Caveats: My oldest child is 11, and I don’t have parenting experience beyond elementary school. We’re lucky that our local public school is a good fit for our kids, and we’d be looking harder at alternatives if that weren’t the case.
Current schools are preparing children for something like the present or the past. I think it’s very likely that AI will shake up work, economics, and daily life considerably by the time my children are adults. The way the schools are preparing them essentially for 2019 feels pretty absurd to me.
In my dream world, my kids would be doing something more flexible than school, with some able tutor to guide them at the right level, and plenty of outdoor time and visiting places in the real world. So why are we not doing that?
School is where the other children are
One of the key benefits homeschoolers point to is that they have more free time, because a classroom is inefficient for any given child. But what my older kids typically like to do with marginal free time is be with other kids, and school is their best opportunity for that. Even after school and on vacations, most of the other neighborhood kids are in some kind of program or camp. If you’re not in school, there’s a much higher barrier to hanging out with other kids. I realize there are homeschooling groups and stuff (and there’s a space near us that seems unusually good for this), but we’d have to spend a good bit of time driving them to these.
During pandemic-era remote school, my kid’s first grade was assigned to draw things they loved. One of the things she drew was her classmates, represented as little heads on a screen. I found that very sad.
We don’t want to quit our jobs
In a world where neither of us had the desire or opportunity to work on altruistic projects, Jeff might have been a stay-at-home dad. (I wouldn’t want to be home full-time, at least with little kids.) But we value the work both of us do.
In theory we could hire some kind of tutor or homeschooling facilitator, though I expect someone who could do a good job would cost considerably more than any nanny we’ve had.
Free public school makes parenting much less costly than it would otherwise be.
It also might just not be the right combination of people. One of my kids dislikes learning-type activities with me much more than she dislikes similar work assigned by the school. My mother said she considered homeschooling me, but “we would have killed each other.”
In discussions of children’s autonomy, there’s curiously little attention on who is going to leave their job to support that autonomy. In the words of someone I talked to at LessOnline, “They want to marry a physics PhD, and then they want to keep her at home.” There are families where this truly makes sense, but I don’t want either of us to get pushed into it.
What do we even prepare them for?
Mostly I expect the future to look very weird and hard to prepare for.
In scenarios where things go ok, I expect AI will do most jobs better than humans. The few remaining careers might end up being
- Areas where we want humans for aesthetic reasons, like live music or handmade art.
- Areas where robotics aren’t good enough for the physical work, like childcare, nursing, or plumbing.
Or maybe we’ll end up in a post-nuclear-war world with no electricity grid, and those of us who survive will be hunter-gatherers.
Or maybe I’m wrong and the world won’t change that much.
Guesses at what will continue having value
What if we’re all on universal basic income and don’t really need to work? I expect a lot of people will play a lot of video games, but I’d like my kids to have other options too. What will give them a good life and a sense of meaning?
- Planning projects
- Non-academic writing (Jeff has helped our kids dictate blog posts since they were little)
- Relating to humans: friendship, handling conflict, understanding others’ viewpoints, public speaking
- Dealing with your own emotions
- Distinguishing between reliable and unreliable information
- Reasoning
- Creative projects like music, writing, art, game design
- Using your body: exercise, dance
- Making physical stuff: cooking, building things
- Outdoor projects: gardening, exploring
These are things I want to make space for in the kids’ lives, through some combination of school and the rest of life.