This week was the first day of school for 3/5ths of Chateau Steelypips: The Pip started seventh grade on Wednesday, SteelyKid started tenth grade on Thursday, and I started either 45th or 47th grade, depending on whether you count my two years as a post-doc as a job or more school. Only Kate and Charlie the pupper aren’t on an academic clock.
The start of September also saw a weird flare-up of social-media #discourse about home-schooling of kids, which is one of the few topics that I regularly interact with that defies my expectations based on political partisanship. Advocacy of home-schooling is mostly right-coded in my mind. I associate it with the one ultra-Catholic family in my home town whose kids were in and out of the local public school a couple times during my childhood, which has fixed it in my mind as something for people who think Opus Dei is a little squishy.
I was an adult before I was really aware of the hippie strain of home-schooling, which kind of broke my brain for a bit. And more recently, probably for reasons related to algorithm design, I’ve been seeing a lot more of the libertarian-ish variants, which are somewhat orthogonal to the other axis— there are both right- and left- coded versions of “Schools are like prisons, deliberately stifling children.”
The most recent outbreak contained a lot of that, including the inevitable link to Paul Graham’s “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”, which continues to be almost-but-not-quite a piece I remember reading ages ago, but have never been able to find again (about which more later, maybe). It also collided with The Pip being in an absolute rage on Tuesday night about having to go to school in the morning (to be fair, he had skipped dinner before going to baseball practice in 95-degree heat, and he is the King of Hangry). I’m pretty sure he’s not a big Paul Graham reader, but he independently came up with a bunch of the usual business about school being a stupid waste of time.
In some ways, it’s a little surprising that I’ve never personally been a subscriber to this particular school (heh) of thought regarding public education. I am, after all, a white American male Of A Certain Age with a STEM degree, all of which are very clear correlates with this set of opinions. I was also a “gifted kid” in K-12, which is another branch of cursed #discourse having substantial overlap with the Another Brick in the Wall Theory of public education.
On another level, it’s probably very unsurprising that I didn’t get into this, given that I come from a very education-oriented family— three of the four kids in my father’s generation became school teachers, one of them married another teacher, and my mother was a school librarian for a while before going to work for an educational consortium. Several cousins of my generation keep up the K-12 tradition, and of course, I’m at a small liberal arts college where I spend a lot of time teaching. We’re all about schooling.
It’s not that I don’t have any sympathy with the argument that a lot of schooling is busy-work— that was certainly (part of) my experience of K-12, back when the dust from the Chicxhulub impactor was still making pretty sunsets. Another bit of education #discourse that’s oddly coded for me is “phonics” for reading education, because I have a bad association with that from my elementary school days. I could already read by the time that I got to kindergarten, and (dimly) really hated being forced to trudge through a lot of repetitive “Sound it out…” exercises.
At the same time, though, while I found some of that stuff annoying, it was never really taxing, and certainly not anything that provided much of an obstacle to doing things I found more interesting (chiefly, reading vast amounts of genre fiction in my parents’ basement). I could knock out the required work with minimal effort, and have plenty of free time for other things. A part of this is that there was an unspoken but crystal clear expectation that I was going to get good grades— as I said to a cousin once when we were reminiscing, it never occurred to me that there was any other option— and that I would get zero sympathy for arguments that (almost) any of my teachers were to blame for anything. It was just sort of… there. A required part of getting on with life, like needing to wear clothes and eat food.
From the perspective of someone now working in education, of course, I see a lot of that tedious work as much more necessary than I did when I was in school. A huge amount of what’s needed to actually learn things is, in fact, pretty tedious. It won’t necessarily require a ton of effort to do, but it does need to be done. It needn’t be in a formal classroom setting; there are plenty of examples of famous Smart People teaching themselves arcane skills out of library books and the like. But when you dig into those stories a little, you find that they really did do all the tedious, repetitive practice work along the way.
What’s exceptional about those people is not that they were able to learn calculus or Greek or whatever without experiencing tedium along the way, but that they had the self-discipline to actually do the work without somebody holding out the extrinsic reward of a school grade. That’s the rare skill that enables true auto-didacts. And, as I often say about this branch of education #discourse, the number of people who have that skill is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the number of people who think they could be brilliant auto-didacts if they were just given more freedom. In fact, the vast majority of people need the formal structure of due dates and assessments and grades to prod them through doing what needs to be done to really learn stuff.
The other piece of the school experience is, of course, the social aspect, which for me was more of a mixed bag. I had a couple of pretty rocky years in junior high where I was very low on the “popularity” scale— I wouldn’t say I was “bullied” by the standards of the day (though it would probably be seen that way now; the 80’s were wild), but it wasn’t much fun. My problem was largely the smart kid thing cited in that Graham essay— I wasn’t interested in the things other kids my age were—but also a good deal my own fault, which was the point of the other half-remembered essay I mentioned above. That piece, as I recall it, made the point that some of the “popularity” struggles of smart kids in middle school come not just from a lack of interest in what peers are into but from projecting contempt for their interests, through a lack of social awareness. And, yeah, looking back, I was doing that, big-time.
I sort of got that straightened out by high school, through a combination of developing some interests in common with my classmates, learning to feign interest in things I still didn’t care about (I can smile and nod my way through conversations about cars like a goddamn champion), and finding more of a social niche with the soccer team. I didn’t enjoy junior high, but I have some fond memories of my high school years, and keep in touch with a range of folks from my graduating class. And I think that as much as junior high sucked for a couple of years, going through that was useful— had I not been in that milieu, I’d probably be much less good at the dealing-with-people parts of my job, and my life more generally.
When I look at my kids heading back to school, I very definitely see bits of my own experience reflecting back. Both of them are very smart and generally get good grades, though with varying levels of effort. SteelyKid’s social scene has been a bit of a journey, but at least for the moment seems to have led to a pretty secure niche. The Pip really reminds me of myself, but a bit ahead of the social schedule— he’s a better athlete than I was, and is genuinely interested in baseball and basketball in a way that lets him connect with his middle-school peers more than I could. He’s also very image-conscious in a way that I wasn’t then and find mildly hilarious as a parent, but won’t elaborate on now.
And, you know, after what felt like hours of The Pip ranting and raving Tuesday night, and some Wednesday-morning grumbling at Kate (I’m out of the house an hour before the kids leave for school, so she catches the brunt of any morning grumpiness), he came home from the first day chatty and happy. He was glad to see his friends, his teachers seem fine, and his only real complaint was that it was stupid hot yesterday. I expect SteelyKid’s first day today will be much the same. Because taken as a whole, school really isn’t all that bad.
I feel like I write more or less this every year, but, you know, some repetition is necessary. If you want to be on hand for the next version, here’s a button:
And if you want to respond to any of the above, the comments will be open (but I’m heading to an all-day meeting, so likely won’t have much time to engage):
Nice job coming up with a yet another creative way to convey your advanced age. This Chicxhulub-dust bit is my favorite one yet!