I absolutely believe that the right private school can be an order of magnitude better than public school.
I also believe proper self and home education has the potential to be an order of magnitude better than private education.
The problem with private education is it is the same traditional classroom and curriculum model teaching relatively the same stuff as public school. Math this far by 18. Grammar this far by 18. Science this far by 18. Meh.
I went to a prestigous private college with a ton of private school kids that, in college, were no smarter or better than my plebian public school upbringing.
My problem isn't public school. It is traditional schooling. The hard-core inefficiencies. The one size fits all path to graduation. And with all that, my kids being essentially raised by someone other than me and my wife (and the people we individually allow to impart wisdom on them).
There's another side to this as well. Snooty dickhead rich kid syndrome. Of course, if I wasn't home schooling, I would hypothetically put them in the best private school possible, but then, I essentially get entitled prick lessons for free with my tuition.
As we have seen time and time again... When you are wealthy, it is tough (not impossible, but tough) to raise humble and hard working kids that have the fire to do cool things with their lives.
I know the "who you know" thing is an important consideration to many, but that's what country clubs are for. If we are talking purely education, I am 100 percent confident I can raise the smarter kid than a squad of the best 28 year old communist teachers money can buy.
100%. This is the same conclusion I've come to.
I'd like to share my perspective on the same concept to see if
@Antifragile can better resonate with it.
The way I see it:
Traditional schooling was born out of localized residence. In the age before instant global communication.
Kids were rounded up from neighborhoods and put inside a building. Adults in the same areas who knew more than the kids took up the role of teaching whatever that local area demanded of them, which shaped their development pathway.
It isn't entirely like this today, but the point I'm trying to make is that this idea of childhood education, the way we see it today and traditionally, is a function of localized resource constraints.
Today, I can educate my daughter the same way the emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, was raised. By seeking the best minds on any topic that I feel will improve my child's development. In Book 1 of the Meditations, Marcus acknowledges all the people who have influenced him most. This section has had a meaningful impact on the way I understand education.
Homeschooling isn't about keeping your kid at home staring at an iPad all day, which is how I believe many people think about it. The term does injustice to unconventional education programs. It's more about customizing the developmental pathway.
Every aspect of it can be reimagined.
Who says when they can and cannot learn how to do a thing? And what things they should interact with? And how?
Why should my kids be sitting on a chair in a pattern of flexion all day staring at a screen or a piece of paper with their pelvis locked. They'd be inside a locked box-shaped room with neon-lights blasting their faces off for hours on end.
What if my daughter and a group of other kids get to play outside instead? Go to the pond and collect 10 different specimen to then look at under the microscope. Rig it with a 20MP rgb camera and project the view up on a wall so everyone can interact with it at the same time. Then they can connect the data stream to a pre-built Google Colab Machine Learning server to analyze their samples. Track every cell independently. Get accurate ML measurements of their samples.
Imagine she did that for 3 hours once every week. By the time she's 12 she would have more microscopy experience than graduate-level microbiology students at a University.
Now stack another skill and hit it for 3 hours a week for however many years.
What if she did 5 different programs each 3-4 hours during the week. Stack that with sports and play. 20 hours of "deep work" in a meaningful way with the help of world-renowned experts on whatever topic of your desire. And the rest mostly play.
This method is way more appealing to me. It obviously demands a lot more from the parent. Some people are too busy and poor to be able to do that. But for people that are able to break free from the Matrix, you can commit to their development, be active in it, and watch them grow into badasses.
