It’s not enough to say individual learning styles exist. We have to respect them. When we lived on the farm, our tree house builder was supposed to be the builder for the room we were adding on to the house. He had no idea what he was doing building that room. But I didn’t figure that out until I called a contractor and the contractor asked to see the blueprints.

Before that moment I thought it was my fault that we never had the right materials when we needed them. I felt bad not paying him for the day, so when he offered to refinish a chair I said sure. He ruined the chair, but I was already in too far, so I pretended the chair was fine.

I needed him out of the house. Out of my way. We had extra lumber everywhere, so I suggested he build a tree house.

He loved the idea.

He ended up needing more lumber. Of course. “I’ll just pick it up on my way tomorrow,” he told me. Then he billed me for it.

As he was building the tree house and I was hiring a contractor to rescue the new room. The contractor’s team pulled up the 75-year-old boards and we marveled over the cursive signatures of the men who built the house. The contractor explained that the house is Wisconsin vernacular architecture, and sometimes the carpenters were also the designers.

Meanwhile, I noticed he was weaving the structure among the tress. So I asked him about how he learned to do this.

He said, “I’ve never been interested in things that could be taught from a book. I wanted to understand things that were inside me that made me myself.”

He paused. I tried to think of something to say, but I could only think about how much his wife must hate listening to him talk like this.

Then he said, “I don’t make drawings. I can feel it. I can feel the empty space. I’m not an engineer, but I have a good intuition about danger. I’ve had structural engineers visit and they gave me the thumbs up. People are very anxious about things that don’t have blueprints. But I instinctively know when it’s done.”

That’s my perfect homeschool lesson. I wrote down what he said so I know what it sounds like when someone is describing a learning process so different than mine that I almost miss his genius.

So the contractor finished the extra room and our builder finished the treehouse. When he was done I had him sign an inside plank.

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The most surprising thing about moving from NYC to Madison, WI is that after we moved, it felt like there was not actually anything to spend money on. For example, kids have their birthday parties at home or in a park. And people aren’t willing to spend a lot to go out to dinner. So people with a lot of money literally go out of state to spend it.

The youngest kids

I noticed that going from regular school to homeschool feels very similar to the NYC to Madison transition: new financial stability. There are not special clothes for pajama day or field trips or the second pair of everything in the school locker. In fact, my kids didn’t always wear clothes, and when they did, nothing matched. And we didn’t pay dues and donations and the dollars that add up because you don’t say no at school.

Middle school

If you’re making financial decisions that are much different from your community you won’t fit into your community. So as kids get older it makes sense that parents try to spend what is necessary to make their kid feel similar to the other kids at school.

Trae Bodge is the consumer spending expert at RetailMeNot and he describes the ways parents spend extra money to keep up with the other families at school.

• Buying their child name-brand, popular or expensive clothing (30%)
• Donating money to the school (24%)
• Purchasing their child the latest gadgets (24%)
• Hosting impressive parties for their child (16%)
• Taking their child on lavish vacations (16%)
• Giving their child a high allowance (14%)
• Hiring a tutor (14%)

When you homeschool you’re already out on a limb, so spending money to keep up with other kids at school is no longer at the top of your radar. Of course, kids get expensive as they get older. I noticed that 14% say they spend money on tutors in order to keep up with other families.  That’s the sort of thing that I spent a ton of money on as my kids got older. But so many of the items on this list are just not on my radar in terms of keeping up with other kids. That pressure really does come from school.

High school

Now that my kids have gotten to college, I have to admit that the high school years were really expensive. The biggest expense is making sure there are third-party measures for everything the kid does. So, for example, the assumption is that a homeschool education is not particularly good unless there are national tests like APs. Prep for those tests requires tutors, especially in subjects the kid isn’t great at.

The other route is having tutors write recommendations. But those recommendations only matter if they are from people who have experience teaching at a respected college. Otherwise the teacher has no basis to compare the student’s work with the work of other kids going to college. But those top-flight tutors are really expensive and hard to find.

