As I mentioned in The Purpose of Homeschool, homeschooling families must work to build alternate professional and social status systems outside our anti-family culture, instead of only doing “school at home”.
A vital part of creating alternate forms of status is making work, labor, professional development, the physical act of doing and creating, integral to a child’s education.
This is intimidating to parents today because our own education was almost completely devoid of exposure to work of any kind. To be young is to be waiting in a two decade long line: good grades1, summer jobs, community service, test prep, more test prep, extracurriculars, just to get into college which itself will only secure you an entry level job; where the expectation is that an educated and accomplished young person still needs to be taught how to work.
Before our modern education system came into being, even poor societies could pass on basic skills which would send our youth today scrambling for anxiety meds. The fact that we can’t do this in a modern society is not the kid’s fault, this is our failure.
100 years ago, child labor and compulsory education laws rescued young people from the danger of being tiny cogs in the great grinding machines and dark mines of the Industrial Revolution. The hope was that these kids could be saved from exploitation and ignorance - and leverage their education for improved economic prospects as adults.
But today, schools have become corrupted titans of their own sort. We’re in dire need of a new type of movement which rescues our youth from the growing dangers of Standardized Industrial Education.
Step By Step Plan
How do we give our youth genuine work experiences? As
said in his essay “School is Not Enough”“It would be most desirable if there were a formula for instilling mastery, a guide of recipes and options for every child or young adult. But so long as society is committed to treating children unseriously, the obvious apprenticeships will be few. There may be more varied options than ever for any given child, but none of them will come to him on their own. They will lie just off the path, and the child will need to go looking. One reason that schools will always do poorly at finding such opportunities for children is that the very best opportunities will always be a response to local needs—a sensitivity to context is precisely the thing that systems of scale fail at producing. But both parent and child should never confuse this with a lack of options. Our era is resource-rich, including educational resources, but onramp poor. The legwork is up to you.”
“The legwork is up to you”.
I wholeheartedly agree. If we’re willing to look for and invest in them, the opportunity to create alternate paths to professional and social status are there.
The remainder of this article is what I think “the legwork” might look like.
Step 1: Before Age 12: Work From Home
I’m not talking about laptops and Zoom meetings but work and training done as a family at home. One of my most fundamental parenting beliefs is that my children must learn to work and that their work should be hard2. Beyond physical labor and household chores, this includes learning how to behave, how to hold a routine, how to self-govern, how to care for their things, how to manage their emotions, how to communicate, etc.
It can mean maintaining a family garden, a bee hive, taking care of animals, doing home or car maintenance, building a fence, preparing food, childcare, or repairing things. If I tried to list all the ways kids could “work from home” with their parents, this article would be too long and no one would read it.
What holds us back from doing this is not opportunity but mistaken beliefs about what childhood is for:
That a frenetic, fun-filled, activity focused life for our children is normal and good. We’ve swallowed the consumer family lifestyle in full. I.e., the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality: “This family on our street went on this big, fun vacation, they have an exclusive family fun pass to the theme park, their kids are in 5 different travel teams, 3 different bands and their 4 year old attends the elite pre-school. We should do all that too!” And we come to feel that good parenting is a calendar full of “educational” and family friendly things for the kids to do.
Couple with the consumerism, most of us have optimized our lives to the point we don’t have a lot work to do anymore ourselves within the walls of our homes: most things can be Instacarted or Amazon Primed or Googled. To ask our kids to do more work means we’d have to do more work and that’s no fun at all.
But because we are so wealthy and have so many opportunities and resources, we have the privilege to choose how to push ourselves and our kids into hard work. Bake the bread, instead of buying it. Collect the honey from a beehive in your yard instead of picking it off the shelf. If you want ice cream or a pie, make it! Have your kid change the oil, milk the cow, feed the chickens, swap out toilets, grow vegetables, mow, edge and weed. Ask them to sew clothes, build toys or repair an appliance3.
I don’t know if it matters which forms of unoptimized work your family does, only that you do it. And that young kids come out of it used to learning by doing and working.
Step 2: Age 12-14: The Family Business
Generally, when a child reaches this age, he can start to do some kind of professional work. There’s no better place to start this than at the family business.
No family business eh? This is where the golden handcuffs of corporate employment come back to bite us in the butt. If all we do is email, fill spreadsheets and sit in weekly status meetings, it becomes very difficult to prepare our kids for the professional world, where they are often not welcome.
If you have a family business, ask children this age to take on some aspect of the business, under your supervision of course. It might be checking inventory, answering the phone, basic accounting, data entry or assisting you in whatever it is you do.
