I get a report from my nine-year-old son’s overnight camp that he is largely unable to read the nonverbal responses kids have to his humor. And, unfortunately, those responses are very negative. And, unfortunately, this is a camp for kids with Asperger’s so the bar was not very high to begin with.

I am sad.

I have been through school districts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Madison, WI. I have hired lawyers, I have spent tons of money to win everything I want. I have been through enough hearings to know that in our current school district I would have to spend loads of money to enforce my son’s IEP and then I’d win and then everyone in our town would hate me.

Being right is not as important as being a good mom. So I decide the first kid I’m taking out of the schools is my nine-year-old who needs special services and it’s easier for me to spend my time earning the money to pay for services than to spend my time fighting the school systems to get services for free.

I am nervous about telling my son. I am worried he has already been sold on the idea of school by the school. I plan out what I will say and I rehearse. I worry he will not trust me to teach him. Or he will miss his current teachers. I worry he’ll call my bluff on the whole idea that you can learn from home.

At the end of dinner I say to my son, “We are going to do school at home this year. No going to school in the mornings for you anymore.”

He says, “What will we do for recess?”

During the industrial age, when parents moved from farms to factories, it became more cost-effective to put kids in school than put them to work. So parents bought into the idea of state-run school. At that point, school became the most expensive babysitting operation on the planet.

In the pre-industrialized world, only the kids with a governess got an education. And those governess types were so quirky and fun because it was an alternative choice to be a governess instead of stay in the town you were born in, get married and have kids of your own. (Think of going airborne with Mary Poppins, or singing with the von Trapp kids and Maria.)

In today’s school system teachers choose teaching because it’s safe and predictable. You can generally get a job teaching where you were born, and (before Scott Walker busted unions) teachers could rely on a lifetime position.

The problem is that today’s workplace rewards risk takers. It rewards entrepreneurial thinking and people who are trained to think independently and creatively – information synthesizers. Why is it good to have people who took a safe route training people for an inherently unstable workforce?

The parents most willing to stay home and teach their kids all day long are probably the parents who do not fit in well in corporate America. That’s why they are willing to leave and stay with kids.

What if we had only the workplace geniuses running homeschooling? Would that be better? Are we aiming to train our kids so that they can successfully navigate the workplace that dominates adult life instead of leaving the workforce? What is the best type of person to teach children given the world they will need to navigate?