That said, I’m not so sure sending the kids to school for high school would have been any cheaper. We’d had to have lived in a really expensive school district. Instead we lived in terrible school districts which allowed us to spend less on housing, and I’m certain having those low-income zip codes helped the kids when they were applying to college.

So maybe the issue is how you feel like you have the most control over finances dictates whether you feel like homeschooling creates financial stability. I’m so terrible at following rules, and it’s always expensive when I get into trouble for breaking rules. So maybe that’s really the genesis of me feeling like homeschool gives me financial stability.

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Certification is messed up. People in their middle-age are most likely to pay for certification in a career-related skill. But kids are the ones who will most benefit from professional certifications.

Certification is an announcement you believe you need to learn a particular skill to make yourself valuable in the workforce. For a middle-aged person listing a certificate program on your resume highlights a lack of self-confidence – a good resume writer can show you how to rewrite your resume to get the job without the certification. (Seriously. If all you needed is the certification you can get the job now.)

A young person, on the other hand, looks like a go-getter if they are learning work-related skills before it’s time to work. This means the kid is thinking ahead, making, executing a plan, and taking initiative in a way that most people don’t. The adult taking a certificate program is playing catch up.

Certificate programs are about learning new skills and gathering ideas. That’s the best part of work. That’s why adults like to do those programs instead of job hunt. And that’s why kids should make career certification programs part of a regular, alternative k-12 education.

I don’t know if I would have pushed my kids to work on the farm if we had not been living with the farmer. He had generations of farmers behind him – so much knowledge about farming that every day was like a certificate program on that farm. In my mind the certificate is not the important part, it’s the vocational skill. The experience of knowing as a kid you are learning something that is useful to society and understanding how society values work and knowledge.

That’s really different than, say, the kids learning alongside me when I was learning how to garden. Self-directed learning without an expert guide is really inefficient. And part of teaching kids about self-directed learning is teaching efficiency. The skill of reaching out to experts for help is something most people don’t feel comfortable doing until middle-age. But that is probably 90% of the lesson of learning to learn as a kid.

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The measurement for whether school is successful is — drumroll — if the kid does well in school. Think about it: You have never read research that says what kids do in school causes a person to have a good adult life. Neither the school or the teacher has long-term impact on outcomes. So we make up stories about why school is important. Based on no data. To make ourselves feel better.

Here’s an example of the circular logic that guides education research:

Children and adolescents spend a considerable amount of their time in school, and the school environment is therefore of importance for child outcomes. Research within the framework of “effective schools” has established that factors in the school environment play a part in pupil achievement.

Translated into normal English: “Kids are in school for a lot of their life so it must have some sort of impact on the child. Research shows that school environments correlate to school achievement.” Notice that these two sentences are unrelated. Because no one is showing that school achievement has an impact on the child’s long-term outcome.

We have long-term studies showing it does not have an impact (Harvard’s 75-year study, twin studies).

We ignore those studies because it’s inconvenient.

We have accepted this situation for decades. The pandemic laid bare why we accept that school has no long-term proven benefits: the short-term benefits to companies. The only way companies can pay low wages is to have children in school all day so parents don’t have to pay for child care. School is universal, government-subsidized child care.

If parents stayed home the care and education would be better, because it would be customized for each child instead of the factory-style system we have now. We almost did that experiment during lockdown. And moms didn’t want to leave their kids to go back to work. So they didn’t.

The jobs are terrible and the school option is becoming visibly terrible as well. Also, parents are finding that as long as they don’t have to be insanely stressed by balancing work and kids, taking care of kids is manageable including homeschooling them.

It turns out that school and low wages go together. School makes parents feel like they are not suitable teachers. And low wages make parents feel like they are not worth enough in society to be calm, stay-at-home parents. But if you give that same parent permission to be home with their kid and in charge of that kid’s education, the parent will finally feel calm and in control.

When I started homeschooling I’d post pictures of my kids doing workbooks. Or reading. Now I post pictures of the kids basking in attention, because I know things in childhood that make a long-term difference have everything to do with relationships and nothing to do with school.

