The most common misinterpretation of The Case Against Education is that it’s only about college. In fact, my treatise analyzes not just high school, but K-8 as well. Where there is education, there is educational signaling.
Whenever I opined on K-8 education, though, I made a major concession. While schools mostly waste taxpayer money and students’ time, they nevertheless provide one undeniably useful service: daycare. Schools warehouse kids so their parents can work, keep house, and relax. Until a few months ago, I thought this benefit was inevitable. No matter how little useful knowledge schools deliver, the most bogus “education” of the young automatically has to provide daycare as a byproduct.
How wrong I was! How very wrong. Beginning last March, schools across the U.S. sent kids home – and started “virtual instruction” for kindergarten on up. What a joke. Obviously – obviously! – a kindergartener isn’t going to do virtual instruction unless a parent closely monitors him. Any parent able to do kindergarten-level work might as well just teach the child himself. The same goes for the vast majority of 1st-graders, 2nd-graders, 3rd-graders, and 4th-graders. Mature 5th-, 6th-, 7th-, or 8th-graders might do their work without a parent breathing down their necks, but most won’t. Once schools closed last March, I added my younger kids to my homeschool and haven’t looked back.
To be fair, you could say virtual education was an emergency measure, and almost no one treated it as a serious substitute for classroom instruction. It was a classic, “We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn” situation. Most parents went along with the farce to let well-liked teachers save face.
Now, however, many school districts are doubling-down on the absurdity of virtual instruction for young kids. My school district, Fairfax County, initially announced that families would have the option to get two days of in-person instruction per week. This in turn means two days of daycare per week. That isn’t enough to let both parents work full-time, but at least it’s something.
Last night, however, Fairfax County Public Schools reversed policy.
Fairfax County Public Schools will begin the 2020-2021 school year with 100% distance learning, due to “worsening national and regional health conditions.”
Superintendent Dr. Scott Brabrand made the virtual recommendation Tuesday, and the school board agreed to accept his proposal, allowing the superintendent to move forward with his plans.
All instruction will be virtual for a full quarter. At least. The schools keep getting full tax funding. In exchange, they refuse even to provide daycare. This is poor service even by the low standards of the public sector. For all practical purposes, parents of virtual schoolers will be de facto homeschoolers, so they might as well cut the red tape and aggravation and homeschool de jure as well. At least in Virginia, homeschooling law remain lax. Why be an unpaid employee of your school district when you can easily be your own boss?
You could say, “At least let’s give virtual education a chance.” I refuse. I will not even give it a chance. I have been in school continuously for forty four years, and a parent for seventeen years. Giving this madness a chance is not worth my time. Sending my kids back to school to see their friends two days a week was a reasonable option. “Sending” my kids “back to school” to “see” their friends is at once laughable and sad. If my kids can’t play with other kids in school, they have no reason to be there.
I’ve been calling for massive cuts in education spending for a long time. Now, however, the case for austerity is truly a no-brainer. If schools won’t provide daycare, why on Earth should taxpayers continue to pay over $10,000 per year per child? Every taxpayer in Fairfax County now has an ironclad reason to say, “I want my money back.”
Of course, since we’re dealing with government enterprises, you might as well save your breath.
READER COMMENTS
River (Frank) Bellamy
Jul 22 2020 at 7:07pm
I am (or at least was before the pandemic) a full time tutor, primarily for high school and introductory college/AP level physics and math. (If anyone wants such a tutor, email me!). I think it is true that a lot of the value is lost with virtual instruction. For kids with a good home life and highly educated parents, like yours, possibly all of it. But looking at kids in general, I think there is some value to the online instruction.
(1) One of the benefits of a normal school that you do touch on is socialization with other kids. Putting kids in a room with other kids for 8 hours a day 180 days a year forces them to learn to be with other people. Being on a zoom call isn’t the same, but it isn’t nothing. And for younger generations, learning to socialize remotely may be a more important skill than ever.
(2) Another benefit is that if the kid is in an abusive home, school provides a trusted adult outside the home that they might tell, or who might notice if they regularly show up with bruises or something. Again, a zoom call is not the same as in-person school, but it isn’t nothing.
(3) Math. One of the patterns I have noticed as a tutor is that homeschoolers and former homeschoolers tend to be weak at math. This is understandable – for most people math is not fun for a while. And it is taught disconnected from its applications, which makes it come off as very abstract and makes it difficult to see the purpose. But to do science, engineering, economics, any number of other subjects, one needs solid math skills, skills that it normally takes years to develop. And kids who don’t develop those skills are at a disadvantage if they become interested in one of those fields. Most homeschooling parents (And I know that Bryan is an exception here) won’t push their kids to learn much math, many have long since forgotten the math themselves. Virtual school may not be as good as in person school, but again, it is not nothing. It means there is a nominal teacher who will administer a math test and issue a grade, and that will encourage students to keep learning something.
Ray
Jul 23 2020 at 9:09am
It’s of course not nothing, but it’s far inferior to in-person education and parents who want to set their kids up with the best chance for success in life are not going to be casual about accepting an entire year or more of “it’s better than nothing”. Too much is at stake.
Instead, schools should open. If teachers feel unsafe, hire different ones. We’ve taken far greater risks as a country for the greater good in the past.
Komori
Jul 23 2020 at 9:16am
I see the socialization argument a lot, and it always puzzles me. If you really want for kids to learn how to socialize, it’d be best to give them a lot of exposure to people who already know how to socialize (namely, adults). This is pretty much how it used to be done, with kids around their parents or apprenticed and so on.
Sticking a bunch of kinds in a room and expecting them to learn how to properly socialize from other amateurs is only slightly more sensible than sticking them in a room and expecting them to teach each other math despite none of them knowing it yet.
