One Weird Trick to Getting a Perfect Education

My wife tells me about the first day we met. We were twelve, and I was visiting her 7th grade classroom because my parents were thinking of sending me to school. The teacher invited me to sit at the back and observe while the students reviewed for a quiz. What Elisa remembers is that I answered all his questions out loud, before he could call on anybody. I didn’t know you were supposed to raise your hand and wait.

You won’t believe this, but a while ago she found her diary from that year, and there’s a page with a single sentence that reads “I am going to marry Adam Smith.” I guess things work out.

Until that point I’d learned at home, and apparently I’d learned enough to pass the test. There would be other tests, and I would pass those too. Now at 43 I find myself in the good company of some pretty rare birds: Most highly credentialed people don’t homeschool their kids—though there are probably more than you think (and you’ll find quite a few of them here at FPR). Homeschooling is weird to a lot of people, but I’m weird to a lot of homeschoolers. The typical homeschooler may think of college professors as condescending scolds who think not sending your children to public school amounts to child abuse.

But plenty of us professor types are more open-minded. My colleague Dale said I ought to write about this, so here I am. He and I have similar stories: the fundamentalist Baptist kid with a liking for books and foreign adventures who gets ruined by the ivory tower and is now a professional corruptor of the youth (recently retired, in Dale’s case).

While we do share a story, one difference is that Dale wasn’t homeschooled and I was, mostly (I went to Christian schools for 7th and 8th grade and then for the last two years of high school). Elisa was also partly homeschooled. And the first thing to say about why we homeschool is that no matter where we were in that story, we never once considered doing otherwise. We’ve been more conservative and more liberal, more to the left and more to the right, further from and closer to our points of origin. It never made a difference to our view of homeschooling. For a long time we didn’t even plan to have children, and even then we always planned to teach them at home. We believed in homeschooling before we believed in having anyone to homeschool.

I teach philosophy; I like to make arguments. I’m afflicted by the “expository demon,” as C.S. Lewis called it. It has me always itching to explain my thinking, to anticipate objections, to make sure my reasoning is airtight. I can make a case for homeschoolers and against their detractors. But it always feels a bit like making the case for loving my wife. Sure, I can give you some reasons, but they’re beside the point. The point is that you can’t argue me out of loving my wife: if you could, it wouldn’t be love. We’re talking about a core conviction here, something that’s not exactly irrational but is definitely more than rational. Homeschooling, for me, is a little like that. You can’t argue me out of it. There’s no cost-benefit analysis, no pro-con list, no deliberation between option A and option B. It’s more like love at first sight.

Neither of my parents went to college, and that’s probably why they thought it was ok to take charge of their children’s education. The main thing you learn at college is that you’re not supposed to do something if you didn’t go to college for it, unless it’s something simple and unimportant like farming (which is what my dad did, until people with business degrees drove him out of business). My parents never got that memo, so they just went ahead. And that’s the main thing I learned as a homeschooled kid. As the meme has it: you can just do things. You don’t have to raise your hand and wait.

Not that I actually did much school. My mom must have taught me to read at some point, but the only reason I know that is because I spent so much time reading books. But I mostly did that on my own; reading wasn’t “school.” Nobody made me read books. I just wanted to, so I did. And—crucially—I had the time and space to do it. There were no bells, no bullies, no grades, no lesson plans and learning outcomes. I just read books. That’s it.

The real curriculum is always the hidden curriculum. The real curriculum hidden behind any form of education is the way it arranges time and space, and the real effect of the conventional arrangement called “school” is not to help people learn, but to convince people that they can’t learn without school. And boy does it work. I can’t think of many things people are more thoroughly convinced of. Remember, I’m a professional corruptor of the youth. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s unsettling the deepest convictions of your average undergraduate. But their conviction that education equals schooling often defies my best efforts to dislodge it. When it comes to school, they’re fundamentalists. We’re talking about something that lives well below the level of reasoned argument.

The basic principle of education is that you can’t learn anything you don’t want to learn; the basic premise of schooling is that you won’t learn anything unless someone else wants you to. I think if people in schools learn—and plenty do—it’s in spite of school not because of it. My good students (as opposed to the ones with good grades) are often the ones who have been most resistant to their schooling. My bad students (as opposed to the ones with the bad grades) are often the ones who liked school best. And, for what it’s worth, some of my worst students are the ones who are studying to become teachers. But there are many good teachers, too. And the same goes for them: teachers who teach well do so in spite of school not because of it.

In a lot of people’s minds, the whole point of homeschooling is to shelter kids from the world. And it’s true that plenty of homeschoolers are “sheltered” in ways that might be objectionable. But this is a tricky concept. There’s a scene in Captain Fantastic where the homeschooled kids visit their cousins in “the real world.” The homeschooled kids have been living in the woods, reading Noam Chomsky and learning Mandarin. They climb mountains and practice martial arts and hunt deer with knives. After dinner, they watch their cousins playing a video game. They can only stare in shock at the violence and destruction on the screen. They’ve been “sheltered” from all that. But during dinner, those same cousins couldn’t stomach a candid conversation about an actual death; their parents all but covered their ears to keep them from being exposed to such horrors. Who is really being sheltered?

That’s the central question of the movie, and there’s a lot of nuance to the answer. Other parts of the story make plain that you can go too far (and get pretty arrogant) while trying to shelter your kids from the “real world” of stupid entertainment and bad food and wasted time and pathetic simulacrums of “education,” and that there’s something to be said for being familiar with what other people know, even if what other people know isn’t really worth knowing. But in general I’ll say this: the problem with many of my conventionally schooled students is precisely that they are all so cut off from the world. I homeschool my kids because I want to make sure they aren’t sheltered.

Being able to do that is a privilege, to be sure. Many people can’t homeschool even if they want to. There’s a larger arrangement of time and space that often makes it impossible. The “hidden curriculum” of our social and economic order usually requires both parents to have a job, for example, and you can’t really homeschool unless somebody stays home. We’re extremely lucky. At the same time, we have to sacrifice some things to enjoy this privilege. We’d have a lot more money if both of us worked. Not everybody has the same choices to make, but everybody has to make choices.

Homeschooling often produces duds. Of course, so does conventional schooling. I don’t think it’s very fruitful to point to individual failures and successes. According to the Harvard professor who sees homeschooling as child abuse, I’m obviously a success story, what with all my fancy (and very conventional) degrees. But you can always say that’s just me. Maybe if I hadn’t been the sort of kid who would spend all day alone in the woods listening to Beethoven, being homeschooled by unqualified parents wouldn’t have served me well. Maybe.

But maybe this is the biggest difference between thinking like a homeschooler and thinking like a conventional schooler: it’s not about “success.” If it’s about success, you need a program to get you there. You need “learning outcomes.” And you need to eliminate all the surprises that might get in the way of achieving those “outcomes” (you certainly can’t have kids wandering off into the woods to listen to Beethoven). Thinking like a homeschooler means thinking that real education happens in all those surprises, those serendipities, those things that can’t be put into a program and connected to an outcome. Falling in love with homeschooling means believing that things work out – though not necessarily as we intend. It means believing, with Wendell Berry, that “we live the given life, not the planned.”

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