So how can society support parents in their quest for calm families rather than  juggling impossible roles. We need to remind ourselves over and over again, collectively, that we never had evidence that school accomplished anything beyond keeping kids safe while their parents were at work. We can raise the bar on ourselves now. We can accomplish so much more if we put families back together again.

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My grandma was a teacher with an open classroom and I went there when our school holidays did not coincide. Since her classroom was first through third grade I got to go there for a long time.

Classroom design in Sweden is based on the  open classroom model with a comforting nod to its 70s vibe, and my own open classroom for second and third grade. Basically any learning I did in school I did in an open classroom. I am an independent learner. I am unable to listen for long periods of time. And I wanted to have the ability to cheat when a test did not interest me.

I wonder if my sons would have been happy in school an open classroom setting. There’s a dicsussion between 1970s school refugess about open classroom experiences at Apartment Therapy. There’s a piece on Bloomberg about how teachers in open classrooms weren’t trained properly. I can see how that was true. In my open classroom the second graders were all ahead and the third graders were behind and that’s not actually a good mix. By the end of the year the teacher stopped the curricula and we just sang folk songs and grocked things.

My high school debate team produced an crazy number of billionaire tech founders, tenured professors and judges. The only other group that comes close to them are the kids in my second grade classroom.

As I write this, I just realized that my most fond memories of school are when I was surrounded by kids who were fascinating. And forget the whole topic of this post –  you don’t need an open classroom or closed classroom or whatever classroom. You need to help your kids find other kids who are fascinating.

I feel lucky I got to be with those kids in second grade. I remember learning something interesting from every single one of them. For example, KT Graves told us second graders we should take a test for contractions instead of study contractions because you just put an apostrophe for the vowel. Tory Platt told us Puff the Magic Dragon was about drugs.

I think the most disappointing to me about school is I encounters all those amazing kids and I had so little time to talk with them in school.

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My son is friends with a girl who grew up in the foster care system. Her mother left when she was a toddler. Then her dad died of a drug overdose. In front of her. We have known her only a short time, since a family adopted her at age 15.

She was at our apartment when Z was taking a practice SAT math test. She had not heard of the SAT. She said her sister did not take it. But the friend didn’t want to sit around while Z took it, so she joined him.

I told her she should just take it for fun. Then I set the timer.

The two of them went to Starbucks while I scored the tests. Z didn’t even finish half the questions. I will have to get him extra time because of his brain injury. But his friend got 100%. I double checked. I couldn’t believe it.

I called them to tell her. She said, “Okay. Thanks for letting me know. See you back at the apartment.”

I prepared a bit to say to her when she got back. But she didn’t believe me that most kids don’t get a perfect score. Z confirmed that it’s true. She brushed us off

For about a month I took time when she was with Z to explain to her the ramifications of getting a perfect score as a Black, high school sophomore coming out of foster care. She didn’t believe me that people want kids like her at their college. It seemed preposterous to her.

But after that, it seemed like a burden to her. The mental shift for her was huge. I finally dropped the topic when she told me, “What I really want right now is me and my sister stay together with the new family.”

Of course: She can’t think about college when she is worried about having a home.

I’ve read about how the SAT is a great equalizer and that’s why MIT reinstated it after COVID. It was hard to see the test as an equalizer when I have been hiring so many tutors. But now I appreciate that MIT requires the SAT. Of course they can tell when it’s useful. It never occurred to me there are girls like my son’s friend – her extreme brilliance matched by her extreme fears.

The knowledge that she exist is hard to hold. I want it to be hard for you, too.

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Primary and secondary school teaching was never meant to be a real profession. Women used to take these jobs until they got married.

You can see this during Children’s Blizzard, which happened in the midwest during the 1800s. The Blizzard occurred unexpectedly during the school day. And hundreds of teachers had the nearly impossible job of saving school children from frostbite. One of the most remarkable aspects of the stories about this day is that teenaged girls were left alone, in charge of 20 kids, with very little training.

Once school started functioning like a factory and teachers formed unions, teaching children started to look like a long-term profession: a marathon to get to those juicy retirement benefits. Now we know those benefits are not sustainable, and there’s little else that is attractive about this profession:

The high demand is in the low reward jobs. 
The six-figure jobs with engaged and well-fed children are all filled. There is high demand for special ed teachers who will participate in a corrupt system. And there is high demand for teachers in low-performing schools where the turnover rate is 50%.

