The Worst Cost of School Conformity Is Wasted Potential

Indoctrination is a serious problem in schools, but it is not even the full extent of what conformity costs us. There is also the person your kid might have become if their strongest interests had been taken seriously. You can remove an objectionable political message from a curriculum and still leave a child spending years on work that barely touches their potential. I want a much more ambitious answer than getting the approved opinions right.

Curriculum publishers choose which events deserve attention, which interpretations receive sympathy, and which questions never appear. Teachers' unions have political interests of their own. None of that means every lesson is a conspiracy, but it does mean families should be able to inspect the choices and refuse them. A curriculum does not become neutral because a large institution bought it. If the student's job is to repeat its judgment without examining the argument, the problem is already there.

Apply the same standard to me. If your child reads this and disagrees, the educational question is whether they can explain why. Which claim do they reject? What evidence would matter? An education in independent judgment has to leave room for a student to expose a weakness in an argument the adult likes. Otherwise we are teaching them that thinking means finding the authority's preferred answer, then decorating it with reasons.

But suppose we solved that problem tomorrow. Every course now presents arguments honestly, and no student is punished for a defensible disagreement. Would giving every child substantially the same intellectual life suddenly make sense? The kid who wants to compose music would still have their strongest interest squeezed into the margins. The kid absorbed in engineering would still have to stop at the boundary of the common course. We would have made the conveyor belt fairer without asking where it was taking anybody.

I want a world of specialists doing things they love at an extremely high level. An extraordinary building makes the value of their differences visible. The person who can calculate its structure needs the person who understands how it will be inhabited, and both depend on people capable of turning a design into something that stands. None could produce the result by acquiring a shallow copy of everybody else's abilities. This is the social promise of individual excellence: developing what distinguishes one person gives other people possibilities they did not have before.

The would-be designer still needs mathematics capable of disproving a beautiful drawing. That is part of taking the ambition seriously. Criticism, calculation and practical constraints make it possible to distinguish a design from a fantasy, and discovering that difference may be uncomfortable. An education that protects an interest from every difficult encounter will never develop it into excellence. I want the student to find out whether they care enough about the work to acquire the discipline it demands, with enough help to make that a real opportunity rather than an invitation to fail.

Wasted potential is a loss to the child first, but it does not stay private. There is also the thing they might have understood, built, or created that the rest of us will never encounter. We cannot count those unrealized possibilities as though they were exam results. We can recognize the poverty of an educational ambition that barely permits them to begin. A more tolerable school day would be welcome; a world in which more people have developed something remarkable to offer one another is worth building.

That would be a more optimistic and frankly more fun world to inhabit, full of people with something of their own to contribute. I want your kid to be one of them. Give them reasons to question the opinions they inherit and the tools to pursue the work they choose. Reproducing an institution's preferred person is a miserable ambition beside discovering what this actual person could become.