Chapter 10

Schooled

Your kid might never say a word about what they do at school all day, but you still want them to learn as much as possible. All parents agree there’s nothing more important than a first-rate education.

Well, almost all parents.

Bare minimum mums and dads think a high-pressure, top-tier education is a waste of time, money, and effort. Don’t worry, this isn’t an anti-intellectual rant about why you should throw rocks at people who can read. Casting stones at anyone is impolite, and besides, I happen to be literate. Not that you can tell based on this book.

Overachieving parents put education in a category by itself in terms of importance, but its impact averages out over a lifetime just like everything else. By the time someone is forty, you can’t tell if they went to a run-down school with daily fistfights or a rich school with daily foie gras. In the long run, an overachiever’s kid at an exclusive school won’t be any better off than your kid at an average one, save for a few minor differences.

How Rich a School Must Be for Amenities

The Price of Excellence

Overachieving parents value education for one reason and one reason only: money. Don’t act shocked. Families don’t move to the most expensive school catchment to make their child a better poet or a deeper thinker. Overbearing mums and dads think if they spend more money on their kid’s education up front, their child will be directly rewarded with a higher pay grade later in life. There’s value in a good education, and it starts in the low six figures and comes with a free gym membership.

Of course, overachieving parents will never say anything that direct. Instead, they claim they want their kid to attend a top-notch school to help them get into a good university. But it’s easy to follow that train of thought to its fiery derailment. If you only care about a good education because you want your kid to get into a good university, and if you only want your kid in a good university so they get a good job, and if you only consider a job to be “good” if it has a high salary, then all you really care about is the almighty dollar. Or the almighty pound if you’re in the U.K. It’s the same overparenting, but with a fancier accent. All that parental concern for your kid—from the day your child got into the best nursery to the day they graduated from the most exclusive university—boils down to shallow materialism. Education is just a long con so your kid can buy stuff.

Overachieving parents deny this money obsession. They claim they just want their kid to be happy, but that excuse doesn’t hold up. If happiness were the real goal of education, parents wouldn’t obsess over getting their kid into top universities. Harvard or Oxford aren’t known for producing cheerful graduates, just rich ones. There are dozens of studies on how much graduates earn but none on how much they smile. You can pay off student loans with checks or money orders, but not with a winning grin.

Once an overachiever’s kid gets that money, though, it doesn’t really help them. They might earn more annually, but they’ll waste it on their own kid’s future education. Whether it’s an overpriced private school or a state school in the most expensive part of town, overachieving parents lock their child into a perpetual cycle of overspending that gets handed down from one generation to the next. But as a bare minimum parent, you can send your kid to a normal school and spend the money you save on beer, and your kids and grandkids can someday do the same. That might not make your family happier, but it will make you drunker, and that’s almost the same thing.

Exclusively Nonexclusive

Regardless of whether your kid attends the “best” or “worst” school in the country, the subject matter is the same. Maths is still maths. Top schools don’t have secret knowledge that two plus two actually equals 5.3. They all teach the same mundane trivia that your kid will remember just long enough to pass the test and then purge from their memory forever. It’s the only way they’ll free up enough space to remember all the Pokémon.

While the subjects are identical, learning them is harder at an elite school, but not in a good way. At an expensive school, your kid will face tougher competition. Rather than fighting for scholarships against kids who spend the day sword-fighting with rulers, they’ll compete against the children of doctors and lawyers who are motivated to win. Your kid is better off being the top student at a poor school than the bottom student at a rich one. Especially if you want them to hold their own in a ruler fight.

Overachieving parents will never believe all schools are the same. They’ll point out that kids who go to rich secondary schools get into prestigious universities. That’s true, but not because their kids learned anything special. Rich kids get into rich universities because they’re rich. Overachieving parents aren’t getting their kids ahead; they’re just paying a premium for mediocrity. Talk about a bad investment.

Differences in How Subjects Are Taught at Poor and Rich Schools

Subject	Poor Schools	Rich Schools
PE	Dirt track.	Rubber track, and their butlers run for them.
Maths	Learn to count on their fingers.	Learn to count with gold coins while laughing at Tiny Tim.
Physics	Limited budget for experiments.	Their lab is Space Camp.
Chemistry	Don’t need it because they cook meth.	Don’t need it because they buy meth.
English	Learn to write from a workbook.	Learn to hire ghostwriters.
Spanish	Learn to meet new friends in a foreign land.	Learn to talk to the help.
Politics	Learn about government ministers.	Same, but they call them “Mum” and “Dad.”
Health	Learn to stay clean.	Learn to avoid poor people.

Learn What Matters

As a bare minimum parent, you shouldn’t be concerned about what school your kid attends. Just make sure they learn what they need in order to support themselves and not be a social deviant. There’s a close connection between low intelligence and bad behavior. None of the murderous rednecks in Deliverance finished secondary school.

But it doesn’t take a top-tier education to prevent your kid from becoming a homicidal hillbilly. Your child can learn to read, write, and do maths from any primary school in the country. Scenic views and state-of-the-art athletic facilities aren’t a prerequisite for your kid to spell “cat.” Generations of kids mastered all these subjects in one-room buildings with no indoor plumbing or heating. If you think algebra is hard now, try doing it with frostbite.

The idea that schools are more or less equal is hard to believe given how closely they’re measured and ranked. But all those ratings tell you is what students there are like on average. The stats don’t tell you anything about how your individual student would perform. Remember, even at the most prestigious schools, one kid finishes last. And it doesn’t bother them at all because they have a trust fund.

