Should Your Kids Go To School?

Indy Schools, Traditional Schools, Montessori, Oh My...

Source: Chanel Pfahl on X, former Canadian teacher exposing wokism in schools

A week ago, I put my almost four year old son in school. Before all the crunchy millennials freak out, it’s an alternative independent school in Mexico— not a Canadian indoctrination factory.

The founders of the alt school are pretty ideologically aligned with my husband and I. Their school remained open during Covid lockdowns (yes, this was a thing in Mexico too). They unabashedly turned down a “trans kid” student, telling the parents they should go see a psychiatrist— something you might go to prison for in the West.

But despite being in a country where you can still work in the grey zones, I have my doubts, not just about our son’s new school, but about the type of education he should be receiving. I don’t know whether he is going to stay there, go to another kind of school, or go to any school at all.

Here’s why.

When our son was just a soul floating in the universe, a yearning before conception, I already knew I wanted to homeschool him. I am not alone in this trajectory; many millennials have gone different routes than their parents’ generation when it comes to parenting choices, and how to go about giving their children the right education.

Back then our lives were different. We were living in the country, my husband was a captain for a commercial airline, and we could more or less afford for me to stay home for a few years as a homeschooling trad wife teaching music lessons on the side (before it became a trend on tik tok). Or, when the time came, I could consider homeschooling pods, Montessori schools, or private schools that didn’t teach a pre-schooler he was born in the wrong body.

But of course, everything changed.

We left Canada for Mexico a year ago, and our options opened up. Mexico does not share the population decline of the West, and there are schools on every corner. Traditional public schools, Catholic schools, and Montessori schools galore.

We were interested in checking out some bilingual Montessori schools, and every so often we would come across a family who raved about their toddler’s school and encouraged us to go check it out. However, we were still getting adjusted here and learning the language. I wasn’t about to throw my son into school just yet, if at all.

But I am not a trad wife in Mexico. I am a working mom, although remotely, and although I am fortunate to be able to dedicate far more time to raising my son than most moms nowadays, I needed help. Like so many other families, school in the formative years becomes a tool of necessity, as much, if not more, than it is solely about the desire to put your three-year-old in a classroom.

We decided to first try hiring a university student whom we knew and trusted to come take care of our son at home three days a week, teaching him Spanish and doing other activities while we got in some focused hours of work. Unfortunately, as lovely as this person was and as much as she cared for our son, the situation didn’t work out as intended.

So we were back to square one: trying to figure out how to carve out enough time to work and tend to our son, without relying too much on Ms. Rachel’s educational videos or Bluey’s storytelling.

My son loves Ms. Rachel. As I looked for this image, this video accidentally started playing, and now my son is watching it as I write.

Unlike some of the hardcore millennials, I am not dogmatically against screens. My mom used to turn on Sesame Street so she could do the laundry, and I see nothing wrong with educational videos, or wholesome and entertaining TV shows for kids. We like 90s and early 2000s stuff, like Arthur, Curious George, Land Before Time and Richard Scarry’s Busy Busy Town. As long as my son is limited in his viewing hours, watching something that will stimulate his language skills and learning, not given access to an IPad without supervision, or watching garbage YouTube videos designed to keep kids hooked in for hours, TV time can actually benefit him— and me.

But millennial parenting is filled with dogmas and mimetic desire to do all the parenting trends correctly. Millennials are trying to raise their kids “consciously”— this even has a name, Conscious Parenting. The Montessori method is very popular in the West with Conscious Parents, and Montessori schools are all over Mexico as well.

The main promise that the Montessori philosophy promises to instil is self-reliance, autonomy, and independence. The method involves children learning by imitation, using their hands and manipulating organic objects (mostly made of wood), and developing skills through focused activities. Rather than being taught to, they are taught from— from their own experience.

“Free activity makes children happy. We can see how happy they are, but it is not the fact that they are happy that is important; the important thing is that a child can construct a man through this free activity. ”

- Maria Montessori

Cool. So Maria sounds like a freedom chick. Her teaching style was banned by the Nazis, presumably for its focus on individualism rather than the Volksgemeinschaft; the unified citizen serving the national community.

But like all good philosophies over time, it was vulnerable to rigid interpretation and cultish adoption. Montessori schools are no exception. A laissez-faire, take the good and discard the less important notions attitude around Montessori education must exist out there, but I have yet to find it.

We went to visit a Montessori school here, run by an American woman. When we walked in, my husband told me he wanted to scream for help. The wood modules and learning materials were lined up perfectly. The children were extremely well behaved— a little too well. Compared to the chaotic recess environment at my son’s new indy school, the mood was eerily calm. My husband said it seemed sterile, like he had walked into a hospital.

I, on the other hand, was impressed with the facilities. But when he shared with me his observations, I came out of my reverie of our gifted son in a perfect Montessori school. He was right, there was something a little cultish about the level of perfection, and how the principle quoted Maria Montessori as if she were running the school from beyond the grave.

“Maybe Montessori is kind of like Objectivism,” I mused to him aloud. “The cult of Ayn Rand.”

Ayn Rand is a good example, because you can take so much good from her philosophy, and be discerning enough to disregard what doesn’t make sense to you. Self-labelled Objectivists— and I know and like many of them in the classical liberal sphere— can be prone to rigid interpretations, and not want to stray from any tenets, lest they be lukewarm Objectivists.

Homeschooling advocates can sometimes be just as cultish. In a world of “progressive” public education, where children are brainwashed into thinking the climate apocalypse is imminent, that they need to choose from a plethora of genders, and that white colonialists are savages and savages are “the resistance”, I can see why parents want their children removed from those environments. But with some homeschooling cultists, you get the stink eye for even thinking your child might benefit from any kind of school at all. This kind of homeschooling supremacy turns me off almost as much as the Woke.

