The Esoteric Benefits of School

why having a ridiculous institution is important + parental-load-bearing institutions + why you should do drugs when you're younger

I have strayed from my path.

This newsletter started out with the promise of bold, foolish and often mistaken takes, but the last few issues have been disappointingly clear-headed. I'm seeing signs of praise, agreement and shared sentiment¹, and not enough people telling me I'm wrong. This needs to change. And what better place to start with than my old whipping-horse: school.

I originally planned to spend these introductory paragraphs waxing lyrical on the horrors of that archaic institution. Just to make sure I wouldn't be mistaken as a school defender by the end of this piece. But I realized that I had too little to complain about.

Don't get me wrong, there's still a bunch of things to hate about school. Countless books, essays and threads have gone over them in detail over the centuries. But for me personally, school was not the most torturous experience I've been through, it was just something that had to be borne. You sacrificed 6 hours a day to the education gods and came back to real life in the afternoon. It's hard to see the water when you've always lived in it.

I hated school when I was a kid. No, that’s a lie. I tolerated and endured school when I was a kid like the minimum security warehousing operation that it was, and it’s only in subsequent years that the hatred has fomented as I reflect on what a monumental waste of time it represented. - Thomas Bevan

But it still sucks at what it's supposed to do. It's a generally accepted fact that school's purpose is not that of effective teaching. It can't even be defended on the grounds of efficient teaching, considering how wasteful it is in the aggregate. It might have started out that way, back when literacy and knowledge stores were scarce resources, but that isn't the case anymore. And so it's "true" purpose, if any, is the subject of much discussion. Maybe even too much.

You've already heard how it's actually just a state-sponsored daycare. A much-needed public service that shifts the burden of responsibility away from parents for half a day. Or that it's the beginning of a lifelong social indoctrination programme, exposing children to the currently dominant culture and mores. Turning them into good little unquestioning robo-slaves ready to slot into the capitalist machine.

Or the one about it being the place where children get their first real dose of socialization. Ensuring that they understand the existence of social hierarchies and public expectations, even if they soon forget how to calculate square roots. And by doing so, it teaches them how to navigate the impersonal, oft-disappointing, Kafka-esque mess that is the real world.

if youre so smart why couldnt you figure out a way to learn what you want while assuaging teachers and administration in public school  - alth0u

Probably the best defense I've seem so far is that school is a warm, safe, healthy place where children can spend half a day around adults who (probably) won't kill them. This alone would make them worth keeping around.

But these are the boring ideas, the old ideas, the welfare ideas. If I'm going play Chesterton’s' fence card, I might as well try to make it a good one. So most of this post is going to talk about how schools real value is as a disconnected, independent environment, separate from the family and neighborhood. And why this is often a good thing.

Because in many ways, school is a completely different world. And even if it's a pretty terrible one, it's very existence allows for some pretty weird stuff to happen. Stuff that's taken for granted but is only possible thanks to the combination of sandbox and adversarial structure that school provides.

Something I worry about is that bullshit beliefs and trash institutions may in fact be load-bearing and whatever replaces them could be worse. - A Literal Banana

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I.

It’s a bare minimum.

Here's a tradeoff that crops up all over the place: give up your agency, and receive security. Surrender control and receive a guaranteed outcome. It's the basis for the social contract and the maintenance of law and order. As well as a bunch of other things like regulation, courts, lockdowns and signing your soul over to a corpora- ahem, employment.

Like any good trade-off, both sides make a tempting offer. In our case, skipping school allows for unfettered agency and no obligations, and school...well, school offers you an increasingly worthless degree for which you give up a certain number of hours for more than a decade of your life.

I prefer the latter. It's not the bravest stance to take, but I choose it because I like minimums.

Minimums are the non-negotiable baselines that I use to make sure I never fall off completely. It's the weekly number of workouts, the three Substack posts a month expectation, the 9.0 GPA maintenance. The stuff that must get done no matter what.

As much as I resent the over-optimizing mindset, and strive for the purposeful creation for slack, there's a certain amount of coercion that's necessary to lay the foundation for that freedom. Slipping into unproductive catatonia is a real failure mode when you're relying on self-directed effort, and one that having fixed minimums helps avoid. Even if I did absolutely nothing else, the minimums ensure that I keep moving towards what I want.

School provides one of the best minimums in the business. In little more than a decade, you walk out of there with a degree. It doesn't take much, unless you choose to give it more than is strictly necessary. Even if you have zero accomplishments outside of graduating, you've fulfilled your duty as a perfectly average member of the modern populace.

