[aaronem]

Your erstwhile instructor seems to be a professional troll, which is probably good work if you can get it, but I'm not joking. GP's comment casts the options available to him in the following duality: either

1. push [his] theoretical children into this race, or

2. let them eat into precious time to figure things out.

Whatever my opinion of the article under discussion, I can only agree with its author that option 1 is a horrible mistake whose consequences for his children may accurately be called lifelong impairment.

Option 2 is no better, and it only even seems that way if you don't think about it too hard. It implicitly accepts the premise, not that childhood is precious (which it is), but that childhood is precious because, and in the way that, academia claims it is. That's toxic as hell, and it will poison any parenting that proceeds from it.

Specifically: He won't be able to relax around his kids, because he'll always have that nagging ambivalence that he's doing wrong by them, failing to equip them to compete as functional adults in a world which does not care about them, and that will come through in his actions. It can't not, and his kids will pick up on it, because a young child's parents are by far the most important things in her world which are not actually her, and she notices everything about everything they do. She won't intuit any of the paragraph I just wrote, of course, because you have to be old and jaded and cynical for that. She'll just know her daddy is never happy or comfortable or relaxed when he's around her, and with the unconscious, inevitable egotism of the very young, she will assume that's because of something to do with her. And she'll almost certainly never get over that.

I don't know that I agree with David Benatar that bringing a child into the world is invariably harmful to the child. But I certainly have a hard time arguing other than that it's harmful to bring a child into the world to endure the kind of parenting I've just described -- hence my advice to GP.

A better third option, if anyone's interested, would be to opt out of the entire nonsense and raise your kids without reference to it. The trouble is that you are not more powerful than the society in which you exist, and it is interested in your kids whether you like it or not. You might find or make an enclave, and a method, in which to raise them without having them be too badly stunted by its more pernicious influences; people have done it before, are doing it now, and will no doubt continue to do so. Perhaps you will be among them. But it's not implausible that your notional kids are better off never having existed at all, if you're not even equipped to recognize the need to be willing to make the attempt.

[taliesinb]

I enjoyed the rest of your comment, and I share some of these sentiments, but don't agree about Benatar being a troll. I'm confident he actually believes the positions he espouses.

Also, I want to know, what are the best modern examples of enclaves? Are they all bespoke? Some likeminded parents getting together? Something more formulaic that has actually scaled out without becoming a self-parody or a lifestyle brand?

[aaronem]

Oh, it's quite possible for a troll to believe what he says. The essence of trolling isn't bullshitting; it's knowing how to get a rise out of people.

To answer your question as best I can, I really can't answer your question very well, because I'm not a parent and never will be, and thus have only a peripheral knowledge of the detailed mechanics of parenting. Based on what little I know, the first place I'd suggest looking would be the homeschooling movement, which seems to be gaining secular adherents quite rapidly of late for reasons appearing not much different from those I suggested in my earlier comment.

[taliesinb]

> The essence of trolling isn't bullshitting; it's knowing how to get a rise out of people.

"Provocative"? No, I think there needs to be an element of bad faith or inauthenticity. 'Actual' trolls are supposed to be malicious creatures.

> homeschooling

I wouldn't call that scalable, it only worked for me because I was already coding by the time I convinced my parents to let me do my own thing. Though maybe there is an advanced body of theory I'm not aware of.

[aaronem]

I don't suppose I can argue your point about the origin of the term. Perhaps "professional shit-stirrer" would be more accurate.

Certainly homeschooling isn't scalable. There are techniques, methods, curricula, which can be (and are quite widely) shared, but no one can systematize it into something which will guarantee a good result in every case. Unfortunately, I see no reason to imagine anyone can so systematize anything else, either. After all, the current lamentable state of affairs is the result of concentrated effort, over a period at least of decades, on the part of many of the world's finest minds. If they can't come up with a "one size fits all", why expect that anyone else can? Perhaps the "social sciences", so called, are fundamentally in error. Perhaps every family and every child is unique, a non-reproducible n=1 experiment -- and perhaps, cast in those terms, it becomes a little easier to see just how wrongheaded the concept of a "one size fits all" solution for human beings might possibly be.

As far as I can tell, the most common objection to homeschooling is that it doesn't work in the absence of parents who are interested and closely involved with the progress of their children -- not in the modern "helicopter" style borne only of a desire not to be seen to parent badly, but rather in a consistent and, to the extent possible, effective fashion, out of both genuine interest in the wellbeing and success of their offspring, and a sense of the duty to society which also inheres in parenting, that is, to bequeath upon the world children whose presence is more likely to be overall a benefit than a detriment. Or, to put it simply, that homeschooling can't work reliably because it doesn't work at all without good parents.

Unfortunately, as the last decades have also shown us, without good parents, nothing else works, either -- and a sufficiently broken system can easily overcome the effects of even the best parents, if only by being vastly larger than them and all but inescapable. Here we have a Yale professor telling us that the existing system is sufficiently broken -- and not really telling us anything we didn't already know. Do we assume that nothing else can work either, and that our kids are doomed? Or do we seek alternatives, even those which are utterly alien to the sort of systems-first thinking that got us into this mess?

I can't speak for anyone else, of course, and I'm not raising any kids of my own, but it seems to me that the only option compatible with even the most basic concept of parental responsibility is the latter one. After all, we've not only seen ourselves that what we've got doesn't work; here we have one of its highest exponents telling us it doesn't work, which should be authoritative enough for just about anybody. Perhaps something else might work better? It'd be very hard for anything else to work worse.