The Case Against Education

Bryan Caplan may be coming out with the book, but Peter Gray makes it in this video, interviewed by Nick Gillespie. By the end, he is talking about school as comparable to child labor.

Those of us who grew up many decades ago probably would not want to trade our childhood for today’s childhood. My memories are of spending all day playing “hit the bat” out in the street, or practicing handstands in the yard, or playing board games. With no adult supervision.

Gray thinks that the school system is not capable of changing. If you are worried about what schools might do to your children, then probably home schooling is the most attractive alternative.

I recommend the whole 30-minute interview.

If I were trying to home school now–and I would give the idea much more consideration than I did 25-30 years ago, when we first sent our daughters to school–then I think that the challenge would be to connect with other home schoolers who are not motivated primarily to provide a religious environment. A Google search for “secular homeschool groups” turns up some resources. I do not know if these are extensive enough to make it a workable option for parents these days. One of the links I clicked on had malware, so I am not going to try to click on any more.

11 thoughts on “The Case Against Education

  1. The problem with secular home schooling is probably the same problem I found when looking into co-housing. If it isn’t religious, its progressivism.

    To sustain some high cost (homeschooling involves lots of time and often foregone income) involved group without mainstream backing requires commitment, and some kind of religion/philosophy seems necessary to generate that commitment.

  2. Anecdotally, Facebook has a lot of groups dedicated to this.

    Eventually, computers will make this problem trivial. But it is,very messy right now.

  3. 1. School is somewhat preparation for the equally unnatural modern workplace. There are a lot of kids – marginal rambunctious males in particular – that need constant and stern drill over the course of their childhood and powerful incentives of big carrots and sticks to eventually achieve self-regulation of their impulses and accommodate themselves to the needs of the contemporary economy.

    Free play for these guys when young is, unfortunately, probably just a recipe for trouble. Young Marines aren’t much different, which is why the Marine Corps is the way it is. That is, the Marine Corps is the way it is not because it’s military, but because the military is full of young, rambunctious males.

    As usual these days, it’s a shame we can’t be sensible and realistic about these sorts of thing, admit kids are different with different needs, and sort them accordingly into classes with pedagogical strategies that are better suited to their type.

    2. “What drives the result?” I’ll tell you what: the attempts of parents to infer and target the content of the prestigious university admissions black box. Tiger Mothering and all the less intense variants on that theme. That leads to rat-race zero-sum games to seem impressive, and a lot of wasteful and traditional-fun-childhood-sacrificing efforts to send the ‘right’ signals. Even secular homeschooling wont help with that unless the homeschoolers also understand that they are intentionally dropping out of the admissions tournament and decide to do so intentionally.

    Not that there’s necessarily a good answer for this. It’d be nice if elite colleges conspicuously advertised that they were mostly focusing on the traits that make it extremely difficult for anybody to “stuff the signal” by grinding down their kids and encourage people to preemptively abandon pointless efforts to invest huge amounts of resources and childhood-time in trying to look impressive to admissions committees.

    • There have always been “marginal rambunctious males” who have had trouble getting through school. The craziness of the current education/socialization system, from what I understand (not having kids myself), is that it seeks to smother all rambunctiousness, spontaneity, independence, innovativeness, nonconformity and leadership out of boys, not just to control or channel those impulses. This is what I find creepy about the “anti-bullying” campaign – its premise is that learning how to handle interpersonal conflict and adversity and, yes, unfairness and minor cruelty, among themselves, without constant adult intervention, should not be part of growing up. I am not optimistic about the kind of adults this system is going to produce. Signs from college campuses are not good.

  4. This hits a lot of issues:

    1) Today teenagers are probably the best behaved than any post-WW2 era so let us the system is a complete failure.
    2) A lot of this is kids and teenager choice of less freedom not just the parent.
    3) One reason why a lot parents are so concerned with education because it is a lot effort to make a good living today than yesteryear.
    4) Sometimes I don’t get the libertarian contradiction that we need more average workers but then turn around say PSST and let them fail. I think a young person with blue collar skills should focus on career and education until 25. Because with both they can make them necessary within corporate organization.
    5) I still don’t understand why education is so much worse than yesteryear. My kids are taught much better than in my 1980s upper middle class High School. (I can possibly see in the 1950s/1960s because education benefited from sex discrimination in the market.) Maybe the High School in certain areas is different. (
    6) I have to imagine home schooling and specialized schooling are much worse at turning child into self-important snowflakes. (either progressive, religious or libertarian.) I do have a handicap child that an uncaring school probably makes him tougher than a school for the handicap or if we home-schooled him. I still say an uncaring High School is the best training for working for an uncaring corporation.
    6) Finally, I think a lot of the kid freedom was because there were a lot more stay at home parents. However, do we want to economically return to this labor supply? And most jobs can’t pay for this. (Given the economy will need less labor in the long run this might be a solution.)

    • I think a lot of the kid freedom was because there were a lot more stay at home parents. However, do we want to economically return to this labor supply?

      Scott Alexander, Invisible Women: “[H]ow on Earth do you unexpectedly raise the number of people in the workforce by 50% and still stick to exactly the same GDP trend? It would be like the US annexed Mexico one day but the GDP didn’t change a bit.”

  5. I have a 6 year old girl in Kindergarten. Her public elementary school is spectacular. The birthday parties that she goes to are spectacular. Her toys are spectacular. All the parents would prefer this childhood to their own. Does Kling really dispute this?

    I can point out a dozen arguments against the current education system, this is the weakest I’ve heard. Caplan’s arguments are much stronger.

    • I think the trouble is more about after-school activities and structure, rather than the school itself. Kids have too much homework, so they need their parents’ help, so they don’t really learn. I’d rather see less homework, more reading and more playing and exploring outside. Games and using your imagination etc.

      • Yeah, homework is a plague. There shouldn’t be any homework prior to high school, except maybe for the slower students who need more practice. And even in high school, there should be strict limits on the amount of homework given, or even better, a ban on counting homework toward the final grade. Kids need time to grow up and live their lives.

        Personally, I responded by simply not doing a lot of the homework that was assigned. My grades suffered because teachers counted homework toward the final grade–not because I didn’t comprehend the material, I got As on almost every test.

  6. In Massachusetts, the state has an official state-sponsored home school program. We don’t use it, but some do.

    There is Khan Academy for on-line learning.

    If we had true innovation, we would end up with a hybrid of home school approach and schooling. Kids would learn from reading, and instructional video, and then have class discussions, or tutoring for problems.

    The biggest disgrace is the lack of vocational training and institutional hostility toward manual labor, even if skilled.

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