Childhood, developing deep interests and the case for home schooling

6 min readDec 1, 2020

I’m developing a mental model for how the educational culture and practice a child is raised in shapes their ability to go deep, why this matters, and the case for home schooling. I might update this piece from time to time — and I’d love your feedback.

Why being able to go deep matters

Many of the greatest technological discoveries that advance human progress emerge following many years of hard labour. They are typically made by gifted individuals in domains most people consider “hard”. These discoveries matter. Their cumulative impact is why most of us no longer live challenging and short lives filled with hardship.

If you read the biographies of these breakthrough individuals, you’ll find a combination of insatiable curiosity and determination. The success stories we hear about are those in domains where progress matters to the rest of the world. This often cannot be determined up front. Paul Graham cites the example of Ramanujan who had no way of knowing that the domain of mathematics he pursued night after night by candlelight would turn out to matter so much. Take a look at pretty much any Nobel Laureate or contender and you’ll often see a similar story. They didn’t set out to win a prize. They had an insatiable curiosity and determination in a field that was ultimately useful for the rest of the world. (We haven’t heard of all the would-be laureates that pursued interests that don’t matter to the world at large — stamp collecting as an example)

Creating space for deep pursuits

I’m interested in how these breakthrough individuals grow up so that I can develop a mental model to guide my own parenting style. I’m interested in their environment, the people around them, their schooling, their reflections on what made a difference. Two themes I encounter frequently are:

The freedom to pursue deep and often technical interests in early childhood, and being supported in doing so. Support may take the form of being taken to the library regularly and left to “wonder”; having an early model computer in the household and being encouraged to tinker with it. Many of these interests seem weird at the time (e.g.; they’re inherently weird/uncommon, or it’s weird for a child of that age/those circumstances to care about them)
Being treated like an adult: examples include fully participating in dinner table conversation even when adult guests are present; having questions answered seriously rather than being dismissed; feeling like your opinion is worth something; being shown the world rather than being shielded from it; having a say about what you learn. The tradeoff here is the child will become very proficient at striking relationships with those older than them or in positions of authority over them, and less so navigating relationships with peers. A balanced approach is important.

Modern lifestyles can crowd out space for deep pursuits in a variety of ways. There’s a lot to say here, but I’m going to summarise the 3 main challenges.

Not enough space: “Normal” ways of raising and educating kids these days such as school schedules, homework and examination cycles define what kids need to know and leave little space for anything else (maybe a few extra-curriculars if you’re lucky). One friend who was home schooled and had tremendous freedom as a child (he started reading at age 9) put it thus: “When you have nothing to do, the gears start turning”

Education doesn’t solve for depth until very late: Western educational models, especially for the first 10 or so years of schooling, tend to focus on “leveling up” across a variety of mandated subjects, rather than creating space for depth in specific areas of interest. The result: a broad, shallow education where kids develop arbitrary relationships to subjects. By the time kids can go deep, many talented kids have figured out “the game” of success in schooling and have been conditioned to play that game well (which is as much about exam technique and shallow knowledge such as pattern recognition as it is about anything else).

Competition for their attention: Whilst online technologies present an incredible opportunity to discover passions and pursue them, kids face an onslaught of products competing to capture and hold their attention. On average, these technologies are capturing kids’ attention for several hours each day.

The impact of schooling/the opportunity in homeschooling

I’ve mentioned conventional schooling above and it’s impact on depth. While not all children and all schools will deliver this type of outcome, it’s much harder for many children that would otherwise develop deep pursuits to do so within conventional schools. Many will associate learning with having to learn about things they don’t care about (and worse, being examined on those things). Schools in general don’t do a great job of coupling knowledge with an appreciation for why that knowledge is important or useful.

In contrast, connecting children to the intrinsic purpose of the knowledge can nurture motivation and provide practical experience in applying knowledge to real world problems. This apprenticeship approach used to be how most education used to happen and how it still does in many high performance environments (think: TdF cycling, McKinsey/GS, software engineering, Shaolin Monks). It’s just not feasible at a population level. Now that most people in modern society go through formal schooling (this wasn’t the case prior to WWII), it has been replaced with one-size-fits-most classroom approaches.

The other major factor here is that as a parent, you are best placed to understand the needs of your child. You have more skin in the game than any institution or teacher whose class they happen to pass through in any given year. If you are thoughtful about it, you’ll be able to cater to their needs and support their development better than someone who doesn’t know them as well. (Note: I am not advocating for teaching your kids yourself. By “cater” I mean to “orchestrate” their education)

Whilst no model of schooling is perfect across all domains of childhood development, alternative models such as home or community schooling can lend themselves to depth driven by a child’s interests. Much less contact time is needed. Much more time for individual pursuit and curiosity is freed up. Exams can be taken on a more flexible schedule.

The reduction in contact time creates other problems for working parents and the subsequent loss of school as childcare (separate conversation). There’s also a conversation to be had around balancing other elements of education that schools provide such as social, communal, physical. These are critical and with a bit of care can be very well catered for.

How we do schooling — a work in progress

These thoughts shape how we’re building a system to educate our children. Our eldest has just turned five and attends a mixture of home and community school settings. This is typically in small groups (up to 5 kids) and includes a mixture of “teaching” (in inverted commas as these settings might not be recognised as “teaching” in the conventional sense but more like play and activities), outdoor time (bush craft, nature immersion, walks with deliberate contemplative activities baked in, exercise) and language immersion. He hangs out on Zoom with a singing teacher and a native Mandarin speaker — we would prefer to do these in person if possible but can’t right now (online sessions aren’t great for very young kids as their attention spans tend to be shorter than in-person). We supplement all this with regular visits to libraries and museums — one of the benefits of living in Oxford where everything is within cycling distance.

Appendix

Questions I am thinking about/raised by friends that reviewed this.. won’t cover here:

Parental attitudes and impact on a child’s ability to go deep: laissez-faire homeschooling vs tiger-parent homeschooling. Is the latter any different to standard schooling approaches? What’s the optimal parental poise when trying to encourage depth? E.g.; facilitate certain experiences/resources, vs hands off, vs other approaches? And is that determined by the attitude of the child?
Can we develop any pattern recognition for situations where homeschooling doesn’t work well .. this could be for example because it creates too much stress for the parents, . E.g.; 2x parents that work full time

Some further resources that might be of interest:

Thank you to Neamul Mohsin and Mohammad Ghassemi for reading drafts of this, and sharing their thoughts and personal experiences

Originally published at https://www.imranmahmud.com on December 1, 2020.