Some possibly controversial opinions about parenting/education
hopefully they are all wrong so I get to learn a lot
Disclaimer: none of this is criticism of how others parent/educate their children, it is purely a reflection of my current thinking/values/constraints around the topic
Off and on over the last month or two, I have been reading about parenting, mostly focusing on education. I do not have a coherent, organized, or extremely well-researched view yet, but I do have some strong opinions. I am fully open to doing a 180 on any of these opinions, but I call them strong opinions because (1) this is a topic I care about and (2) it is a much more effective way to get to the heart of an issue if you have clear opinions you can debunk (this is the idea behind learning by writing, which this post is essentially a pass on). I will continue to refine these opinions by steel-manning arguments against them, though it will take some time to do so, as there are a lot!
Here are the opinions:
[this one hopefully is not too controversial] Public school is a suboptimal way to teach children. It teaches to the average across many dimensions, class sizes are large, individualized instruction is rare, and intrinsic motivation for school/learning drops markedly from kindergarten to adolescence1. Highly motivated individuals/teachers can do better.
An emphasis on extrinsic rewards like grades, tests, etc are generally damaging to children’s intrinsic motivation to learn, due to the undermining/overjustification effect.
As performance/mastery-based extrinsic rewards, especially when given for exceeding others, are the least-bad kind of extrinsic reward, the undermining effect may be less relevant for very intelligent/top of the class kids. For those kids, getting great grades is taken as a signal of achievement/mastery, which can help foster intrinsic motivation (at least in math).
The behavioral genetics literature (twin studies) is fairly conclusive on the point that parents have minimal impact on their kid’s long-term personality traits, including eg conscientiousness2. Genetics explains roughly half of the variation and environment explains the other half. Peer group and culture are the parts of the environment that likely have the most impact.
If you accept that parenting has minimal impact on long-term personality traits, arguments like “you need to do X thing that you really hate because it will teach you to be disciplined in the future” don’t make much sense. Perhaps doing X thing is still valuable in the moment for some unrelated reason (you should clean up after yourself because having a clean room is valuable), but justifying coercing children to do that thing to try to mold their future personality in a specific way is not appropriate3.
If you accept that culture matters way more than parenting for children’s long-term personality, finding a culture that values learning/trying hard at things matters (if you value that, of course!). Approaches like Montessori/Jesuit schools/magnet schools/microschools are all reasonable ways to join or create such a culture.
Matching the level of education children get from a generic public school only requires 1-4 hours a day of individualized tutoring (see here, here), heavily including known effective educational techniques like spaced repetition. The rest of the day could be left up to the child for self-directed projects, play time, exploring nature, etc.
One of the areas that extreme non-coercive approaches like Taking Children Seriously don’t emphasize enough is the effect of the immediate phsyical environment. If the only option available to a child is TV, they will only watch TV – having a well-stocked fridge of options for the child in their environment is important and requires thought. Montessori does this combo of child free choice/autonomy with a curated environment very well.
As much as possible, children should be treated like rational creative beings. They might be hungry or tired or thirsty and say things that they wouldn’t agree with later. Adults get hangry too. Children’s interests are real and should be respected as much as possible, and generic public school falls short here.
Reiterating that these are my current opinions and they will 100% change. If they don’t change, that means I am likely not doing a good job thinking about them. Also fully expect my opinions to change once we actually have our kid soon :)
I would really really love to hear your strongest arguments against any of these opinions!
Some updates from discussions/further thinking (only including a few of these here as larger revisions will naturally lead to their own future posts):
From a discussion with Ryan – I didn’t define “education” in this post and to be honest, I don’t have a definition I am happy with yet. I don’t intend education here to refer to purely academic education, eg language arts, math, history, etc; I am referring to something broader, closer to the Enlightenment-era idea of cultivating virtue. Which is why having most of a day being spent playing around in nature is totally fine and perhaps even more educational than the formal instruction received that day.
There is a good amount of research supporting this. Here’s a few:
This does not mean parents have no impact! They clearly have an impact in the context of the parent<>child relationship, which is a hugely important relationship in a child’s life. Activities that are done solely at home (playing an instrument, cooking, other hobbies), career paths, etc can also all be affected by parents.
To be clear, this also doesn’t mean you should never coerce children to do something. You almost certainly will have to. But it’s best to invest coercion, not spend it.
Hot take - I agree with almost all of your opinions
Public school really is set up for only a small subset of specific people to succeed.
Extrinsic/intrinsic motivations are incredibly interesting and difficult to understand, and I think an important aspect of learning is being able to characterize our own motivations. This is something I find hard to do sometimes, especially now that I’m realizing that extrinsic motivations that “worked” for me as a kid (grades at school for example) might subtly inform some of my misplaced “intrinsic” motivations as an adult. Nothing that bad overall, but definitely interesting to think about
And thinking about education in a less structured way, and more from a design perspective has been interesting - like how do we design and cultivate environments that help foster resilience/genuine curiosity/being okay with failure and trying hard things like you said.
But that being said I also struggle with where some forced structure/discipline might fit in here - there are some things my parents made me do that I hated as a kid, but now I’m incredibly thankful for them (learning Marathi/hindi for example)
I also think having as much human interaction as possible, with different groups of people of all ages in different settings is something I would want for myself and future children - that goes back to the importance of curating the environment we’re all in - especially in this hyper tech focused world we’re all in.
And definitely agree that children are smarter than we give them credit for, and respond shockingly well to logic and reason, which is awesome.
All that being said I’m obviously no expert and have very little experience with kids but for some reason have always been fascinated by this topic so thank you for this post!!! hope it’s okay that I turned the comment section into a discussion thread lol - I should’ve done my homework (read your posts) before hanging out with you this past weekend!