Good point about the title. And yes, you’re right, we definitely do need public schools. Some parents can’t stay home with their kids and some that maybe could can’t provide a good education. I think where it gets tricky is that through a combination of making school compulsory, the rise of dual income families, and the wage stagnation that has made it so even two incomes isn’t enough to send your kids to private school, public school has become the default answer to education. Defaults can be a good thing, but the problem with defaults is once something becomes a default you stop thinking critically about it.

I am fully convinced that public school (in its current state and certainly as I went through it) is not the right option for the majority of children in America. The problem is that I don’t think private school is the answer either, I think it’s homeschooling and homeschooling is just not going to be a practical option for 99% of Americans. But I wish it were. This is an odd place to talk about this for the first time, but this is the way my thoughts have been going recently and I guess this comment is a good place to talk about it until I can write a more in-depth post: I’m pretty sure that jobs are a net negative when it comes to quality of life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% all in that responsible adults should earn a living and I think that “work” is an unambiguously good thing and is fundamental to what it means to be human, but jobs were a bad idea. Their redeeming value was unprecedented economic efficiency. We now have iPhones because of a century of Americans having jobs. That said, they pull families apart, they add enormous amounts of stress, and they have made us all weak and sedentary.

Right now all of the major causes of death in the Western World are chronic diseases (which are also the main cause of diminished quality of life in our twilight years). For a long time I lay the blame on our poor diets. While I’m still convinced that diet is part of the puzzle, I think sleep, stress, and movement habits are all a big part as well. Jobs are major culprits directly for two of those and I think they are indirect culprits for the other two as well. Everyone now is too hurried to prepare their own meals, so instead of eating a low-sugar/high-fiber diet (i.e. real food), everyone eats a high-calorie/high-sugar/high-processed fat/low-fiber diet (i.e. processed foods, convenience foods, etc).

Jobs have obviously impacted sleep as well, otherwise we wouldn’t need alarms.

I know this is a bit of a rabbit hole, but one of the reasons why I’m bringing this up is because even if we “fix” public schools, we still have a huge problem that I don’t think I brought up in the article: there’s no enrollment. There’s a frivolous administrative process called “enrollment,” but that’s not real enrollment, it’s just a euphemism for paperwork. Real enrollment is where the students buy in to what is happening. We are lucky that some kids do, but in general kids don’t come to school because they want to, they come to school because the have to (and even many of the ones who “want” to go to school don’t really care about school, they want to go to school because that’s where their friends are. If their friends all played hooky, they wouldn’t want to go to school anymore. If I had to rank the main reasons for why the few kids who do want to go to school want to go I would say 1. because their friends are there 2. because they have a vague fear of what will happen if they “fall behind” in their education and finally 3. because they want to learn. Even in that last case I would say that attitude usually says more about the kid than the school).

If I had to say what I think the root cause is, I would say it’s an attachment void. You have kids whose basic needs aren’t being met (chances are their basic physical needs are being met, but not their psychological needs). Instead of attaching to adults and taking cues from people they can learn from, they end up attaching to peers. Not only does this cut off their enthusiasm for learning, in many cases it actively discourages it. I remember clearly in high school needing to pretend that I didn’t find a lesson interesting so that I could “fit in” with my friends. Peer oriented kids have to rebel against learning because that’s what the herd expects them to do, and approval from the herd is the only thing that matters (unfortunately I remember this feeling well).

They say that more is caught than taught, but this is only true when the mentee is attached to the mentor. Kids “catch” ideas from their peers faster than we can keep up with. In the past you would have culture that was passed down across generations, now you have “teen culture” which renews itself every four years (some of this is marketing driven, but most of it is the fact that kids are peer oriented).

This is a major area that I’ve changed my mind in recent years. I used to think that teenage rebellion was just a quirk of human nature and that people who complained of a “teen crisis” caused by violent video games or sexually explicit television or whatever needed to learn their history, because people have had similar concern for decades. Well, it turns out that the cultural curmudgeons have been right all along. Without knowing this would happen, I ended up reading two separate books on two very different topics that both cited research that shows that in other cultures — especially pre-industrial ones — teens love to hang out with adults. They love to hang out with their parents, their grandparents, to get advice from adult mentors in their community. It’s only modern culture that causes kids to ask their parents to drop them off a block away so they won’t be seen together.

In all seriousness I’m coming to see that the key to education is parenting, the key to parenting is not tactics, but relationship and the biggest hindrance to relationship is…school and jobs.

So when I wrote this I said that school was necessary, and while I still stand by that, my thinking has evolved and now I view school as a necessary evil.

That’s not necessarily a fatalistic position. I have great hope that public school can be transformed into a source of national pride that has me singing its praises. I’m reading a book right now called Prepared where Diane Tavenner shares how she built a school that actually works. I’m only about halfway through it, but some of the things that they seem to have done well is to adopt project-based learning (which she points out, does not mean a standard approach with a project or two thrown on top, it means the projects are the approach) and to install mentor groups.

So there’s hope, but I think that there are problems that go deeper than school. I just read a book recently called The Second Shift which argued that we are in a “stalled revolution”: because women entered the workforce after men, their household responsibilities became established and once they did enter the workforce and two-job couples started essentially splitting work outside the home, the woman still did the lion’s share of work inside the home. The book argued that men need to start sharing more at home and even couples that think they are sharing really aren’t, the husbands just do more than the husbands who do nothing. I agree with her that if we’re going to accept the reality of two-job families, they need to re-think the responsibilities at home, but I couldn’t help but wonder: wouldn’t a better solution be to get rid of the two-job family? Either by one parent staying home or — preferably — by both parents staying home.

Of course, I recognize the economic reality that we can’t all become professional YouTubers, but I’ve come to the point that I think that everyone owes it to themselves and their family to evaluate if escaping 9–5 is a legitimate possibility for them.

Sorry for writing a novel in response to your brief comment. Thank you so much for reading the original post and thank you for reading this one i you’ve made it this far. Chance would have it that you left a comment at the exact moment where these thoughts were percolating in my head and I wasn’t sure if they were well formed enough for a full post, but I needed to express them somehow, so thanks for giving me that outlet 😃