Home Schooling

 is, a thing I have always felt very unhappy about, always. But a few months ago I was setting out tables for a Saturday coffee morning in the village, and this woman starts chatting about how she will home-school her children. And she is already doing a lot of the ground work with her eldest before he is even school age. The visits to university , museum and art and craft events for kids for example. And how the resources these days are so much easier to access. And I somehow manage to not put my mouth in my foot. And then her tea arrives and I go grab some jigsaw puzzle boxes and thank her for the chat.

Normally foot-in-mouth is my mode for anything I disagree with, but later that week I realised, hey, she is onto something. So glad I did not step wrong. It was almost like my brain was happy to listen for a change. Like a watershed inside me. Around the same time as this chance home-schooling discussion,  I started reading something that has sat on my shelf of shame for a while. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a book less about motorcycles, but more on thought processes of all things made and built by man. Robert Pirsig is on a mission, but he has this clever way of explaining himself by laying out first, the past, where we have come from, and up to this present day. And then uses that to show a direction of travel. He does this, because most people have very little agency, we only see what is in the present, not the future and not the past. I see this in my youngest son, who struggles to explain himself, but also struggles to decide what he wants to do with his life. He feels he has no power over his future. I have to at this point admit, the reason the book appeared on my bookshelf in the first place, was that I too am looking for meaning in my life. As an exercise, I'm finally stopping and listening to my son more carefully, getting him to open up, but on his own time. And I wonder about this woman who wants to home-school her children. I know it does work and it does actually create wonderfully rounded and self-motivated human beings. So I feel my abdication of my child's education to a school system, has cut me off from him. I resolve to never be hostile to anyone who home-schools their children. I also resolve to understand how to motivate my son, and at the same time me.

Why I changed my mind on home schooling is rooted in a linked thing that has been brewing for years, bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Virtual currencies are really a way for taking control of our own economic destiny. By removing the tax burden the state places on every transaction we make and allowing people to go back to a barter system. Back to basic roots, to exchange what they desire for what they can produce themselves. I'm no fan of it yet, but it's a culture shift made all the more urgent with the advent of AI. AI at it's heart is that same control system by the rich to have slaves do their bidding. They build schools and universities and out of the universities must com compliant robot workers. Workers who will play by the rules taught in these schools, rules to obey and not question. Home schooling rocks that boat, crypto currencies rock that boat, and so I have to say bravo to the woman who stopped to chat about how she is bringing up her children to be strong independent humans. It's true I've never been convinced that higher education actually works, something Robert Persig actually attacks as an institution is the way universities literally tell kids that if they answer every question in the way that gives them the highest marks, that they will have done a "good" thing and will go on to do well in life. It is the ultimate lie, perpetuated to create compliant humans who often do not find them own motivation and their own souls. We study always in order to please our teachers he explains. A kind of life attitude that extends into the workplace and produces subservient, unthinking drones. Drones unable to appreciate the motorcycle. A motorcycle, which is really a metaphor for the world and society which we live in. A world made of many parts. We are all little parts, in communities or systems. But as I read, I get the feeling most of us do not even know which part we are in society. 

Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert Persig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book which points us away from the rigid system, towards one where we reason about our world and do so freely. Incredibly freely. Sure the book has made him a lot of money, but it is a guide book on how to understand not just my own motivations at this time, but also to seek out a future. So I'm enjoying the book, especially how as a writer of technical manuals, that Robert is making me think about words. And about structure and about how there are hundreds of ways to show someone how to assemble a motorcycle. But how the art of understanding the motorcycle and all of it's parts, requires an appreciation of not just how to assemble it, but how to see it as a co-operation of systems. Every machine we build, programs, computers, compilers, web servers and more are made of many many systems which are balanced in their power and and then joined with attention to exact location so as to make the machine not just maintainable, but also optimal.

And so, by the time you read this, I will have looked at all the sentences that make up this blog post. I will have re-arranged many of them in a few of the possibly hundreds of ways they could have been assembled. And then will let you be the judge when I hit publish, did I explain myself optimally, and also did I help you replicate my track or route. And after that I will not look back, because I can only look forward. But to look forward, you first must look back.