Lesson Learned

Wherever your kid goes to school, they’ll learn the same fundamental life lessons—and not the ones overachieving parents want to talk about. School will teach your kid that teachers, like everyone else in life, play favorites. Merit matters, but not as much as sucking up. School will also teach your child to jump through hoops to appease an arbitrary, underqualified authority figure who, through a cruel twist of fate, has absolute power over your child’s life. But most of all, school will teach your kid to sit still and be bored for hours a day. A student who masters those skills can handle any white-collar job on the planet. Office dwellers aren’t born; they’re made.

School will also teach your kid valuable lessons about teamwork. On group projects, your child will discover the only thing teammates contribute is dead weight. Plus their names, which partners are happy to add when it’s time to take credit. This dynamic remains the same in the working world, but instead of a grade, your kid will get a paycheck. Meanwhile, their useless teammates will get a paycheck AND a promotion. That’s called leadership.

Homeschooling

You might be tempted to skip the headaches of the primary and secondary education systems and homeschool your kid instead.

Don’t.

First of all, it’s too much work. Spending all day, every day with your kid violates everything bare minimum parents stand for. The only thing worse than not spending enough time with your child is spending too much time with them. Just ask your kid.

Second, if you homeschool, there won’t be any mitigating influences in their education. Everything will be on you. You can’t blame the way your kid turns out on a bad school or a bad teacher. Never underestimate the value of a scapegoat.

Third, there’s value to having your kid get roughed up by the system. That’s how the real world works. Your child can either single-handedly build a better society, or they can learn to be a well-oiled cog in the machine. One of those outcomes is a lot easier than the other.

Finally, if your kid wants a white-collar job someday, they’ll have to join the education system eventually anyway. There’s no such thing as homeschooling for university. When your kid starts at a university, it’s better for them to have thirteen years of experience with being mistreated by academia than to go in as a rookie. It’s dangerous to crush someone’s hopes and dreams at such a late stage. Better to do it to them young when it’s still okay for them to cry.

The University Difference

But is university even necessary? If you’re just trying to turn your kid into a functional adult, a three-year degree seems like overkill. Your child doesn’t need a fancy piece of paper to tell them they’re average.

Unfortunately, if you want your kid to get by in society, they’ll need a degree, even if it is more work up front. A bachelor’s degree today is like a high school diploma (or A-levels in the UK) years ago. Your kid can’t even stack shelves without a major in food stacking and a minor in crushing the bread with the tinned soup. In another decade, they’ll need a master’s degree to explain the socioeconomic impact of paper versus plastic. And ten years after that, they’ll need a doctorate just to walk in the front doors of the supermarket. They might slide open automatically, but not for the uneducated. They can starve.

It’s less work for your kid to go to university than to fight the system for their entire life. But that doesn’t mean you have to get them into an expensive, exclusive university faraway. A degree improves your child’s job prospects because it shows employers your kid can survive being kicked around by the system for three years. It’s good practice for the working world, where your kid will be kicked around for the next three or four decades.

That piece of paper also shows hiring managers that your kid is normal enough to function in society on at least some level. It might seem like universities take anyone who can pay, but they do weed out some weirdos. If you have a university degree, an employer can safely assume you can hold a basic conversation and aren’t possessed by the devil. Although they might sprinkle you with holy water just in case.

Earning a university degree also shows your kid can make a plan and execute it. Going to university wasn’t a good plan. In fact, it was a financially devastating one. But it was a plan nonetheless, and your kid stuck to it. That means something. Namely, that they’ll be paying off student loans for the rest of their life.

Above all else, graduating from university shows employers that your kid is desperate. That crushing student debt is a ticking time bomb your kid has to defuse before it blows up their life. Employers know if they make your kid a terrible offer, your kid has to take it. If not, the employer can make an equally terrible offer to the next impoverished graduate while your child starves. Your kid spent three years and all of your money to put themselves at a disadvantage at the bargaining table. University is the most expensive lesson they’ll never learn.

Real Knowledge

Beyond those lessons on how to be beaten down by life, most university degrees don’t teach usable job skills. All those years studying your major were wasted, just like you usually were. Think about your job right now. Was there anything you learned at university that taught you how to file certain forms or to use a job-specific computer program or to find the best toilet in which to hide from your boss all day? Probably not. Most accredited universities are woefully understaffed in the hide-and-seek department. When you enter the workforce, you have to be trained or retrained on everything because your job duties have nothing to do with abstract classes like calculus or eighteenth-century French poetry. Unless your job is to teach one of those classes. In that case, I’ll pray for you. In English.

Most of the stuff people do day-to-day can be taught in a few weeks or months of on-the-job training. It doesn’t really matter if you understand the theories and science behind what you do, because most of your day consists of following the same basic steps over and over again. Push this button. Measure that sample. Put your left foot in and shake it all about. You don’t need years of education to do your job. You need a one-page flowchart.

Most of us are production workers, even if we can’t see the assembly line. We aren’t hired to dream new dreams or develop new ways to do things. If you’ve ever spent any time around other people, you realize that’s for the best. Stupidity is not a recessive trait. The truth is most of us are at work to produce a specific result over and over again, be it a polished widget, a completed file, or an educated student. There’s no reason to shell out more for an education just to have your kid turn out just as average as everybody else. It’s a lesson rich kids learn the hard way, and they literally pay for it.

School’s Out

You can hit all the benchmarks of successful parenting without sending your kid to an elite private school. An ordinary education will prepare your kid for the workforce by mistreating them in all the right ways. It’ll stop them from being a social deviant because they’ll be too educated to hang out on a river playing a banjo. And it’ll prevent your kid from blaming you for their problems because they’ll have an entire education system to blame instead. And the best part is you don’t have to do anything to reach those milestones. Just make sure your kid leaves home every morning and returns every afternoon. And that second part is optional.

If you stick to a bare minimum education, your kid will turn out fine, just like all the children of overachieving parents. And that will make those parents furious. There’s no better reward in the world.