It might not be the freest outcome (that's why it's a trade-off), but it's liberating in ways other than agency. After getting into a school, you no longer have to face the responsibility for moving things along yourself. Now there's this (relatively cheap) background process that runs for a few years and gives you a degree at the end of it, leaving you free to spend your remaining resources wherever you please. This is the main thing minimums achieve, they set you free to explore without the nagging guilt, or the feeling of falling behind.

The point of a minimum is, of course, to be minimal. If you try to maximize a process that's supposed to run cheaply, you’re missing the point. The more power you let school have over you, the less useful it is as a minimum.

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II.

You're not in charge.

I like to think I know what's good for me. I assume most other people do too. And I like to think I do a better job at choosing things to do than a school does. But my maps are limited, there are parts of the territory that I avoid by default. And they'd stay dark to me for as long as I was in charge of my decisions.

So once again, there's upside to relinquishing control. You're put into situations you'd have never chosen yourself, hoping for outcomes you'd never get to see otherwise². What school does is push around a bunch of kids into doing things they might hate, in the off-chance that it's good for them. And sometimes, it is.

Some parents might have arbitrary rules that rival the school's mandates, but they're still limited to their own maps. They're also more likely to bend to resistance, since they serve just the one individual and aren't held to a path by unshakeable rules. Their relationship with their children (thankfully) isn’t impersonal enough to allow for truly arbitrary coercion.

I'm not going to try to guess what weird things school pushed you into that ended up being a useful experience, but I'm willing to bet that there were at least a couple of them. It might have been your first fist-fight, or something as mundane as drama club, but they did happen.

One experience that's fairly universal is being forced into a classroom with people you'd normally never get to see, let alone interact with. "Heterogeneity good" might seem like a weak argument, but I can't deny the fact that school contained a variety I haven't seen in the years since³.

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III.

It rewards the unpleasant.

There might not be a way to measure the payoff of memorizing your times-tables, but I'm pretty sure it isn't zero. Likewise for being forced to learn a second language, writing terrible essays, and mostly-pointless projects.

"But this stuff is useless." Yes, that's the point. You'd have never done them yourself, given the choice. Lucky for you, school takes away your choice the moment you walk in. My fellow libertarian souls will resent this, and learn an important lesson in half-assing things. But somewhere in that largely worthless pile of mandatory practice, there are a couple things that will matter in the long run.

school gives you a proximal utility payoff for doing seemingly useless practice - roon

Outside of school, you've got to deal with trade-offs all on your lonesome. Trying to model personal utility, efficiency and dozen other variables in the hope of picking the projects that are worth doing. Even then, most of that work will never be worth anything except the skills learned from them, and you have to continually resist the temptation to give up. A temptation that's made harder to resist by the fact that there's no downside to dropping out. It's enough to make a man wish for structured curricula again.

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IV.

Love and other drugs.

Maybe there's a point at which too many suitors becomes a problem ahem Tinder ahem but for the most part, more is better in the marketplace of teenage crushes. And nothing comes close to providing the sheer number of peers that high school gives you regular contact with. Most relationships are (often completely) dependent on proximity to keep them going. I've lamented this fact before, but it happens anyway.

The more optimistic among you will point out that clubs and playgroups exist to fill this gap. But unlike school, attendance in those institutions isn't mandatory. So they’re much smaller and you aren't guaranteed a collection of your entire age-cohort in one place the way you are with large educational institutes.

Does the internet solve this? I don't know. If these early years are any indication, the answer seems like a definite "no". It's making a difference on the margin, but most couples still go to the same school.

As for the other drugs, I meant actual drugs. Like, narcotics. Marijuana. Maybe half a tab of acid. Sold-in-an-alley, pulled-out-at-parties-with-a-wink-and-smile, probably-diluted-to-oblivion drugs. Maybe alcohol too, if your definition of drug stretches that far. This is the relatively harmless stuff, of course. Unless you happen to own a penthouse or two, your kids (thankfully) cannot afford cocaine.

If you're going to do it someday, I think it's a good thing to have your first brush with this stuff when you're young. For one, you can take it. You're not an adult yet, so you aren't expected to act like one too often. You won't lose your job or be sued for child-neglect on a week-long bender because...well, you don't have either of those two things yet. A teenage delinquent is a danger to themselves, an adult is responsible for other people.

