Study without thinking and you are blind; think without studying and you are in danger. – Confucius
One of my sons told me last week he’s thinking of going to college. He quit high school before graduating and has done very well financially as a web designer. But he’s realizing that it’s not something he’s going to want to do forever and thinks some college experience might be good for him.
Another son told me two weeks ago that when he tells his college friends about his K-12 schooling (alternative private school, homeschooling, public charter school) and all the experiences he had, they’re envious. But he’s been realizing lately how much he’s missed out by not attending traditional schools.
It didn’t occur to me till my kids were school-aged that my formal schooling left something to be desired. I approached it like everything else in life–who could I impress? I had no passion for learning anything until graduate school. I just went through the motions. My wife’s experience was somewhat similar. And so we were determined to provide our kids with a different kind of educational experience than we had.
We succeeded, to some extent, but now I think we erred too far the other way. I got pretty cocky about my views on what was the right kind of education and this cockiness prevented me from seeing that there’s a wisdom to a more balanced approach.
“School, if it is good, imparts knowledge and a context for understanding the world around us. It opens us to ideas that we could never discover on our own, and make us one with the life of the mind as it has been shaped by people and cultures we could never meet in our own experience. It makes us part of a community of learners, and helps give us form and direction to the endless flow of experience that passes before us.” – Kent Nerburn
I know my sons have benefited from their non-traditional education. But I think they’ve also missed out, primarily because of me and my ego. My wife saw the problem way sooner than me, and thanks to her persistence, we’ve come back towards the middle with our daughter. It’s not too late for them, of course. But I do feel oddly bad about this — maybe even guilty, an emotion that I rarely experience.