Kenya cancelled their school year

This started in another slack thread at work.

It was triggered by a story about Kenya cancelling their school year.

A lot of people in the thread that followed are worried about the implications for their children. How do you motivate your teenagers to focus on the difficult subjects when they could be playing video games instead? What is this isolation doing to their social skills? Are they doing enough to prep their 2 year old for kindergarten?

People are worried about prepping for kindergarten!

We have a friend who recently got their kid's online school schedule. They have it mapped out, in 15 minute increments, from 8:15 to 3:15. He's supposed to be on Zoom, with the rest of his class, the entire time.The day they got it, he read 2 books because he wanted to. His mom is positive that he will not sit still for 2 hours doing popsicle stick crafts (which happens in the first day or so). This is for kindergarten!

I don't have any idea what conditions are like in Kenya. My thoughts and opinions don't really apply there, since I have absolutely zero context.

In the US, schools were specifically designed to mold people into good factory workers. Yes, that's an oversimplification. But still. Obey orders. Stand in line. Be where you're supposed to, on time. Learn the things we care about, even if they're boring and ultimately pointless.

For some children, they do provide needed relief from homes where they don't get the love and safety they need. For others, it's their only chance to get anything that resembles a nutritious meal.

For most Americans, I'm convinced that it's just day care that's been subsidized by tax payers. It's a way to keep our children out of the way while we go about the seemingly important tasks that keep the economic wheels spinning. I reached this brilliant conclusion while I was bored out of my mind with high school, and I haven't seen anything to change my mind since.

My family is in a good place because we deliberately chose to live beneath our means so my partner can focus on parenting full time.

My little one could have started kindergarten this year. It would have been a terrible thing to do with him, even without all the risks involved in covid. There is no way he could sit still and do what someone else wants for hours at a time. Trying to force him into that mold would crush his spirit and destroy the wilful and independent person we want him to be.

I'm not saying that school is bad, or that it's wrong for your kid, or anything like that.

I want my medical doctor to have the kind of expertise that you get through years of intense study and expert guidance. And I want that doctor to have the expertise checked by other experts.

I've had multiple experiences that demonstrate that, even with that sort of training and checking, dentists can mess up badly. I'm pretty sure Mal has a new cavity in the tooth that broke when the needless cap fell off.

Someone who's building a massive bridge that's going to handle a lot of traffic needs a lot of formal education. Well, reportedly, any fool can design a solid bridge. But it takes a serious engineer to design a bridge that's "just solid enough." And yet there was the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse.

Anyway, a formal education is a prerequisite for certain jobs. But it isn't a guarantee that person who received the education will actually be good at that job.

And, for most jobs, that formal education really wasn't needed. And a lot of it was pointless.

The journalism classes my brother took in college have absolutely zero impact on his daily job. But those were some of his favorite classes, and they shape the way he interprets the news.

My high school started offering AP calculus when I got to my senior year. I really enjoyed that class. I've even found a few excuses to use the slope of a curve. But it really doesn't have anything to do with my daily life.

My daily life is heavily impacted by the things I learned by myself about programming computers. I did take a few classes, but mostly they didn't teach me anything I didn't already know. And the new things I did learn just are not relevant any more (except for vi, and we could have long flame wars about that).

What would be so wrong about letting kids pursue their own interests? If your kid would rather play video games than study IB physics...well, in the big scheme of things, how important is IB physics?

I can't even remember the definition for momentum. I think I remember why balls bounce off walls, but I'm not sure. And this knowledge that I've forgotten doesn't really matter, even though I did enjoy physics class.

And, well, playing with sail boats at science museums really helped me understand all that gibberish I had to memorize about adding vectors together.

I'm told that schools are super-competitive now. You have to make sure your kid does good in kindergarten so they can get into the right prep school to get into a good college to guarantee that they'll have a better income than the poor people who weren't going to be able to afford college in the first place.

Or you could focus on developing your relationship with your child. They're little information sponges. They are going to learn the important things, no matter what you do. If an institutionalized school doesn't crush the love of learning out of them, it may even turn out that they wind up learning things (possibly in a classroom) that actually lead to some sort of career that they love.

Or maybe not. Maybe they'll wind up in some pointless job that leaves them perfectly content to work 8 to 5 and then go home and forget about it, because that's just enough to give them the means to do whatever it is they really love.

The basic fact that people need to waste some much of our lives doing something we don't care about in order to be able to eat and get out of the elements is a broader topic for a different day.

I'm sure your pre-kindergartener will be fine. 40 years from now, I bet they'll be happier if they think back and remember playing catch with you instead of lessons where you use flash cards to teach them colors.

Or whatever it is that people do for kindergarten prep. That's something that I've never spent any time researching.