Secondly, it's probably easier to put your body through this stuff when you're young. Long-term brain effects aside, your body just heals faster in your teens. And if you ask for it, you'll also get a lot more sympathy and assistance as a helpless teen trying to kick the habit than you would as grown-up.

If you choose to abstain, you also get to see how it works out for the people who don't. Instead of hearing horror stories from your obviously-biased familial relations, you can watch your peers disintegrate before you in real time. Fun!

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V.

Rebellion and lies.

Kids grow up real fast, and sooner than later, they need someone to rebel against. If you're lucky, school fills that role. Sorry, they'll never stop grumbling about your curfews and other barely-enforced rules, it's just how this works. But any real subversion, based on genuine hate, remains limited to schools.

It's fine for a child to dislike (or even resent) a teacher. It isn't ideal, but it's fallout is fairly limited. Teachers are explicit agents of coercion, and as such, they deal with disrespect and dissidence everyday. But having a parent-child relationship based on regular insubordination and consequent punishment does not end well.

Sure, every parent's going to have to roll up their sleeves and wield some coercion every once in a while. But I promise you, you do not want to have to do it everyday. And you really don't want to do it out of a sense of fear, because that's where it gets really ugly.

Because if there's one thing the education system deals in, it's fear. It takes a rare kind of parent to resist the ever-present worry that their kid is falling behind, and that this is their fault. You'd think someone who chose to homeschool in the first place would be robust enough to ignore the doubting voice, but no such luck. Parents worry, parents fear, and then they do dumb things that they have to double down on to maintain authority.

This sucks for the kid, even more than a demanding teacher in school would. School ends, teachers leave and there's always the option to switch institutions if things turn messy. You get none of that with family.

Homeschooling also might rob kids of the opportunity to rebel without the knowledge that they’re safe. It’s family- either your rebellion is a mere game or it’s so severe it’ll impact your relationship till death - marsienne

They've also got to learn to lie. And while this does usually begin at home, it's better for everyone involved that they get to practice it elsewhere. It's both harder and less rewarding to lie to people you've grown up around. The fact that you're all stuck playing the long game makes it even more so.

School, on the other hand, makes dishonesty a very convenient strategy. Mainly because lies are used most often against structures that have rules which invite the most disobedience, and school has lots of those. There's also a wider range of people against which to develop you fib-telling ability, this ensuring that it's generalizable. Don't want to get stuck with an over-fitted deception skillset, do we?

There’s a reason why some of the best Calvin adventures happen at school.

School also happens to be the perfect place for prank-playing. Either on your clueless fellows or in defiance of the Death-eaters teachers. Mean neighbors used to a preferred target for pranks⁴, but:

1. They know you did it, which takes some of the fun out of a stealthy execution.

2. They can threaten to sue. Also not fun.

But waging a gag war against agents of faceless system? That hits the sweet spot between playful malice and plausible deniability. You can actually get away with stuff for once, because the suspect pool is so large. Not so with family or local acquaintances.

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VI.

It’s a nemesis-sourcing platform.

Not only does school give kids a structure to rebel against, it gives them the opportunity to form rivalries and create sworn enemies. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of bullies and physical violence either. Just being around a bunch of peers is enough to get the competitive juices flowing.

And kids need someone to compete against. A rival to overthrow, an adversary to chase down. Someone to envy and someone to crush in battle. You might not like, but this is what peak performance is fueled by.

And this too, is best kept outside of the house. Sibling rivalries are fun, until they aren't. There's only so much glory to go around the house, and it can lead to some ugly dynamics if there's no other place to spread the competition out.

Again, the separate nature of school lets you keep particularly vicious conflict confined to school. You can hate a bully/rival in class, and then forget about them completely once you're home. This separation isn't perfect, but it's nice to have. And infinitely preferable to resenting your brother.

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I suppose it’s obvious that I don’t intend to convince any real anarchists with this post. There's a particular kind of kid for whom school is literal hell and I wish them well in their attempts to quit. But I do think that the "free the children" crowd ought to know what they're getting into when they call for abolishment. School is...quite the institution.

[school provides] structure for those who need it and structure for those who need to defy it - marsienne

There’s no other place that fills the role of unconnected sandbox and faceless adversary as well as these bastions of formal education. Burn them down at your own peril.

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1. I joke, of course. I treasure every single comment, like and subscriber.

2. I suppose this is part of the appeal of bondage.

3. Caveat: this might not hold for the posh private schools.

4. See: Dennis the Menace