Peak Education.

My sons are brilliant guerilla teachers, and it works for son two’s favour. Son one — who is more analytical, does a course, keeps his notes, and tutors son two. They have shared goals. They learn, like I did, despite their teachers, rather than because of their teachers.

Now I pay a lot of rates (property tax) to live in my part of town and send the boys to a fairly elite single sex school. But the quality of teachers is about the same as it was for me: the difference is that in my school in a working class/ lower middle class suburb we still had the reading list of an elite school — from Cicero and Caesar (in the original) to James Joyce. The quality of textual material young men and women are exposed to has moved from interesting — Kipling, Caesar, Pope, Dickens… to YA dreck such as the hunger games.

It is enough to want to teach informally whenever possible.

Roosh is about 20 years younger than me. He reflects on his education, in the USA, at considerable cost to his parents and taxpayer, and finds it wanting.

But besides the scientific method, it was all for nothing. I say that without exaggeration—not a single lecture, factoid, graph, or equation I’ve learned in school has been marginally useful in my life since graduating 14 years ago. Even when I was employed as a microbiologist, more than 90% of what I used at work was learned through practical on-the-job training. I’m confident that at 15 years of age I could have done the same job as at 25, especially since I was essentially a glorified assembly line worker in the manner at which I conducted experiments handed down to me by my superiors.

What percentage of men in the past completed a formal education? Compare that with today’s perverse obsession to educate everyone using a one-size-fits-all model that jams facts into people’s ears as if force feeding someone on hunger strike. It’s no surprise that the only thing that accomplishes is creating adults who are good at basic trivia but not at solving problems or generating useful ideas. You can not educate thought into someone. You can not create a great thinker or an intellectual out of thin air. Education destroys original thought and muddles great minds, and mainly excels at creating zombies who march in step with all the other automaton…

If I have a son, he will receive a classical education from a dedicated tutor at no more than two hours a day. The rest of his time will be spent exploring nature, music, athletics, woodworking, art, and of course, the scientific method. The goal is not to fill his head with information and facts in the hopes that one day it will aid him, but to give him the tools and mental framework to tackle any problem he will face in life while allowing him to develop passions that make it all worth living. My education didn’t do that for me and for many other men, and what a regrettable waste it has been for us.

Now, if education was useless we could tolerate it. But it is more than useless: it is dangerous, to one’s sanity. Teaching has always been a place where men who are overly lustful for teenage flesh of either gender: but now women are getting in on the act, or being caught: one recalls that Simone de Bouvier seduced young women and then pandered them to Sartre, her inamorata.

Firstly, it’s boring. I have a master’s (Grade 19) and a fellowship (Probably grade 25  or 30), and I now have a Pavlovian response to slide shows. I fall asleep.

It might lend a degree of credibility to my role as my children’s primary educator if I could report that I dropped out of high school for reasons of virtue, perhaps to pursue a rigorous course of self-directed study in thermonuclear engineering or to dig wells in some impoverished sub-Saharan village. But the truth is, I left public school because I was bored to the point of anger. To the point of numbness. To the point of rebellion.

Day after day I sat, compelled to repeat and recite, and little of it seemed to have any bearing beyond the vacuum of the classroom. Everything I learned felt abstract and standardized. It was a conditional knowledge that existed in separation from the richly textured world just beyond the school’s plate-glass windows, which, for all their transparency, felt like the bars of a prison cell.

Peter Gray knows just how I felt. Gray, a Boston College psychology professor who wrote the 2013 book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, is unsparing in his criticism of compulsory education. “Children are forced to attend school, where they are stripped of most of their rights,” he says. “The debate shouldn’t be about whether school is prison, because unless you want to change the definition of prison, it is. School deliberately removes the environmental conditions that foster self-directed learning and natural curiosity. It’s like locking a child in a closet.”

Secondly, it can be abusive. Either physically (being locked in the quiet room), emotionally — being informed that your wishes and interests have no place in school, or sexually, given the number of male and female teachers who have been caught sexually exploiting the cheerleaders or Football squad (heterosexually and, more frequently now, homosexually) are approaching or exceeding the numbers of children scarred by the pedophilic priest scandals.

If I was in the USA I would be in a huge bind. I agree with Instapundit: sending your child to a US state school is placing them at risk. But I’m a solo Dad, and the Kiwi habit of leaving work on time (taking it home if needed) is not part of the US corporate culture. I’m home in time to undo the damage done by the school over dinner.

I have seen what the Canadian system has done to young people as I have relatives there, and I will no further: Libel is such a hard charge to defend. However, I do have boys who are going through the NZ educational system. One that is deeply flawed. People are graduating high school without the skills needed for maths or physics (which rules out almost all the sciences), and without the ability to write a coherent argument. (I think you fail if you do this, given the current marking schedules). And there are memes about continuing to acquire credentials as some kind of perverted proxy measure for being an independent and mature adult.

What should we do? Well, for many of us, it is too late. The kids are in the school system, and we are up to our necks in debt paying for that house in a good school zone. But I would argue that is a mistake my generation has made.

Instead, I would go rural: live where the housing is cheaper, keep the budget minimal, so that when you have children one can work and one can raise. (Or both work part-time). The current generation is dysfunctional: this is the fruit of a long progressive walk through the institutions. So, instead, make like Lenin and vote with your feet. You have naught to lose but status and debt: your children have nothing to lose but their chains.