Simon Sarris has some thoughts that I’ve entertained myself but never articulated nearly so well. Go read “The most precious resource is agency”. He speaks of a childhood locked in rote education robbing children of the opportunity to do meaningful work and thus to exercise agency in their life.
”We seem to have a political (public) imagination so shallow that it cannot conceive of what to even do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them all the way through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim.”
And
“Seizing opportunity requires opportunity to exist at all. And I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people.”
I remember well whining in high school that most of the things being taught were pointless. (Only later did I learn how much I learned was obsolete or just plain wrong!) I pined for control and fled school for work as soon as I could. I was employed and struggling to “adult” 3,000 miles from home long before I could legally buy beer. Later, when I re-entered college, the land of lotus eaters, I never stopped eyeing the exit and the instant I had the necessary degree I was gone like a flash. It was agency I needed, even if I didn’t understand it at the time.
I sincerely hope the vast increase in home schooling is benefiting at least some of the smart and capable kids out there.
Hat tip to Chicago Boyz.