of compulsory high school. Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie are among the many who began their working lives at puberty.
The terms “teen” and “adolescence” were created in the early 20th century. This wasn’t even a recognized category before then. John Taylor Gatto’s provocative thesis in The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher, that schooling trains us to be passive and dependent, is not even controversial for those who know much about the history of young people. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, wrote The Case Against Adolescence which makes the case that the infantilization of young people has been tremendously harmful. Human beings should take on significant responsibilities at puberty for healthy, normal development.
Now, that’s absolutely true about history, but is it what we need to be doing today? Should I be treating my 12-year-old daughter as if she’s about to enter the workforce?
That’s not what they’re saying.
Not by a long shot.
The reason why a Franklin, Carnegie, or Edison can be a leader without formal education is that people with sufficient motivation and ability can learn what they need to learn without schooling. The late Cole Summers (Kevin Cooper) showed that it is just as possible today (read his autobiography to the age of 14 to see how he learned without any schooling at all). Laura Deming, unschooled by her father, got into MIT at 14. Cliff Spradlin is a self-taught software developer who dropped out of high school and has been a software engineer at Tesla, SpaceX, and Waymo. Mikkel Thorup left school after middle school and has developed a highly successful business relocating expats. I’ve known hundreds of people with little formal schooling who have been highly successful in the 21st century. In careers open to merit, rather than credentialing, motivated people can learn what they need without formal education.
Ivan Illich became convinced in the 1970s that institutionalized education led to a loss of independence and initiative. Given that most of the value currently attributed to formal education is due to signaling, and that the human capital element (skills learned) can be learned without formal schooling (or with much less), then the net gains from formal schooling are much smaller than typically believed. Moreover, insofar as our counterfactual hypothesis for evaluating the opportunity costs of government schooling is NOT no schooling at all, but rather a voluntary market including home education, tutoring, private and religious schools, and apprenticeships, there would be abundant opportunities for acquiring the human capital component currently attributed to public schools. With the march of technology, from books to radio to films to TV to computers to the Internet to AI, skill development through some combination of human transmission, technological assistance, and personal initiative is easier than ever.
But what about the squashed entrepreneurial initiative from learning to be passive and dependent? And what about the anti-capitalist and victimhood ideologies taught in schools? And the negative habits many (most) students learn in public schools? Are the net outcomes from these characteristics more debilitating in a coerced K-12 system than the marginal value of human capital additions through government schooling over voluntary schooling?
Yeah, what about them?
The truth of the matter is that compulsory public education is framed as an unmitigated good, but every shred of evidence saying that it is also happens to be suspect, especially when you remember what the Prussian system that our public education system was based on was designed to do: Create docile, obedient workers.3
Public education creates a problem because it strives to carve our children into sitting down, shutting up, and doing what they’re told.
But obedience doesn’t achieve great things. It might be a peaceful life for many—and, to be sure, a peaceful life is a good thing in many ways—but it’s the same kind of peaceful life that a drone would “enjoy.”
“If you don’t send your kids to school, they won’t be socialized,” someone might respond. However, think about what a typical school day at a typical school looks like. You drop your kids off and they go inside. They generally get to interact with their peers a bit before the first bell, but from then on, most of their day is them sitting in a desk and listening to someone drone on with facts and figures that most of them only care about within the context of getting a bigger number on a test.
Then, at the end of the day, they go home where they see their neighbors, friends, and family, interacting with them and learning how to talk to people of a variety of ages. They play sports where they’re up, moving, and associating with coaches and teammates. They’re doing martial arts where they’re getting exercise and learning discipline.
Most kids learn a lot of what they need to learn outside of school anyway. Knowing the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell is useful for many people, but most people are just fine not knowing that lava that’s still underground is magma.
But because this system is in place, one should wonder just how many would-be entrepreneurs had that beaten out of their system. How many advancements were we denied because those with the intellect to make them took the safer route like a good little drone?
Homeschool kids don’t have that problem. They learn just fine, but they do it in a way that doesn’t stifle their potential. They can hold jobs to learn the value of work while still going to school, and do so with a lot more flexibility than your traditional high school worker.
More importantly, they are in a position to potentially shake the entire world.
While public school kids can sometimes do that too, the truth is that the system they find themselves in doesn’t reward the outliers, the visionaries. It prefers to pound square pegs until they fit in round holes.
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Politics, culture, a dose of snark, and a profound love of personal and economic freedom.
The problem with Government Schools is that the Parents are no longer the customers. The teachers are.
And this is the shortcoming of all Government "Service" agencies: the service they supposed to provide to We the Little People is second, at best, to the satisfaction and security of those employed to deliver those services.
In short: Their customers can't really choose from many other sellers, and they never have to turn a profit - indication that they provide a good service - in order to keep paying their trade.