I met a woman the other day with a full-time job in the health care industry. She noted that her 14-year-old boy was just starting his first year of high school and that he had never been to school before. As she worked full-time, did her husband stay home to teach the kid? No. They couldn’t afford to give up his $10,000+/month income, plus great benefits and a pension. Had she been home-schooling the kid? “No! My husband doesn’t believe in home-schooling. Our son has been unschooled. He does whatever interests him and sometimes asks us questions. The only thing that we’ve done is work with him using some standard math textbooks starting at age 9.” How come the kid was going to high school now? “It was his decision. He really wants to try it out. We did not want him to go.”
What did her husband do that he was so adamantly opposed to sending his child to a traditional school? “He’s been a public school teacher for 15 years.”
Where is this man a teacher? I’ve looked at a lot of the best-paying districts in the country and only a handful even scratch six figures, let along go all the way to $120,000.
Public high school, for many communities, seems more about law enforcement than education, unfortunately. It’s easier to keep property safe when you know where most of the teenagers are for a good chunk of the day. Buy a cop a beer in a bar and ask what he/she thinks about school vacation days. Still, even if not enough academic learning takes place in the public high school, I’m not sure that “unschooling” is a viable option for too many people, since many kids might normally gravitate toward watching tv and playing video games, rather than reading a book, dissecting the family dog, or doing whatever else it takes to properly educate oneself in an “unschooled” environment. Schools also allow for at least some positive socialization (it’s great for meeting girls!) and they tend to have better athletic facilities and team sport opportunities than other sources, although some towns do have excellent community-based sports. I also wonder what might be the effect (fair or not) on “unschooled” students applying for MIT. Does anyone know of an “unschooled” MIT graduate? Perhaps they can comment on how they were received by the admissions process, etc. Lastly, if that school-employed guy is making $120k a year, tell me he’s at least a principal now.
As a homeschool kid, I’ve never had a problem meeting high educational standards. But that’s beside the point. Reading & dissecting aren’t inherently better than TV and video games. If you want to spend your life watching TV or playing video games, you take the steps you need to make it happen. Likewise with literature or biology. You just don’t defer your interests until later because you think that following the rules will get you what you want. It’s difficult to explain this to traditionally educated people because their concept of “what I want” is limited.
About the deceptively high salary: the guy was a teacher for 15 years, but he could be doing anything now. It’s amazing how much easier it is to learn social skills and sports when you’re not wasting 6 hours a day sitting on your ass.
John, Andy: In order to protect the innocent (guilty?), I don’t want to name the precise school district. I will say that it is considered a high quality, though not exceptional, public school. Keep in mind that schoolteacher salaries that you see published are for working 9 months per year. So to earn $10,000/month a teacher would need to reach only the $90,000/year pay level, a relatively common level. Of course, some teachers agree to work during the summer and therefore get paid considerably more by the school system than their basic salary.
http://www.alleducationschools.com/faqs/teacher-salary has some more info on teacher salaries compared to other occupations. Teachers, on average, earn more per hour than civil engineers, architects, accountants, or “medical scientists”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01generationb.html talks about teachers in the Rochester, NY public schools earning $102,000 per year for 9 months of effort. This is in a city where the median household income is $42,600 per year and the median home price is $94,000 (source: http://www.homeinsight.com/home-value/NY/rochester.asp ; zillow estimates a “home value index” of $62,300 for Rochester, so a teacher could buy a new house every year and give it away to a friend; the comparable figure for Lexington, MA (standard Boston bedroom suburb) is over $600,000 so it seems that this could reflect the price of a reasonable family home).
Andy: How many MIT graduates were “unschooled”? I’m not sure, but the youngest MIT professor ever hired, Erik Demaine, was home/unschooled by his father. He completed a bachelor’s degree at age 14 and joined the MIT faculty at age 20. http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N46/46genius.46n.html has an interview with Demaine. Just imagine how far this guy could have gone if he had spent 12 years sitting in a public school classroom!
[James: Obviously your home schooling has made you a more careful reader than the rest of us, and it is true that this father could have quit the public school system and gone to work at a private company (are there any left who are hiring?) to earn his $10,000 per month. But I’m not that clever and the economy of Massachusetts is not so vibrant that civil servants tend to walk away to take their chances in the open labor market. The kid’s father will himself be ending his 3-month vacation this week and going back to teach in a suburban public school. I imagine that he will work there until he retires.]
Andy, Phil
I knew a couple of 14 year old freshmen when I was an MIT undergrad.
They attended formal school, but parents had them apply well prior to high school entrance/graduation on the assessment that high school would provide negligible benefit relative to the corresponding expenditure of 4 years. Which is the right way to evaluate the problem.
My belief is MIT has been, or at least was in the past, friendly to such applications.
It sounds like gypsies have a similar educational approach and this Guardian article is a quick interesting read on that topic:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/07/gypsy-childhood-prejudice-education
On some days it appears to me that modern man has become an indoor house cat (or in the case of some cube dwelling SW developers, a caged animal) and I much agree with the subject’s assessment:
“I crave greenery, and I constantly wrestle with the emotion of feeling trapped. I spend half my life opening doors and windows, trying to get rid of the airless, claustrophobic feeling that comes with being inside.”