School is a raw deal and we can do better for our children

Make it make sense to me (spoiler: you can't)

There is perhaps no other element of society with a more obscenely lopsided cost-benefit analysis than schooling, specifically institutional, K-12 education. It has never made sense to me at all, not even remotely. If someone is able to justify this convention—if someone can tally all the costs and all the benefits and validate schooling on that basis—I would be extremely interested to see it.

I don’t think that’s possible. I was homeschooled for most of my primary and secondary educations, including all of high school, and there was always something of a good-natured novelty made of my status within my friend group. I got it: You don’t meet too many homeschooled kids in the average run of things, and many of them were often quite weird, so I was something of a special case (I wasn’t weird). But in fact it was the other way around: It was my friends who were having the novel experience, at least if we are to judge novelty by any reasonable metric.

Consider: In most schools, you go to a building for around eight hours a day; you do pretty much exactly what you’re told; you bust your ass learning a bunch of stuff about half a dozen different disciplines every day; you bring a ton of work home with you and continue working your ass off in the evening; you periodically have to study intensively for tests, often several difficult tests on the same day; you will spend a lot of additional time in libraries and on the Internet doing intensive research for a variety of projects and supplementary assignments; often you are writing several lengthy papers on a wide variety of of topics while also studying for tests and doing projects and doing homework; you do that five days a week, for about nine months out of the year, for around 12 years…

…and yet you will retain almost none of this knowledge and you are never paid or compensated for your work in any way, aside from one day receiving a signifier that you managed to complete all of the work they gave you to a degree satisfactory enough to receive the signifier in question.

That is a lot of work—I mean it is a great deal of hard work, stress, planning, effort, time, money, mental power—for a payoff of so brutally low an intrinsic value. It can’t really be justified in any believable sense.

Nevertheless there are a few defenses that people throw up in favor of this bizarre system that are worth refuting.

“You need an education. You have to learn stuff.” Okay, but students don’t actually “learn” anything they’re taught in school, at least not in any meaningful epistemological sense. Try this: Sit down and write out a list of all the specific, identifiable, concrete facts, principles, formulas and knowledge that you remember learning from kindergarten through 12th grade, that you’ve retained and can still call forward and command as useful information. I’ll give you a spoiler alert: You probably can’t produce a dozen items on that list. Nearly all of it has left you. All of that hard, specific, focused, effort-laden work—literal years of hard work, many thousands of hours of effort—and you’ve got next to nothing to show for it in any practical sense. Don’t romanticize school with the passage of years: You were working hard, you were often stressed, you put in a ton of time and talent, and yet the fruits of your labor have vanished. What other undertaking has such a miserable payoff? Imagine going to an intensive trade school for 12 years in order to learn a profession, only to have no memory of what you learned and no ability to call it forward even subliminally in order to help you do your job. It would be embarrassing and infuriating. And yet this is what we demand of children during the most precious years of their lives—pouring so much of themselves into things they will forget very easily. Why do we do this?

“Well, if you don’t retain the information, at least you’ll encounter a bunch of different information and figure out what you are interested in.” This is only half-true, or rather it half-misses the point. Yes, it’s good to be exposed to many different disciplines, subjects, facts, philosophies; cast your net wide enough in the philosophical sea and you’re going to bring back something you like. But, uh, guess what: You don’t need to go to school eight hours a day, five days a week for 12 years to do that. Not even close. Do we really think that children and young people are incapable of figuring out what they’re interested in except in the context of this extremely regimented, time-consuming, costly, high-investment, low-return artificial environment we’ve built for them? Have you ever seen kids, you know, exist in the world? They figure out the stuff they love in about ninety seconds. You can’t possibly assume that it’s necessary to sit in a classroom in highly structured hour-long increments, every day, Monday through Friday, do several hours of homework per night, do projects and “group projects” and term papers, take tests and midterms and finals, year after year after year—all in order to figure out what you want to do! It’s just preposterous. And in any event, when a child does figure out what he likes within the context of school, it ultimately doesn’t matter, because he can’t actually study that thing to any meaningfully intensive degree; he still has half a dozen other subjects to which he must devote a ton of attention in order to pass the tests and pass the classes.

“Okay, even if specific knowledge isn’t retained and specific interests are quashed, at the very least school teaches kids how to think and how to learn.” This might be the most ridiculous of all defenses of modern education. You don’t need school for this. You just don’t. Given the proper environment—an attentive, loving family that places an emphasis on reading and writing and doing interesting things and acquiring interesting knowledge—children will figure out “how to think” and “how to learn” in nothing flat. Children have a voracious, insatiable appetite for thought and knowledge. They seek these things out relentlessly. There is no stopping them. You certainly don’t need 12 years of the extremely stratified, rigid, inflexible environment of school to impart such things upon them. My goodness.

“Well, if nothing else, it helps kids get socialized. Kids need socialization.” Ha! Okay. Is there any environment more strictly anti-social than school? It’s like a lab experiment: Everything is controlled, all the variables are prearranged, everything is timed and regimented, standardized by age and ability. What other social environment in the entire world is in any way remotely like school? You will never encounter anything like it again in your life. It’s like saying that kids need to go to theme parks in order to learn how to play with each other—the environment is so far removed from the daily joys, struggles, problems and solutions of everyday life that it’s almost counterproductive in that sense. I mean, if you want your kid to be “socialized,” i.e. if you want him to play normally with other kids, then just, you know, let him play with kids. Schedule playdates. Let him walk over to his friend’s house. Normal life. It will be fine.

None of this is to say, of course, that school is entirely useless. All of us can easily recall wonderful teachers who used their considerable talents to impart some sort of knowledge upon their students; even in the scant few years I spent in a standard school environment. Those kinds of teachers can and do have a measurable and important effect on the lives of many students.

Teaching is of course very important; school is where it breaks down, where the impartation of useful knowledge is sidelined in favor of something much more mechanical and far less joyful. We can do better than this. Lots of people are doing better than this already. There are easier, funner, healthier, more lasting and more pleasurable ways of taking little kids and making them into educated young adults. We should abandon the poisonous notion that “school” is the only way it can be done.