90% of a traditional school day is wasted

We're wasting time on high grades instead of spending it on meaningful work.

A British economist named Goodhart had a famous adage: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Ninety percent of a kid’s day at a traditional school is spent targeting measures: grades and percentages.

Kids spend their whole day working towards good test scores. But good test scores often don't translate to success in the real world. 

Grades don’t mean squat. 

If we want our kids to thrive in learning, we need a less abstract measurement. Grades are useful when you need a one-size-fits-all shorthand for “achievement.” Modern schools were designed to work like factories, after all. But in 2022, unlike 1922, we have the bandwidth to offer a little more than factory schooling. 

Instead of high grades, let’s aim for specific and useful outcomes. Each child can negotiate toward the real-life target they desire.

If a child is money-motivated, he can set a goal to earn a certain amount in a timeframe. If a child is driven by curiosity, she can set a goal to read a certain number of books and write an essay on the information gathered. If a child likes working with their hands, she can set up a building project. 

If we want to stop wasting ninety percent of our kids’ time, education has to be specific, negotiated, and moving toward each kid’s own goals. Not imposed, generalized, and structured around the goals of bureaucrats. 

Kids can learn the standard curriculum in a couple of hours

Yeah, most kids need to learn “the basics.” But, as it stands, most kids spend over 15,000 hours learning the basics without an end in mind. Why keep doing all these 7-hour-daily rituals when everything you can learn in a classroom can be learned a couple of hours a day through online programs? 

Get the basics over with so kids can get their teeth into the learning that matters.

Let your kids spend most of their day courageously trying new things and failing until they get something right (sometimes called “play”). Give them useful structure and positive cultural traditions to guide the way without crushing their spirits or preventing them from feeling the instructive pains of failure (and, thus, the joy of finally “getting” something). 

Your kid’s future is not set in stone. They will constantly negotiate it each step of the way. The best thing you can do for them is not to give them artificial certainty (grades and degrees), but instead give them the capability to continually re-negotiate their path.

When kids sit in classroom after classroom, raising their hands to even go to the bathroom, they internalize that life is not something to be interacted with. Instead, they’re being instilled with the belief that they are passengers (or worse–victims) in their own life. 

We’re not settling for that. 

Life is a series of negotiations. Give your child the gift of being an enthusiastic (which, interestingly, means “possessed by the spirit of God”) negotiator. 

When kids know how to state what they want and make their own plans to get it, they become the drivers of their life. When that’s the case, not a moment of their day is wasted. 

How to stop wasting your kid’s day 

Your kid can learn everything academic they need in a couple hours a day. There are countless tools at your fingertips to enable this – like math apps, Khan Academy, and YouTube (and a number of schools are built around this philosophy, too).

Structure your kids’ education in a way that allows them to take advantage of these resources – and then let them spend the rest of their day exploring the things that matter to them. 

And most importantly, communicate and negotiate with your child. Let them try to verbalize what they want, and give them all the tools you can find together to bring it into reality (while navigating reality’s many limitations). 

Those are the real lessons. None of them can be explained or taught — they have to be lived.

And the real lessons are the most important thing you can teach your child. 

Thank you for reading,

Taylor + the rebelEducator team

If you know any kids wasting 90% of their day, send this to their parents.

If someone sent this to you and you like it, there is plenty more to come.

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P.S.

Here’s what we’re looking at:

This podcast episode is on alternatives to school and college.

This tweet from a former teacher about kids living their lives between 5 and 22.

Kids learn math easily when they do it themselves. Who knew.

Quotes we’re pondering:

“I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.” ― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery

“The artificial method is to hear what other people say, to learn and to read, and so to get your head crammed full of general ideas before you have any sort of extended acquaintance with the world as it is, and as you may see it for yourself. You will be told that the particular observations which go to make these general ideas will come to you later on in the course of experience; but until that time arrives, you apply your general ideas wrongly, you judge men and things from a wrong standpoint, you see them in a wrong light, and treat them in a wrong way. So it is that education perverts the mind.” — Authur Schopenhauer, philosopher

“Creativity is not merely about cute pictures drawn by kindergartners. It is about the ability to create new enterprises, organizations, and institutions that fundamentally change society.” — Michael Strong