If we hadn’t evolved to function in groups it wouldn’t work at all, but given the increasingly childish way adults behave (temper tantrums should not be the go-to strategy for everything) it’s pretty obvious this method is sub-optimal.
john hare
Jul 24 2020 at 4:37am
I dropped out of school at 12 and picked up a GED at 19. Passed the GED before completing a semester of night school. This is five decades ago. No problems academically and was able to hold a high b in college engineering classes while working full time.
It took me quite some time to learn to fit in with young people my own age. Social skills I picked up in my twenties i should have been learned in my teens. Cringe worthy memories. I don’t know how much of that is attributed to not being around people my age for several formative years. I would place myself as socially retarded for some of those years and several relationships were soured. That has cascaded over the decades as I can see where early stupid mistakes caused problems that led to other problems later on. It is entirely possible though that it was just me and not my lack of contact with other youngsters.
On the other hand, I worked all those years and learned work ethic in my preteens that others were learning in their twenties.
Mark Brophy
Jul 23 2020 at 10:53am
Math isn’t very important even for computer programmers and other techies. Learning to communicate well is much more important. If a 35 year old takes the SAT, his math score will be worse than it was when he was 17 but his verbal score will be better because he uses the language constantly but rarely uses math.
Rachel
Jul 24 2020 at 12:01am
As a homeschool graduate, I didn’t take math beyond algebra in high school — by choice. (I did take stats later, in college.) I don’t believe in making people waste their time studying specialized skills that not everyone needs. And, frankly, almost nobody needs trigonometry or calculus in everyday life.
But homeschoolers are not some crazy exception here. In fact, I would guess part of the reason you have the perception you do is selection bias, because homeschoolers weak in math they actually need recognized this need — and that’s why they hired you. Both literacy and numeracy in the American adult public — most of whom are the products of public school — are abominable.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), more than 75% of 12th-grade public school students failed to test at the “proficient” level. Forty percent scored as “below basic.” We’re seeing this in real-life situations where many young adults are unable to make change unless the cash register tells them specifically what to hand over. I had a friend who had a run-in with a cashier literally unable to make change when the difference was one cent.
According to Psychology Today, “in an article published in 2005, Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.”
Homeschoolers, as a group, are not the ones dropping the ball.
Matthias Goergens
Jul 23 2020 at 7:51am
They were making kids do ‘homebased learning’ here in Singapore as well. Including kids in Kindergarten.
Michelg
Jul 23 2020 at 8:09am
Brian, I wonder if a solution for this could be: as far as schools don´t return to normality, cutting off of their budgets to the necessary ammount to mantain the virtuality mode. Not beyond that.
It should require only some accounting.
mark
Jul 23 2020 at 10:05am
As a teacher, parent and school+college student I agree, fully. Schools functioning mainly as day-care is a long-hold belief. (Though I value college-education much higher than whatever “education” was forced on us in school).
Though Thomas Sowell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9boQrCPwMws showed in his recent book that charter schools do much better than standard schools (esp. but not only for black kids), which kinda must mean that they do a bit more than day-care, or at least much better “day-care”. (Plus a leader in The Econ. claims kids really lose out with schools closed. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/07/18/the-risks-of-keeping-schools-closed-far-outweigh-the-benefits )
A few more asides:
I saw how free-lancing teachers of German at Goethe/Hongkong worked many unpaid extra-hours to provide a meaningful “distant-course” (like: preparing a ppp with dozens of slides to illustrate a new rule step-by-step) – while school teachers in Germany (all kinda “tenured”) just sended out some mails full of pdf-scans with exercises for kids to do (no need to send back, really – and “of course, you can mail me, if you have questions” rofl). Kids and parents were very happy indeed about youtube! (Anyway, demand for online-only-courses in HK fell low – who voluntarily pays for that?! )
The few private schools in Germany are eager to reopen; gov.-funded are eager to “be very careful and responsible”. The good news is they tend to concentrate now more on elementary subjects (Math, German).
Jens
Jul 23 2020 at 11:37am
Well, I had a primary school child at home in a German public school for the past 4 months.
We were given the tasks (sometimes a PDF) every Sunday in a web application for the following week with a suggested timetable. There was also a web application for basic arithmetic operations with an integrated reward system (coins for integrated mini-games). And a question and answer application for the reading books.
There was also a daily video stream in which the teacher carried out and documented several long-term experiments. Among other things, the rearing and pupation of caterpillars to butterflies (such sets can apparently be bought for biology lessons).
So I’m very happy with home schooling. This is also due to the fact that my son may not need support at first glance, but is very quiet and often falls a little behind because he is overlooked. That has changed extremely, he has made great strides. This is mainly due to my wife, but definitely also because of the teacher. I would even pay for that.
One thing is clear: it depends.
Iskander
Jul 24 2020 at 7:03am
I’ve been reading a fair number of books and reports from the 1920/30s and its amazing how many authors will use lack of education as a reason for low labour productivity in much of Asia, even for tasks which don’t require literacy. The education obsession is nothing new.
Greg Clark compared a textile factory in interwar Southern India where education was provided to workers and their families with those in Bombay where no education was given. He found no difference in labour productivity between them.
MarkW
Jul 24 2020 at 7:41am
It will be interesting to see what happens in Michigan. Here school-funding is directly tied to enrollment and there are existing teaching companies that actually know how to do virtual education where parents could enroll their kids. That would redirect funds away from any local public district doing virtual teaching badly (which will almost certainly be the case — the teachers and districts definitely haven’t spent the summer getting up to speed on virtual teaching).
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