Social Infrastructure & Education
Why Social Infrastructure is The Bottleneck for a Competitive Education Model
There is a growing feeling that I notice among my friends and acquaintances. Life feels hard, the future is uncertain, and people are lonely and lost, unsure how to set out and create value. The world feels unfriendly and nearly impossible to understand. This isn’t your imagination. Our society is in decline, and it is increasingly unclear not only how to heal it, but to live a good life within it. These issues are one and the same; if we are going to heal our society we are going to need to learn how to live good lives. It is essential that we take this not as a trivial task, but as a life’s work that is constantly changing. Starting a family puts skin in the game, and working to educate your children well will be a necessary part of working towards a good world within which one can live a good life.
I plan on homeschooling my children, as do many people I know. Given the state of the public school system, the decision to do so is often clearly the best option for families who can arrange their lives to make it work. However, there are a few key areas in which the school system outcompetes the default homeschooling arrangement - and these areas are necessary to understand and develop strong bases for if we want to eventually create a viable alternative to the current school system. While this piece will focus on homeschooling, many of the same principles apply to alternative schools.
Homeschoolers or other alternative learning groups will by default be outcompeted by public schools in the areas of material and intellectual resources, basic structure, and social infrastructure.
The material resources are obvious - a publicly funded school will have a physical building, more teachers teaching a wide variety of classes, and materials for various creative or technological endeavors and extra-curriculars activities. Likewise, school has inherited a structure which sets the pace and narrative for learning which students can latch onto and be carried along by. You go to class, study materials, listen to the teacher, take tests, do projects, etc… The narrative is especially notable here for people choosing to educate their children at home. School has a societally accepted narrative which allows it to lay a confident claim to children’s time and attention. This inertia allows school to continue functioning even though it isn’t very good at its job.
Many parents will lack the narrative authority to enforce such a structure, and it often won’t be the right thing to do. This will occur if you don’t have an intrinsic vision for what you want your child’s education to accomplish, and instead piggyback on the model school provides. The public school model is an artificial structure, so mimicking it will likely feel artificial to you too. School gets away with it because of its depersonalized nature, and the fact that it’s embedded in our collective consciousness as something to be obeyed. Determining how to work out a structure that works for you will be important, but there are more primary supports which should be established first.
Both the material resources and structure are held in place in formal education systems by a bureaucracy. As someone developing an alternative learning community, it will be necessary to figure out how to build social infrastructure within your local environment.
Schools will generally outcompete alternatives on providing students with good social lives, simply because they have a much larger population base. The chances you’ll find people you jive with are significantly higher. Schools also provide smaller social contexts through clubs, sports teams, theater groups, etc.. which generally provide a much richer social environment than school itself.
Good social infrastructure however, involves a lot more than just good social environments. Schools are not outcompeting alternatives on social infrastructure because they are good at building it, but because they have such a monopoly, which discourages other groups from building alternatives.
Social infrastructure is essentially the arrangement of human relationships that supports the functioning of life for communities and individuals. In schools, much of this is highly synthetic and not responsive to changes in the environment or different individuals needs. In a healthy community, it will operate much more like a living organism than a machine - because it is built around living beings.
Do you have neighbors who can babysit for you last minute or lend you an egg when you’re out? Do you have friends and family with whom you talk about your ideas and how to work on them? How many people in your local community know and understand you? If your kid has questions about mathematics you don’t have the answers for, do you know who within a 5 minute walk would know? These kinds of questions point to the ways we rely on people in our everyday lives. This network of relationships was once our security system, the way we could get things done, and a huge part of what gave meaning to our lives.
Today, these social networks are largely being outcompeted by society’s trend towards modernity and modern conveniences. Schools provide education, childcare and homework to keep you busy long into the night; grocery stores are open late, and we can look up whatever information we need online. As this social infrastructure is replaced by technological and bureaucratic infrastructure, our need to rely on one another decreases. As we lose the need to reach out, so too we lose the capacity.
So, children who once could have learned and benefited from the wealth of their community are now left with little support upon leaving school. I believe there are still communities still have existing social fabrics, but they are the outliers rather than the norm.
