Whether pi is important, whether Shakespeare is boring – these are matters of opinion with which I, as a tenth grader, vehemently disagree. I absolutely love school, I love my classes, I love math, and I love Shakespeare; and if I were your daughter, I would be furious with you for denying me these things in my early childhood. 

Your children are going to grow up, an they’re going to be severely limited. Don’t think they won’t know it, and don’t think they won’t recognize that it ultimately comes from your stubborn insistence upon imposing on them some sort of embittered vendetta against high schools nationwide. Disagree all you want, but that’s how they will see it.

I’m not against homeschooling, and I’m not against some attempt on your part to try out an educational philosophy on your own children. Bronson Alcott home schooled all three of his daughters using educational methods derived from his life experiences – look how they turned out. The difference is that he truly was acting in the best interest of his children, and although you think you’re doing the same, you’re not.

You cite the search for things that impassion you as the one truly valuable characteristic of education. What if your children find that poetry, or physics, or math resounds deeply with them? Should they not be permitted to receive due exposure to these things before they have to decide? Shakespeare is the pinnacle of of the power in poetry. Pi, and imaginary numbers, are absolutely essential parts of the science that powers every electronic item you have ever used. You may never have the passion required to pursue greater use of these things. But don’t assume your children won’t, either.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand,whereas imagination embraces the entire world; and everything there ever will be to know and understand,” Albert Einstein.

On behalf of the kids in the world who care about Shakespeare and write chemical equations of ionic compounds for fun, please, don’t limit your children’s education opportunities just yet. They deserve a change to be an imaginer.

By the way, we learn a lot of things that we find boring only to discover they actually ARE usueful, when you need them. Learning only what’s the fund and useful (who decides what is fun and useful, by the way? The kid itself?) would be a bit risky, especially if your kids decide what’S fun and useful.

Good luck with THAT :-)

Education is most probably built on top of a superset of notions everybody could find useful (even if not fun) one day or another. The trouble seems to be that we do not check too often if what we’re teaching our kids is still supposed to be useful.

In any case “useful” is a dangerous category: maybe you can have a look to what an acient taoist, Zhuang-zi, wrote about being “useful”… And if you’ll find reading Zhuang-zi just f**** boring, then you’re lucky: a great guy in Taiwan has made a fantastic edition of Zhuang-zi in comics: http://www.amazon.com/Zhuangzi-Speaks-Chih-chung-Tsai/dp/0691008825

Thanks a lot for your humour and your profoundness, thou :-)

* Electrical engineers use imaginary numbers. If the current is imaginary then the wire heats up but doesn’t transmit useful power.

* And when you put imaginary numbers and pi together you get Fourier analysis, which is how the EQ on your stereo works, as well as how other stuff works. That’s what e^i pi means.

Guess why I know this stuff? I majored in math in college and didn’t learn or remember anything, because it was boring and I didn’t get to choose what I worked on. Seven or eight years after high school I started reading math again on my own. Now I can’t stop. I spent Friday night and Saturday night reading about Alexander polynomials and integration with respect to the Euler Characteristic. I don’t 100% understand it, I don’t do any exercises or proofs, and it’s fascinating.

School sucks. People should focus on (a) creating things other people care about [did you ever notice how many adults go to see school plays? And drama funding gets cut. That’s the only thing anybody actually cares about.] and (b) doing what excites them, so they actually enjoy their life.

Or maybe we should funnel all of our kids through the exact same process so they can compete for the same schools and then the same investment banking jobs or McKinsey consulting, and not ask what they really want to do with their lives until they’re 30.

Same goes for PhD’s by the way. One of my statistics professors finished his doctorate before he asked himself who he was and what he wanted to do with his life. Well at that point the choice was already made.

There’s plenty of that sort of feeling in the US too (sadly).

In the end, you just have to give up caring what some people think in order to succeed. Reverse snobbery is no better than plain old snobbery. Besides, being envied is to be desired far more than being pitied.