Agree with caveats. But nursing home job I got at 15 (a hard job, a real job, not “work experience” but real labour) was the making of me now, as a doctor.
As a teacher of young people, I very much appreciate the point you are making! I strive to see individuality and to ask why we are learning anything. I take your essay to heart.
This article is really worth reading and touched me personally. Not only as a father, but because as a child I myself had to struggle with the modern school system, found it coercive and restrictive and couldn't find a way out. The way for young people to do something great lies off the beaten track.
Agree with so many things, but I don't think mass schooling is a waste of time, nor do I think standardization makes being exceptional that much more difficult than it would otherwise be.
Maybe it is a difference in understanding, but when I think about life before mass schooling, I imagine most children spent their childhoods doing whatever manual labor (e.g., helping in the fields, helping with the family business, running errands) their parents required them to do. Maybe these jobs provided skills that today's children don't get, but I don't think these jobs prepared children for occupations outside of their parents occupation in any meaningful way. I also don't think children particularly enjoyed this work. Whenever you read diaries from children in the great depression, many lamented having to leave school to find work. Obviously, there could be many reasons for this, but I think the simplest is that school is a not-so-bad way to spend your life as an adolescent, and is preferable to many of its alternatives.
I think exceptional children will excel in most environments. School provides these children with 8 hours where their parents, who are otherwise in control of their lives, have no say in what they do. Many of those hours may be spent doing schoolwork, but (at least in the public school I attended) if you finish your work early, most of the time the teachers would let you study or work on whatever you wanted, so long as it didn't disrupt the class. ~90% of children in the US attend public school, where learning is standardized in various ways, yet there is no dearth of exceptional teenagers and young adults who are recognized as exceptional in their fields (music, science, visual arts, etc.) while they are attending public school.
If a parent thinks their child would be exceptional but is being held back by a standardized curriculum, I totally support them finding an alternative means of education. But for the vast majority of children in the US who may not be "exceptional," I think school is a good way to spend much of your time in childhood.
All of that aside, I think your point about agency in children is so important, and think many children would benefit from their parents promoting agency at all points in life.
This was great the first time I read it and is just as good now. Your and Heinrich's thoughts on education and agency have been very influential as I design our own education. It's why I decided to let my son build an airplane when he asked. I'm still formulating my thoughts (and writing about them every week), but reading this helps remind me that I'm on a right path
Agree with caveats. But nursing home job I got at 15 (a hard job, a real job, not “work experience” but real labour) was the making of me now, as a doctor.
Even in the first years of my job, I saw starkly the difference between myself and those who’d only ever known “school work” before.
As a teacher of young people, I very much appreciate the point you are making! I strive to see individuality and to ask why we are learning anything. I take your essay to heart.
Thank you for the perspective!
This article is really worth reading and touched me personally. Not only as a father, but because as a child I myself had to struggle with the modern school system, found it coercive and restrictive and couldn't find a way out. The way for young people to do something great lies off the beaten track.
Agree with so many things, but I don't think mass schooling is a waste of time, nor do I think standardization makes being exceptional that much more difficult than it would otherwise be.
Maybe it is a difference in understanding, but when I think about life before mass schooling, I imagine most children spent their childhoods doing whatever manual labor (e.g., helping in the fields, helping with the family business, running errands) their parents required them to do. Maybe these jobs provided skills that today's children don't get, but I don't think these jobs prepared children for occupations outside of their parents occupation in any meaningful way. I also don't think children particularly enjoyed this work. Whenever you read diaries from children in the great depression, many lamented having to leave school to find work. Obviously, there could be many reasons for this, but I think the simplest is that school is a not-so-bad way to spend your life as an adolescent, and is preferable to many of its alternatives.
I think exceptional children will excel in most environments. School provides these children with 8 hours where their parents, who are otherwise in control of their lives, have no say in what they do. Many of those hours may be spent doing schoolwork, but (at least in the public school I attended) if you finish your work early, most of the time the teachers would let you study or work on whatever you wanted, so long as it didn't disrupt the class. ~90% of children in the US attend public school, where learning is standardized in various ways, yet there is no dearth of exceptional teenagers and young adults who are recognized as exceptional in their fields (music, science, visual arts, etc.) while they are attending public school.
If a parent thinks their child would be exceptional but is being held back by a standardized curriculum, I totally support them finding an alternative means of education. But for the vast majority of children in the US who may not be "exceptional," I think school is a good way to spend much of your time in childhood.
All of that aside, I think your point about agency in children is so important, and think many children would benefit from their parents promoting agency at all points in life.
This was great the first time I read it and is just as good now. Your and Heinrich's thoughts on education and agency have been very influential as I design our own education. It's why I decided to let my son build an airplane when he asked. I'm still formulating my thoughts (and writing about them every week), but reading this helps remind me that I'm on a right path
Great essay! Im particularly interested in how you're putting these principles into practice with your own children.