School
School has been taking a bit of a bashing lately in my life on the web. Philip Greenspun was musing recently about whether conventional public school still makes sense in an age of the internet and jet planes:
“Suppose that you had a 16-year-old named Johnnie and the $14,000 per year that the local school district will spend to keep him occupied for a year. If there were no Boeing 747s, cheap telephones, or Internet you might want to send him to a nearby school. But for less than $2000 we can send that kid anywhere in the world and bring him back for Christmas and Spring Break. For a few cents per minute we can pick up the phone and talk to our kid regardless of where he happens to be.
Hmm... maybe we can send Johnnie to China for one year. He will go to an elite private boarding school and learn Mandarin, probably the most useful language for business, aside from English, for the foreseeable future. With the money left over from the $14,000 after subtracting for airfare and school fees we can send Johnnie on a backpacking tour around Australia during his summer break. Next year, because Johnnie was never that great at math, maybe we'll send him to India to be tutored 1:1 by a math PhD (compare to being one of 25 students in a classroom led by a teacher only slightly ahead of the better students). The $12,000 we have left over after paying for airfare is more than the salary of a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, one of the world's finest universities. So Johnnie can also learn how to manage a few servants and maybe play some polo. For Johnnie's last year before college maybe it would be good if he learned fluent Spanish and got to know our neighbors in Latin America. So we send him off to Argentina or Mexico to attend one of their finest private schools”
Some children’s books I read once espoused what I thought would have been an amazing education: a naturalist allows his two sons, Hal and Roger, to take a year off school and spend it traveling the world researching and trapping exotic animals. They show up in Africa to work with elephants, go to New Guinea and befriend some cannibals, and spend some time in the South Seas whaling.
I found an old essay by a renegade educator, John Gatto. For all the time he spent as a teacher in New York, he doesn’t have anything good to say about school as we know it:
“Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned.”
I reread an essay by Paul Graham that focuses as much on why, for him, school doesn’t work, as it does on “nerds” – a special group whose agony is magnified by a fleeting understanding of this futility and their trouble fitting in. They are in school for the pursuit of knowledge and ironically, this is the source of all their unhappiness because it diverts their attention from a full time teenager’s job: being cool.
The whole thing makes the idea of an unstructured education interesting, because one isn’t battling ridiculous social hierarchies or experiencing the futility of memorizing arbitrary facts. Although home school gives this lack of structure, it is often implemented as a bizarre form of mind control1 from parent to child which is much worse than learning to be a good civil servant. Traveling around the world also has its pitfalls; sometimes it isn’t travel that one needs, it’s reflection. Sometimes we travel like we buy books in a bookstore: to feel better and establish some progress without really tackling what is in front of us. Beyond that I know many brilliant, unconventional thinkers who never got used to the idea of a deadline. All their charms fall into a dustbin called potential because when it comes down to it they never can pin down commitment to a thing.
Back to square one: school. But I have an idea – how about a good school?
1Like many things, home school depends on execution (no pun intended). However, I have known many home schooled people and don't make this claim lightly.
10:06:15 PM 
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