The Job Schools Really Do For Parents

One of the frustrating things about being very deep in an area is that sometimes you can be saying something that is totally obvious and no one listens. That is different than a secret, because often many outsiders have heard it and think it’s a lie. Only later do they decide it’s a truth. One of these facts is that a significant amount of value that school delivers society is in care (call this babysitting if you want). In other words, parents want their kids out of their hair, preferably by someone who treats them well.

I’ve been saying this for a long time, most recently here. I don’t know anyone deep in learning like me that doesn’t believe that care is an enormous portion of education’s societal contract. Yet no one seems to act on that. As an investor, this is good news for me. I have my pick of the founders who have recognized this and are acting on it. But as someone who badly wants society to change for the benefit of kids, it saddens me almost every day.

So a shout out to The Diff which maybe puts this in a more accessible way than I do.

Lots of parents are learning how hard it is to keep kids focused and entertained for an entire schoolday — but they’re also starting to suspect that the role of school is not so much to teach as to keep kids out of earshot and make sure they don’t maim themselves. We might end up saying that teaching is a more important job than we thought, because it’s a different job than we suspected: as it turns out, it takes patience and conscientiousness, but we don’t need to pay up for an advanced degree. You don’t need to have the literary and analytical skill to teach Lord of the Flies, just the sang-froid to prevent it.

And yes, the ramifications for school curricula, personnel, cost and organization are vast.