For the prospective homeschooler, the lack of this social infrastructure makes the job all the harder. It is the primary thing you will have to rebuild as you figure out a way to provide a learning environment for your child. You can turn to online resources, and it’s likely that your city has existing homeschooling groups, but there is more to be done if we really want to reclaim the resources and supports necessary for building a world outside school. If you intend to have children while being able to keep pursuing other goals in life, you will need this infrastructure. Having supports which allow us to live better lives will be good for everyone involved. It will also expose your kids to people with a more diverse range of intellect and life skills, easing your burden and enriching their learning.
This will be exceedingly hard work, and we will be working against all the inertia of modern life which keeps people isolated. There is much more to write on this topic, but here are a few tips to get started which can make a big difference.
1. Start building it before you have kids
Figure out where you plan to have kids, and start building a community there. If you have family you can live close to, do it. Work hard on relationships. Your family members are going to be more invested in you than almost anyone else. Gather them if you can, and learn to support each other in your work. Get involved with your local homeschooling community before you have kids. I’m not sure if different groups will allow this - but push for it if they don’t. Involving prospective parents in learning communities will be one of the best ways to get invested childcare support. Help out the parents, ask them questions and learn from their experience. Find someone’s style you admire a lot and see if you can arrange some sort of apprenticeship with them. Once you have kids, you are going to be overwhelmed with their day to day care. Start building the supports you need well before your first kid is born.
2. Start local
Get to know your neighbors, invite them over for dinner. Find out who can play instruments, host music jams. Organize block parties and baked goods exchanges. Build trust, and build friendships. Find out what you have in common with people and figure out how you can be of help to one another. Your kids will make friends with kids in the neighborhood, and it will make them so much easier to maintain. They will be able to walk to see their friends, and can gain more independence than if you have to drive or otherwise escort them anytime they want to go somewhere.
3. Go against the grain
People are getting used to being left alone, and they are getting used to being lonely. You will need to learn to overcome flakiness, and people being too busy to spend time with you. Keep pushing. It’s easy to get trapped in the cycle of your busy life making it harder to invest in your family and community, and allowing government and private institutions to replace these functions.
The kind of community building that needs to be done will feel awkward. Gauge interest for alternative learning options within your local context. Ask parents if they’ve considered homeschooling, and if not, then why. People’s reasons for choosing public school may be time constraints, worries about their child getting enough academic resources, or social opportunities. If you can gather enough people and resources, you may be able to lighten everyone’s load enough to make it worthwhile.
You will run into people you disagree with and who you don’t like. This is okay, talk to them and attempt to reconcile your differences or simply find common ground elsewhere. Find the available interaction surface that provides value to both of you. This isn’t going to be possible in all cases, but don’t get discouraged too easily if there is initial shear. Friendship through persistence is a winning strategy.
4. Pool your resources
Find out what people have to offer in your local area and see how willing they are to share it with you, and what kinds of things they would find valuable in exchange. Many people have limited time, so figure them out and understand what they are struggling with and how you could make it worth their while. Maybe you want to learn to cook something that your elderly neighbor has totally nailed, and she needs someone to drive her to a doctor’s appointment. Maybe there’s a retired physics professor who could offer tutoring to your insatiably curious 7-year-old who needs help filing his taxes.
You won’t be able to provide everything your child needs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Having to rely on others in your community, and having a child with the desire to go seek things on his own are both valuable experiences. Try to make the most of them.
What’s more, if you can take on functions which reduce the cost of living, this can free up parents’ time to work less and spend more time with their children. Perhaps you can buy land which can serve as a get away, a farm, or giant playground. Maybe you can share housing, help with financial investments and planning, or seek grants as a group for different entrepreneurial or educational activities. As much as possible, try to avoid the two-income household trap.
5. Keep seeking out connections
There will be many people with shared or similar visions working in different places. Find people who are doing something better than you are, and learn from them. You don’t have what it takes as an individual to make this work, it will be a constant journey of self improvement and collaboration. Get together and share resources, host meet-ups, take a family road trip through other interesting learning communities. As you do this, you will begin to build a larger network of people collaborating with a coherent vision of the world. This will give purpose and drive to your work, especially when you’re struggling with your local community.
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Someday I intend to create a much more in depth guide to regenerating social fabric for raising children. For now, this is a start.
I believe it is necessary to push for excellence and vitality outside the school system. Homeschooling, and gathering networks of supports outside the school system is the fastest way individuals can start acting on this while providing a high quality education for their children. This piece is intended to be a jumping off point, an initial look at what needs to be done and how we might do it. There will always be more roadblocks to actually getting things off the ground, but it’s essential to begin planning for how to deal with them now.
