School: your mileage may vary

I don’t know what proportion of people in the rationality community feel this way, but many are strongly anti-school. Astral Codex Ten: “School is child prison.” Zvi: “It’s a prison. We don’t care if the kids can read, write or add. We care if they get credit for time served.” Another person at a rationalist dinner party described their time in school as “years and years of torture.”

I’ve always found this kind of surprising, since my experience in school was ok. But I do believe some people find it awful, either because of especially bad school environments or especially strong reaction to the environment.

I’ve heard a lot of interest in the rationalist and EA communities in homeschooling, unschooling, or some kind of nontraditional school. But this is mostly from people who don’t yet have kids, or whose kids are still babies.

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My mother studied child development in college and said she considered homeschooling me, but “we would have killed each other.”

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A friend was into anarchism and unschooling when her first child was young. She went to unschooling meetups and found they were attended almost entirely by women who had quit their jobs to raise the children while their male partners earned money. “That wasn’t the radical example I wanted to set for my child.”

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I homeschooled my older kids in some basics for preschool. It went ok, but it left me less optimistic about homeschooling than I had been before. Our plan was for the kids to start in public school, and move to plan B or C if that didn’t work. L had six months of kindergarten before the pandemic closed things down. 

During the year of remote first grade, L did fine with the Zoom sessions and anything that involved her beloved teacher. But the “asynchronous work” (homework) that we were supposed to have her do was terrible. Any task directed by me was far more arduous than the same task directed by her teacher and next to other children also doing the task. Once I realized the school wouldn’t punish us, we stopped doing the homework.

Now that she’s back in person, everything seems a lot better. She has occasional complaints but on most days says school was “great.” Her reading, writing, and drawing had been kind of stalled and are now more or less caught up to what I’d expect at her age.

A has also had a fine time in kindergarten, and also mostly describes her day as “great” if I ask her. Neither kid is athletic, but they love recess and gym class (more than they enjoy playing outdoors in general). When I asked them if they’d rather be home for a day or be at school, they both said they’d rather be at school so they can see their friends. They also run into their friends in the neighborhood, but school is a more reliable source of time with them.

There are still some things we supplement a bit at home in areas where the kids are a bit ahead (like math in L’s case) or behind (like handwriting). But mostly school seems to be working as it’s supposed to.

This week I saw a bunch of EA friends and talked to several of them about their schooling plans. One new parent is working on a curriculum for a small school they and similar-minded parents can send their kids to. If I understood right, their take is that regular school is so bad that almost anything run by smart people would be better.

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After that, I felt some trepidation when talking to another parent doing homeschooling. This one had a fine time in public schools and would be fine with sending their child there if their city didn’t have such a troubled school system. The child is academically precocious, but isn’t strong on social skills and doesn’t have much contact with other kids.

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I talked to a third parent whose children started in public schools. That wasn’t working well, so they tried a hippie private school. That also didn’t go well, so during the pandemic they switched to homeschooling. For a while they tried unschooling, but the kids didn’t seem particularly happy with the project of following their own whims all day every day. After some trial and error, they’ve moved to something more like a usual school structure (for example having outdoor play every day after lunch, because otherwise days might pass without going outside). Her sense is that the kids are now pretty satisfied with the arrangement, and are catching up on some of the skills they were behind on.

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I worry that smart parents who plan to collaborate on schooling are overestimating how similar their kids will be. It’s satisfying to teach a child who’s a quick study, but not all our children will be. What about when someone has a child with serious learning disabilities, or a child who starts fights, or a child whose stimming distracts other kids? The reason public schools are often better for kids with special needs is that they’re required to make some attempt at educating all children, while private schools are free to reject anyone they want. I expect it will be hard for everyone when education projects based on friend groups need to say “Sorry, not your kid.”

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I also worry that education is . . . just hard. Yes, there are a bunch of structural problems that plague traditional schools, like overemphasis on testing and the difficulty of simultaneously teaching 24 kids with different levels and different needs. But there’s also a lot of actual knowledge and skill involved in, say, teaching reading to a kid who’s not getting it. And I’m not at all sure that my friends and I are better at this than the teachers at the local public school.

So I’ll be interested to see how these various experiments go.