You cannot influence the lives of children. 
Robert Ingersoll is a former teacher turned sociologist. He explains that “Teachers in schools do not call the shots. They have very little say. They’re told what to do; it’s a very disempowered line of work.” So the more you are hoping to change the lives of children the more frustrated you’ll be with the constraints from higher up.

Teachers isolate themselves from the community.
If you teach in a community where you would actually want to live, then you will feel poor. That’s because even though teachers have high salaries in well-funded schools, those schools are well funded because the parents in that community have even higher salaries. Also, in order to get pay hikes, teachers strike. The strike is essentially pitting teachers against taxpayers — which is teachers against everyone.

Teachers become isolated from their own community. 
Teaching has a lower learning curve than most professions. Carol Dwerk codified this conclusion with her research, (which I hate, because I think Dwerk is misogynist, but I have to reference her research just this once before I take her down in another post.)

Anyway, teachers must figure out stuff like how to calm down disrespectful parents and kids who can’t sit still. After about five years, they know how to manage the kids and the parents. And there is nothing else to learn. They get the same type of kids coming through every year. And they are teaching the same subject, and they are told how to teach by the government.

Compare the learning curve to any other industry and you’ll see why teaching was initially intended to be a sort of temporary job. This is why people who are in their mid-40s in teaching are seen as very knowledgable  and employees in their mid-40s are seen as full of outdated information.

Teachers should go home. 
A whopping 85% of teachers say they entered the profession because they love working with young people. Of course whatever their idea of working with young people is, it’s probably not a teacher student ration of 1:30. That’s more working at young people.

The difference between working with and working at probably explains why every reason teachers cite for wanting to leave teaching is that they get no respect. How can someone respect a person who spends 40 hours a week corralling such a large group of kids? It’s a terrible, impossible job that is never going to be meaningful.

Any why would you want to use up all your energy taking care of other peoples’ kids instead of saving your energy for the kids who need it most: your own.

One more thing about the Children’s Blizzard
Shortly after the big snow newspapers in Boston — reporting as if no days had passed — were already pointing fingers: “Unthinking teachers to-day dismissed young school children, some of whom have to go four or five blocks across the open land.” Yet non-teachers who made the same dangerous decisions were  “overcome by a wonderful display of nerve and good judgement.” So it seems that it’s been maybe forever that the newspaper industry lacked reliability because there were no links. And it’s also been maybe forever that teachers have been singled out for disrespect.

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Women went to work outside the home to create a more equitable society. But the more equitable a society is the more clearly women want labor divided by gender. Where are we today?

In a study in 2022 women in a very selective college assumed that when they marry they will be responsible for the children and household chores. They expect their spouses to “help with chores”, but not have large responsibility. 

But we still put girls through systems that assume men and women will have similar careers. We don’t tell girls they are most likely won’t want to work outside the home.

Our schools are built for a less equitable society than we have now. When men worked in factories and women had no money of their own, it made sense to educate girls so they could grow up and get money of their own. But we have an equitable society today where women have the right to half the family’s money no matter who earned it. Women have decision making power regardless of whether they work outside the home. We don’t have perfect equity, but it’s vastly different than we had when the schools were established, so it makes sense that the structure of our schooling is no longer helpful to women. 

We need to start talking realistically to women about the real data. And real feelings women have about personal fulfillment in equitable societies. The way we talk with girls today is as invalidating as the way we talked with them in 1950: we disregard their hopes and dreams and what we know about what women have been telling us they want for the last 30 years. 

Here are posts I’ve written that have the data. But I want to tell you: the data about what women want today is not what’s holding us back. It’s been there, consistently for decades. What’s holding us back is cognitive dissonance. We’re scared to tell girls they will probably grow up and take care of children and that’s a great choice for smart, educated people to make.

What if girls aren’t oppressed

The crazy lengths companies will go to hire and retain high level women

Gender fluidity and autism open the gates of power for women

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