Resolved: Be more informative

When I was in the dorm in college, we weren’t allowed to have hot pots, but we could have irons. You can make a great grilled cheese sandwich, just wrap in foil and iron until done.

P.S. As a fellow Aspie, I have to say that I have the tendency to be sanctimonious as well. So my daughter, another Aspie. So when you do it, it doesn’t bother me, but I can see where it might bother other people, and I have to work on that personally as well.

I have never found you sanctimonious. Biased in some areas, perhaps, but we all are.

Above all, I appreciate your courage. It takes courage to stand up for what you believe in.

“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.” – Peter Thiel

I’ve noticed the sanctimony here too, and not just from PT. I’m not sure it’s the worst thing here. It’s normal to brag about your kids, and to assert that your parenting is the best parenting ever. That’s just typical playground talk. Bring on the humblebragging!

The hyperbole here can also be fun. I understand that this is how PT learns and communicates, with exaggeration and sensationalism. That’s why this blog works on the web. Without the clickbait titles, it wouldn’t get as many page views, or drive traffic to PT’s business. The web without hyperbole would be ignored – it’s an occupational hazard. So it’s not just “my kid thought school was a drag,” it’s “school is always and everywhere a drag for all kids.” It’s not just “kids can learn things from video games,” it’s “parents should all let their kids play video games all day long because it’s the best way for them to learn.”

The part that bothers me more than the sanctimony and hyperbole is the creation of a self-referential ideology of anti-institutionalism. Don’t send your kids to school. Don’t teach your kids math. Don’t tell them to read. Don’t prepare them for college. Don’t worry about credentials. Don’t think about getting a normal job. All supported with links from one to another, to make a knotty ball of countercultural twine.

There’s some truth in all of this, or it would be easily dismissible. I hated school. My son hated school. I don’t send him to school anymore. But I don’t claim that all schools are terrible for all kids, because it’s simply not true. Some kids in school are probably better off there than my son is at home.

Many people do well without going to college, or despite dropping out of college, like Bill Gates or our host, but that doesn’t mean college is useless. Some of us have or had careers that would have been impossible without the credentials and knowledge gained in college or graduate school; some of us would have been sorely damaged by following that kind of advice. It’s true that some kids can play unlimited video games and do just fine with it, but others cannot, and they and their parents would not be helped at all by that advice. It strikes me as peculiar how infatuated folks can be with the differences in personality among people, while being so uniform about their prescriptions for parenting.

This anti-institutional preaching, though each element tends to support each other element, and each part has good points to it, can itself become a colossal edifice of dogma. The core idea of unschooling – that the child himself is the one who should decide what and when to learn – is a fundamental insight from which every parent can benefit. It’s true that you can’t choose the personality of your child; it’s true that a child will learn best what he chooses to. But the child himself is still affected by his environment, and will still learn many things from you – even if you feel you’re not choosing to teach anything. Taking the insight to extremes may not be the best for all kids.

We all have profound effects on our children. We may not be able to change their personality. We may not be able to consciously or _deliberately_ guide their paths. But they see the things we do, the choices we make, and the things we value. They hear our conversations with other adults, and they take in our worldview and our habits. Read every day and they likely will too. Hold regular music performances at your house, and your kids may retain the idea that playing music is a vital part of adult life. Spend eighteen years telling your kid that math is useless, college is a waste of time, and corporate jobs are stupid, and you may influence your kid sufficiently to close off careers for which these statements are not true. For people who don’t have family money, dropping out is more likely to lead to a career in food service than a small business.

I grew up in the seventies (yes, ages ago), in an ambience of ferment and social change, with widespread questioning of social norms and institutions. Some people justifiably questioned truly evil deeds, like the terrorism we sponsored in Latin America and our misguided adventures in Southeast Asia. Others threw out the baby with the bathwater, leaving the country for good or turning to unproductive radicalism. Many became deeply cynical, and passed along this cynicism to a younger generation. I could joke as an adult that I grew up with a “military-industrious complex” – a complex about being either military or industrious. These biases did not help me prosper or progress in my early adulthood, and I would have done better without them. It turned out, to my surprise, that I was well-suited to work in the middle of the military-industrial complex, and I had an excellent if delayed career there.

Like the rest of reality, institutions aren’t going to go away just because we’re ignoring them or we don’t like them or trust them. We can help our kids totally avoid some institutions, like grade school, but it would probably be to their benefit to learn how to interact with – if not enthusiastically participate in, at least get what they need from – other institutions, such as college. Even if they don’t need school, children are very likely to benefit from other institutions, and from learning how to cooperate in and with institutions. This may mean doing their best to stay focused in lecture classes, or studying math year after year to meet prerequisites, or accepting the irregularity of offerings in exchange for being part of a program larger than oneself.

Having faith in one’s own ingenuity and creativity is wonderful, and one hopes his children develop it, but one should also hope his children will learn to add their part to creations that surpass any individual. I am thrilled that my children get to be part of grand institutions in our city, and I hope they will learn to do so better than I did.

Bringing this back to the question of sanctimony, one of the ways this presents itself to readers of this blog is when its owner and other participants go beyond enthusiasm for their anti-institutional or counter-intuitive parenting choices to scoff at or condemn parents who don’t make the same choices. Sometimes I feel greater sympathy with the readers whose kids are in school, based on the digs directed towards them. If my family ever stops homeschooling (meaning, for us, that my children decide schools are the tools they need at the moment… or that we move to Switzerland), I will not miss the sanctimony.

This is a snippet from an interview with Lazlo Brock, Google’s SR VP of Operations, done last year: “Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.”

So since your boys are getting older now, and you have been at this for quite a few years, maybe you could begin to show ways that unschoolers can learn those soft skills. A lot of unschooling is about independence, self-sufficiency, controlling what you want to learn and how, so it’s natural that unless we are introducing these additional environments that they just won’t be exposed to group work in order to learn these soft skills. For instance with our family, my kids take weekly acting classes that includes group work and improv scenes. Maybe you could show what your kids do.

Also, a little sanctimony in your posts never hurt anyone and your follow up comments are always so helpful. I think what makes your blog a little different is that it’s not just a homeschooling blog but you also want to show the dark side of public education so people can see it instead of just going with the flow. I think you can still say “Hey this is what is going on in schools” to get our attention and then give your alternative. There is no self-righteousness in that.

Penelope, you make it hard for me to stick to my resolve of spending less time obsessing about your posts and the comments section.

Fortunately, my other resolution, to voice my opinions more often is working well with some interesting results. No prizes for guessing where I get the inspiration to do that from.