What’s remarkable about my teaching experience is that in all of these cases, the students involved volunteered to learn these subjects because they were interested in them. The students who were not interested (which is the large majority of students at The Open School) did not come. This means that these classes played out in a completely different way than you’re probably familiar with in conventional school, where most students in the class don’t care about the subject and don’t want to be there.

After experiencing the joy of teaching students who actually want to learn, I could never go back to the painful drudgery of the conventional classroom. I often hear of homeschoolers who, at the start of their homeschooling journey, plan out a curriculum with all the usual subjects—math, science, history, etc.—and then eventually drop it when they get sick of forcing their child to do things they hate, and see how little true learning is happening anyway. Afterwards they settle on something more like “unschooling,” which follows the child’s interests rather than using a pre-packaged curriculum. It usually takes this first-hand experience for parents to realize how broken the conventional educational model is.

The answer typically given to “why do we make kids learn all these things when they so clearly hate it?” is that kids NEED to know these subjects. Yes, it’s unpleasant, but it’s worth it because they will not be successful in life if they are not educated.

But is that really true? Do kids REALLY need to know all those things?

Let’s start with the basics: reading, writing, and math. Everyone knows these things are essential—and I will grant that they’re right. But I will point out, before moving on, that forcing children to learn to read and write and to do math at a young age is counterproductive.

What about history? People like to lean on the adage “those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” This may be true for presidents and senators, but is it true for every citizen? The United States is a representative democracy—we choose our leaders, and it’s the leader’s job to figure out what to do. I don’t need to become an expert on plumbing in order to select a plumber to fix my toilet. So why should I need to be an expert on history and government in order to select a president?

People often lament that our country is going astray, and if only the voting population knew more about history or science or economics, the problems would be solved. Yet almost every member of the voting population today spent their entire childhood in public school, and it didn’t solve the problem.

Another argument, mainly used to support teaching science and technology, is that without early training in these subjects, kids will not have the opportunity to become scientists or engineers. Even if most of them will not become scientists or engineers anyway, we at least owe it to them to open the doors to those paths, just in case.

However, it is simply not true that kids need early training. I teach a math class which starts kids at age 12, having zero previous math training, and gets them through everything, including calculus, in 4 years at a leisurely pace. Many students wait much later and, with hard work, are able to cram it all in in under 1 year. I have a particularly gifted student who breezed through it quickly and easily—he plans to major in physics. Waiting until he was a teenager to start clearly did not close any doors for him.

“Ok,” I hear you saying, “But what about the less gifted students? Don’t they need years of training?” The answer to that is easy: If someone is not a math person, why train them in advanced math? They are not going to become an engineer or accountant. No teacher, no matter how passionate or brilliant, can convert a right-brained person into a left-brained person.

What about other subjects, like geography, literature, music, foreign language, and so on? Sure, knowing about these things enriches a person and makes them more “cultured.” But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re trying to answer the question: Do kids NEED to learn these subjects? And the answer is plainly no.

Are there any subjects that kids really need to know (besides reading, writing, and math)? Actually, yes! Everyone should be educated on topics related to health and safety, including nutrition and sex. What’s interesting is that kids typically appreciate being taught these subjects, because they understand that they need to know them. And fortunately, these subjects don’t take years to learn.

Ok, so kids don’t NEED to know history, science, art, and so on. But knowledge of these subjects enriches them, right? So aren’t we still doing them a favor by making them learn? Won’t they be glad we made them do it, after all is said and done?

I won’t try to answer the question of how valuable each of these things are to learn. My goal with this article is simply to convince you that the value of knowing a subject has to be weighed against the cost of learning it. To say “it’s better to know about art than to not know about it, therefore children should be forced to learn about art” is like saying “it’s better to have money than to not have it, therefore I should steal from the cash register.” Just because something is good doesn’t mean you should try to obtain it an any cost. The cost must be weighed against the benefit.

If a child hates being made to learn things they have no interest in, that’s a real cost. How big the cost is depends on how much they hate it. It’s up to you to decide whether the benefit is worth the cost. (Or, as proponents of self-directed education would say, it’s up to the child to decide—at the very least, that saves the teacher the work of having to assess whether the child is interested.)

From my experience, if a student is not interested in learning something, they won’t learn it. You can make them sit at a desk while you explain it, you can make them read a book, you can even make them answer questions on it. Ultimately it won’t stick and you will have wasted your time and theirs.

Do I worry that the kids will grow up and not be “educated”? No. Because even if they don’t learn geography or Spanish, they will learn a LOT of things. Maybe the things they learn won’t be the kinds of things we were expecting. We just have to loosen our anxious grip on the reins and open our minds to the possibilities.