I spoke with a prominent figure who opened up some private schools in the traditional method. He hates Montessori, claiming it is too child-led and doesn’t involve enough instruction. When I asked my son’s principal about the Montessori method, she pretty much said the same thing:

“I hired some Montessori teachers but they weren’t really doing anything. I expected them to teach something. But they just sat there and observed the children.”

Is that what Montessori actually is? No teaching, no guidance, minimal intervention? Or is that just an extreme interpretation of the style; an excuse to sit around not doing much?

After six days of my son being in his new school, I started to get to know the lay of the land. I was happy he was in a school that wouldn’t make him paint his face and say his gender (yes, this is allegedly happening in Mexican public preschools too). I was happy he had a thoughtful teacher, an environment with lots of free play interspersed with more traditional learning, and had a friend he liked to eat lunch with.

Was I convinced he needed this kind of education? No. I still had my reservations.

As

Andrew M. Weisse

has pointed out, in a world of rapidly growing Artificial Intelligence, traditional models like a teacher standing in front of a chalkboard and learning by rote memorization will likely become completely obsolete. I personally think it is already outdated, and runs contradictory to how intelligence actually develops.

After almost four years of his life, being exclusively “unschooled”, mainly taught skills and language by doing activities and conversing with us, reading with us, and free independent play, our son shows many markers of a gifted child. He has a very advanced vocabulary, comprehension and communication skills. He is trilingual. He is emotionally and socially intelligent, plays musical instruments, and knows the whole Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here” album by heart, including the instrumentals. I could go on and on—I am his proud mother—, but my point is, so far, he is excelling without any formal instruction.

His teacher told me she was very impressed with his language skills. Many of his peers, who have been in school since they were barely verbal, are still barely verbal two years later. But, she said, our son has a hard time following the rules and schedule.

This is not something I find upsetting. To me, it is perfectly natural for my free-range boy to not want to conform.

After a few days of his new schooling, my son got a little fever. The next day, we didn’t send him to school. The following day, we thought, we would bring him back if he was feeling better. I let him know the evening before.

“I don’t want to go to school.” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I’ve been there enough,” he said.

I initially knew it would be normal for him to resist going back after the novelty of the first few days wore off. But still, I was curious to know what his experience was, and why he didn’t want to go.

“It’s boring.” he said.

I asked him questions to try and figure out what he didn’t like.

It turns out, he doesn’t like sitting in the classroom with the teacher speaking at the chalkboard. He gets bored in the classroom. When he goes for lunch, he is not able to finish his food because he’s a slow eater, and it’s already time to go back before he can play. He doesn’t really go to the bathroom all day long— something he was perfectly independent with before school began. He has to take off his shoes to go in the sandbox, and he doesn’t like getting his feet dirty.

And the school is LOUD. It is a loud, very stimulating environment. Compared to the sanitary Montessori school we visited, it is organic chaos. But maybe, a little too much for him.

Something dawned on me after he let me know what he really thought.

In a traditional school, in order to minimize the chaos, you need order. People have a designated time to eat, to play, to learn, to socialize, take music class or sports. You have to sacrifice your autonomy for the good of the group. Traditional schools foster interdependence, compliance and conformity. By design, they have to. And in this way, they train you to become a ‘good’ citizen. They are breeding grounds for collectivism. Volksgemeinschaft.

When I asked my son’s teacher about how his day went last week, she confirmed with me what my son had later told me. He was slow to eat his lunch, so sometimes they urged the slow eaters to hurry up so that they had enough time to squeeze in play before going back to the classroom. Perfectly reasonable for the good of the group, but there was something unnerving to me about my son, the individual, being rushed to eat his food so that he would burn off enough beans to be able to sit quietly in class later. It ran contrary to the environment we had created for him at home, naturally.

The Montessori philosophy, in contrast, is supposed to promote what is good for the individual. It is about nurturing and guiding your inherent abilities, and nudging you to develop the skills where you lack natural competency by providing the right environment to explore.

“All the great men the world has ever had, in music, poetry, science etc., have all been children. We don’t know what the child will become, but he possesses a great force, and if he is to develop to the best of his capabilities by the time he is a man, it is essential that he obeys all the laws of nature during his development. ”

- Maria Montessori

Maybe many of the modern Montessori schools do not live up to this promise. I haven’t read or seen firsthand everything about Montessori, nor do I care about applying all of its principles. I have my own mind to think with, and my own son to relate with.

The last thing he said, when I was questioning him about school, was this:

“I want to homeschool again.”

Right now, he just wandered over to the fridge. He’s hungry. His hunger does not adhere to an externally imposed strict schedule. I am going to let him eat a snack.

It’s Sunday, and tomorrow is back to school. I still don’t know if he’s going back. And it’s not because he doesn’t want to go— it’s because I don’t know if I want him to go.

Maybe we will try it out a little longer, and decide the social environment he is getting, and his exposure to Spanish conversation, along with the free time for our focused work, will be enough of a benefit to outweigh my reservations. Maybe we will find another school instead, a good enough Montessori school. It’s hard to get everything in one package.

Or maybe, we will find a way to keep making it work, at home, with me as his guide and teacher.

Each child is an individual person. Education is personal. We have to decide if our kids should go to school, or not, and not because of what anyone else thinks. We have to figure it out for ourselves.

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Do you have kids, and are they in school? I would love to hear your opinions! Please feel free to share your thoughts below.