“I think I found one thing you can’t provide in a free market! Education!”

Usually I respond to statements like that with “I’m surprised you think you haven’t learned outside of school.”

“Well yeah, but kids learn all sorts of good stuff in school where as in life you really don’t branch out a whole lot.”

There’s a reason for that. Not only do we live in a world where we have people specializing in specific things and getting really good in their niche, people also don’t tend to go too far out in terms of hobbies and interests because they simply don’t have time. Time is one of those scarce resources too. Right now I’m in a minimum wage job that eats up 7 to 9 hours of my day while I am churning out one blog post a day. Imagine if I had 24 hours a day to blog and were paid to do that. I’d be very good at blogging, rather than just average.

“So what does this have to do with school?”

Well, school is just like my minimum wage job. Kids go for 7 to 9 hours a day and have lots of homework on top of that in some cases. How much free time do they have? Let’s just assume they have as much time as I do. That is time for an extracurricular sport or learning an instrument, or hanging out with friends for a bit, or something else small. Notice those or’s. You can’t do everything even with all the time in the world, and just having an hour every day to yourself doesn’t give you a lot of room to explore and learn about what interests you.

“But you still learn stuff in school!”

I certainly don’t recall a whole lot about English Lit, Chemistry, Biology, Study Skills (yes that was and is a class in many schools), and a lot of other courses that didn’t interest me at the time and still don’t interest me. On the other hand, I can easily pull mathematical proofs out of my head and profess the depths of physics because I loved that stuff. I took that in and made it mine. All the other hours of the days were wasted to me. Hours I could have put toward learning some other stuff. I’d wager you have classes you didn’t do good at or didn’t like, and I would also wager you felt like time was wasted at school.

“Then maybe we need to restructure public schools or something.”

Many kids get very good late in high school and late in college about knowing what to take, both in terms of interests, and for time to themselves. My junior and senior years of high school were filled with joke classes like Bowling and Intro to Art and so on. I did this so I’d have more time to myself in terms of both less homework and in class because of a diminished workload I could finish very quickly. It’s no coincidence that in those years I learned a majority of Latin grammar, the ability to memorize large chunks of text, vast amounts of ancient history, how to read body language, and all sorts of things that school wouldn’t have offered me.

To restructure schools so that everyone takes 7 to 9 hours a day of what you think interests them is no different than what they have now. You’re leaving them with less time to decide what is important to them and less time to go explore what they are interested in seeing and learning.

“What I’m proposing means they’d go to school for fewer years because of fewer junk classes, doofus.”

And right after those fewer years they’ll go to college, do the same thing, and right after get a job and be caught in the problem still.

“So you want to get rid of school altogether and just let kids run rampant? How are they going to learn how to add and subtract?”

Well, if you’re living in a free market and you’re teaching them money and investment like a good parent should, then you don’t have to worry about the math. They’ll learn that very quickly out of necessity and out of want to get more money and understand how their actions benefit them. The other stuff comes with kids just looking into what interests them. If they say they want to be an astronaut, give them some books on space exploration and so on. They’ll learn what is expected and known already, and if that’s their thing then they’ll eat it up and crave everything else about it. Maybe said child changes his mind eventually and says doctors are cool. Give your kids books about medicine and sociology. As a parent you’re duty bound to help your child grow (which makes for a very good discussion, by the way).

This isn’t to say there’s not a place for schools. If parents don’t have time in the day to be enablers for their children, then they can pay someone else to do that, and perhaps many parents in the neighborhood have that need. Someone who is a good teacher would see the demand and come in saying “I can look after your children and help them learn things. I do X Y and Z.”

Then there would be teachers marketing to different levels of development. There would be teachers for the very bright kids, teachers for the students with learning disabilities, and teachers for the misbehaving kids, and so on. There’s no need for the phalanxing of students by age for years and years and years. Let parents and kids alike decide their curriculums and how to approach them.

When a child has learned enough and decides that he or she wants to try doing a job, then let that happen. Then they can learn their job on the job because it interests them.

“Said child would likely be woefully unprepared for said job.”

The same could be said for people with Fine Arts degrees. And I don’t mean that as an insult, but more as serving my point. In my business program I learned the basics of every business function, so I can fit in anywhere and begin to specialize when needed. A fine arts student might have trouble finding a patron, so he or she would have to find a job that interests them, then begin to learn while on the job.

Some people learn to be good at what they want to do, and some people learn just because its interesting. Let people decide for themselves which is which in their lives.

“Hrm. So when can I shake my money in front of you teach my kids?”

As soon as I decide if I really want to monetize my services.