The "life is school, school is life" society

I was driving back from the grocery store today and half listening to a local NPR news report, and I heard this woman say "Well, we know that success in school means success in life."

I suppose I could just take this to mean that a better education tends to, at least on the average, lead to a better-paying and more satisfying job, which increases the odds of happiness and accomplishment. But she didn't say success in school leads to success in life, or prepares one for success in life, or any other word indicating a causal relationship. She simply equated the two.

The concept of the developmental "window" during which a skill must be learned, or else it can never be learned, has been used to equate school success with later success. But I think this concept is overrated, or at least misunderstood. While it may be true of language, only unrecognized profound deafness or a genetic cognitive disability typically prevents someone from learning to speak fluently. As for the basics of K-12 education, reading and math, these things have been frequently taught to adults; there is no "window" which can be terribly and irrevocably missed. What we all really mean, when we talk about "falling behind," is getting put on the "you'll never amount to anything" track, and kept out of the "college prep" (they might as well call it "upper middle class prep") classes. So let's be honest: we don't mean that success in school generally leads to better jobs and a fuller, happier life because there is some developmental and cognitive reason for that. It's not that some kids, tragically, missed the critical window in which they might have developed talents in math or literacy. It's just a plain old, straight up tracking system. We have, quite simply, set it up this way.

This woman meant what she said. Success in school is success in life; success in life is success in school. It reminded me very much of this comment from Valerie Fitzenreiter, who wrote The Unprocessed Child:

We’ve all heard the societal cry to put children first, but this cry is usually followed by a call to give them a better education. In the past twenty years I have observed the relentless linking of children to school. Everything that a child does is in some way affiliated to school; everything that is said to a child revolves around the topic of school. It is as if the concept of school is the only way others can relate to a child. Even when the child is on summer vacation, all conversations with him are about the return to the inevitable school year: “When does school start?” “Do you miss school?” “Are you looking forward to school starting?” “Do you like school?” When the child has an interest that he pursues after school, it is called an extracurricular activity. We refer to children between the ages of five and eighteen as “school-aged children.” I believe that a child is more than his experiences revolving around school, more than his last teacher, his last report card and his behavior while in the boring confinement of a schoolroom.

The wonderful thing about homeschooling is not just that you refuse to label your child with narrow and misleading test scores, that you insist upon seeing them as full human beings, that you concentrate on character and ethics alongside reading and math. It's that, until college at least, you opt out of the whole tracking system. (That schools ostensibly exist, and are believed by many to exist, for purposes of egalitarianism and the promotion of social mobility is merely salt in the wound.)

Taking charge of your kids' education means taking charge of how you define success in life, and how you'll go about attaining it.