Having gone through a similar thing myself at the same age, I’ve since come to conclude that most education on offer just isn’t for me. I want to learn things well, not just well enough for an exam in an efficient time frame. Corollary: I want to learn things that are worth learning well.
Through this lens, much of conventional education feels like a desperate babysitting tactic to keep the young busy.
<rant>
For this reason I’m completely biased toward believing all of the positive stories about homeschooling coming out of the pandemic. The socialising argument against homeschooling has always seemed suspicious, and I completely buy that real socialising happens outside of the confines of school. From my own experience, this always feels true … extracurricular sports, music or out of school social events always seemed to be more meaningful and relevant than the classroom dynamic.
Oh, I agree. School and formal education tend to be defined in a relationship to normal, and this lens alone explains most of how it operates.
The pandemic changes were dramatic precisely because they struck at norms, and that was the question and argument the whole way through: "it's not normal to have a pandemic" vs "the pandemic is the new normal." I remember overhearing a couple in the park in April 2020, one saying to the other, "when things are back to normal," and just thinking, yeah, fat chance. Norms are adopted for your survival, not the other way around.
With school the defined norms are actually quite strict and take up a huge part of the day. Most of the assignments are related in some way to meeting a norm, and this makes a certain kind of person - someone sufficiently willing to compete within and master the unspoken rules, or anxious enough not to fail - a "star student". But take the class outside of the classroom, and it's totally different.
From my perspective, it's not norms themselves being bad, just the particular set we've been herding along institutionally. We need some, some of the time, because the alternative is everyone being a philosopher, which besides creating unworkable arrangements, many people don't have it in them to try.
With schooling/education, I suspect there's a potential trap for any society where the "norms", should they entail sufficiently large institutions, as they do now in the West, can become excessively "sticky" and inertial as they, and, pivotally, their institutions, become monopolistically attached to prestige.
Once this occurs, it may be too difficult to reason about alternatives because competing within the unspoken game, as you put it, is too dominant a social factor and becomes the social air that we're all breathing. The educational institution and culture arguably becomes (and now the unworkable armchair philosopher comes out) a meta-norm or "Grundnorm"[1] from which others such as what makes a worth-while life, who has "prestige" and power (both real and earning) etc.
For a few reasons, I think allowing this to go too far is undesirable for a society. And with the West having transitioned in modernity to this idea that nearly everyone should be getting a tertiary education of some sort I do wonder if some major scaling issues and negative secondary effects come into play.
From my own peek into the workings of academia, one of the more disheartening things I observed was how Professors, the most successful researchers we have, were increasingly being burdened with duties not too dissimilar from those of high school teachers. Seemed to me to be a mismatch between the scale of the research and education sectors. And, I suspect, we're yet to see the knock-on effects.
Through this lens, much of conventional education feels like a desperate babysitting tactic to keep the young busy.
<rant> For this reason I’m completely biased toward believing all of the positive stories about homeschooling coming out of the pandemic. The socialising argument against homeschooling has always seemed suspicious, and I completely buy that real socialising happens outside of the confines of school. From my own experience, this always feels true … extracurricular sports, music or out of school social events always seemed to be more meaningful and relevant than the classroom dynamic.
</rant>