Corporate workers still have an opportunity here. They can teach their kids (after hours if needed) how to manage digital communications, stay on task with screens, communicate in difficult environments with other adults, learn to type, use common productivity apps, or pass on a wide range of other skills which will be applicable in whatever work the child does later in life.
They can also open a side business, or go into business for themselves because owning a business is in everyone’s blood.
Any of these chances to work with their parents will be more useful than a full day of middle school classes, (we all remember middle school), and it will prepare them to work with other adults in a formal apprenticeship.
Step 3: Age 14 & Older: A Modern Apprenticeship
More than just a 9-5 arrangement or a summer job, apprenticeships in times past could last for years and the apprentice might even move a long distance to stay and learn from the master.
We don’t need to recreate this structure with modern apprenticeships: a 14 year old boy who apprenticed with ye olde blacksmith had few choices and even fewer resources. He did what he had to do.
By comparison we have so many choices and so many resources that I believe a child could engage in many kinds of apprenticeships which would expose him to a wide variety of work and career possibilities4. Not one year’s long apprenticeship, but a plethora of mini-apprenticeships.
Approach friends, family or others who have a work situation where this is possible. Explain what you’d like to accomplish. Again, you’ll get more traction at smaller companies and with business owners than with corporate middle managers. But anything is possible!
Make a written agreement describing what the apprenticeship covers (not always the same as an employment contract but an employer and/or local labor laws may require it).
What skills does the apprentice need to have BEFORE starting the apprenticeship? I.e. what does the parent need to teach them?
What specific skills will the “master” teach the apprentice?
How long will the apprenticeship be? How many hours a week for how many weeks? When will it start and end?
Will the apprentice be paid or will the “master” be compensated for their time and expertise? Again, may be dependent on local labor laws and what the teenager is learning and when and where the apprenticeship is taking place.
Rinse and repeat. As the teen ages, narrow the focus of the apprenticeships toward his interests and make them longer. Tailor the content of his academic classes toward this interest if possible. And as his experience becomes greater, the apprenticeships could go into more depth.
Offer to do this for the teenage children of your friends and associates. What could you teach?
So for example, let’s say a 14 year old does a series of mini-apprenticeships with his parent’s contacts. Over the course of a year he works with:
A CPA and learns how to keep a basic ledger.
A real estate agent and learns how to be personable with a client.
A plumber and learns how to install a new toilet or replace a broken pipe.
A corporate middle manager and learns how to respond to a long, detailed email with just a single word.
And after this round, he really enjoys the work with the CPA and the plumber. The next year he does longer apprenticeships. Maybe he works with the same “masters” again on a deeper level or does work with an electrician and a small business tax expert and takes some finance-oriented math classes. Maybe he does another sales oriented apprenticeship in order to round out his personal skills too.
If he continues on this track, by the time he’s 18, not only does he have a good idea what he likes doing, but he also has years of practical experience working with business owners and customers. He might even be qualified to operate a business on his own.
But for our purposes here, what’s most important is he’s used his education to:
build a sense of professional and social status outside of the system
build relationships with other likeminded and independent professionals with whom he could collaborate in the future.
Thus he has begun to build a village. This is far superior to a fast food job where a boy earns some extra spending money for the privilege of working the deep fryer on behalf of an absentee owner at minimum wage. And it’s far superior to sitting in a school classroom learning questionably useful topics at a “standardized” pace
Rather than waiting in line for status, he has made his community and relationships his primary source of legitimacy, confidence and education. This is the very beginning of building alternate forms of accreditation, certification and credentials.
This is Work
If not rescued, a child will have to seek status from the state and mainstream institutions, perpetuating the anti-family cycle.
So “the legwork is up to you”.
At the start, you’ll have to create the work at home, you’ll have to have something of a family business, you’ll have to find other professionals willing to teach your kid and be willing to teach theirs.
At the start, it will feel lonely.
Others will think you’re weird.
It will certainly be hard.
But in the 21st century, this is the work of village building.
Do You Need Directions?
These are big ideas and the details need to be planned and tailored to your village and circumstances. Often I find it helpful to get the perspective of someone far removed from my circumstances to help me see what I can’t see.
To that end, I’m available to consult with you to help you succeed.
What’s Coming?
Throughout September & October, I plan on writing on the following topics:
Publishing my first interview with a master village builder
Agency & New Technology
The type of village building projects and initiatives that make the biggest difference and how I can help you.
How communication skills can help in your village.
How to build villages in the office.
Practical tips For guys on how to make and keep friends at middle age.
I’ve met parents who pick daycares and preschools based on improving future college placement. The cue to mainstream status starts forming in the womb.
Don’t worry, they play A LOT.
Implied in all of this is that you know how to do this stuff too.
There are also child labor laws. Before building apprenticeships I would suggest looking up what your state’s laws are.