Homeschoolers, Beneath the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

I.

At one point in history, to the extent people did “school” their children, all schools were homeschools. But that time is long past, and now most children get their education from organized institutions, whether state-run or private.

In some countries like Germany, homeschooling is even illegal. In other countries like the US, while homeschooling is allowed as an option with certain caveats, public schools remain the default choice.

But while state-run schools are getting ever more popular as the arc of history proceeds – does that then mean they are better at educating children?

Well, that depends, as ever, on what we mean by “better.” Of course, the best way to mean “better” is always the moral sense. Put another way – is it moral for governments like that of Germany to require all children to attend educational institutions? Isn’t that indoctrination? Or, alternately – is it moral for governments like that of the US to allow homeschooling in the first place? What is to stop people from inculcating their children with whatever cuckoo ideologies they happen to believe?

We might innocently opine that the best, most moral way to educate children is by whichever method will impart to them the most True Knowledge. However, neither the government nor any given individual parent can be certain in an epistemic sense of possessing this True Knowledge. Thus the question remains, only now under conditions of epistemic uncertainty. So, is it more moral for a government to allow homeschooling, or to ban it? (Or, for that matter, to mandate it?) And as an individual, is it more moral to send your children to a government school, or to a self-selected private school or to homeschool?

II.

Well, a friend might reason, it depends. What it really comes down to is that you want your children to get a good education – that’s what you should value, to be a good parent in the moral sense. And by an education, I really mean an education that teaches true and valuable things, not just brainwashing your children into believing whatever nonsense is politically fashionable. So if the government in question is into brainwashing, then homeschooling is the correct option. But if the parents are crazy and would brainwash their children, then state-run schools are the best bet.

Fair enough. But how do you tell the difference between education and brainwashing?

That’s obvious! cries the friend. How do you even need to ask? I just look and I know – don’t you?

So brainwashing is like obscenity, then – you know it when you see it?

Of course!

But by what standards are you measuring this, friend? What does “I know it when I see it” really mean? It does not mean that the answer itself is so obvious as to need no justification – it just means that the answer is obvious to you. But you are still judging by your own standards, measuring against your own values. And where did you get those values and standards? From your parents? From your school? Your values are not the only values in the world. Why should yours have any more guarantee of Truth to them than the government’s, or anyone else’s?

Education and brainwashing are ultimately both words that mean teaching – the only difference is whether what is being taught is True or False. And since from an epistemic standpoint you cannot know what is True, the only real difference between how you use the terms “education” and “brainwashing” is whether or not you agree with what is being taught.

This is not a unique phenomenon. There are a lot of concepts that on a meta-level possess the same meaning, but are referred to by two different terms – one for when the speaker is in support, and another for when the speaker is opposed:

So, we cannot pass judgement based on Truth alone. But all is not lost.

From an individual perspective, determining whether it is more moral to homeschool or to send your children to public school involves a relatively straight-forward cost-benefit analysis. As an individual parent with the moral obligation to teach your child The Truth and Only The Truth, what you want to teach your child is what you yourself believe – since if you thought what you believed wasn’t true, why the hell would you believe it in the first place? So, the answer is simply to weigh the amount of Falsehood taught in government schools against the increased efficiency in learning your child might gain from being taught by professionals (i.e., if you’re not very good at calculus you might have a hard time teaching it to your kid), adjust according to how much you think you can counteract falsehoods taught in state-schools by discussing them with your children at home (while keeping in mind the tendency to cultural osmosis from being around people all the time who believe the government line) – and voila, there’s your answer.

But the question of what the most ethical government policy towards homeschooling ought to be is a bit more complicated. Consider: many parents within the country will be crazy and have False and bizarre beliefs, which they will then try to teach their children, believing all the while that they are teaching only the Truth. The government, as a benevolent body, has a duty to protect those children from their crazy parents – after all, it’s not fair for some children to have the opportunity to learn True things in government-run schools, while other children, through no fault of their own, instead only get to learn False things from their crazy parents. Also, children who are taught to follow crazy beliefs will grow up to become crazy adults who do crazy things, and this can be socially and economically disruptive.

But of course, the governments themselves are not guaranteed to possess Truthful national ideologies either. Just as there can be crazy parents, there can also be crazy governments. It could be that in a given country, all the children attending state-run schools are being taught Falsehoods, while the few homeschooled children are the ones learning the real Truth. From that perspective, it seems that for the government to at least allow homeschooling would be more moral, since then even if the government had gone bad at least some children would get to learn Truth. It would of course be unfair to those children who wound up in state-run schools learning Falsehood – but would it be more moral to be fair and make all children learn Falsehood just because of that? Is it more important for education to be fair, or to be Truthful?

The problem, of course, is that a government can never judge for itself whether its own ideology is based on Truth or Falsehood – from within the system, every aspect of system-thinking appears as Truth, and all outside-system thinking appears False, whatever their actual relation to reality and facts.

So as outsiders pondering general principles of moral government policy, we see that there is a variable of uncertainty as to the relative Truth and Falsehood of government vs. private beliefs in our hypothetical country. That is, to discover the most moral policy towards homeschooling for government in general to take, we must take an outside-view perspective, not knowing ahead of time whether what the government is going to teach in their state-schools will be Truth or Falsehood. Given, then, that we don’t know whether our hypothetical government is some nice multi-kulti liberal northern European country or Nazi Germany, and we have to recommend the same government stance towards homeschooling for both – which do we choose?

(In fact, you do not know yourself whether what is taught in state-schools now (in any country) is True or False, since you are not God. You can know whether you agree with is taught there – but if you do agree, you could just be indoctrinated yourself, and if you don’t agree, you could just be one of the aforementioned crazy parents.)

(Private schools are not mentioned here, being something of a middle option. What category they fall into rather depends on the amount of regulation placed upon them, and the social and economic conditions under which they are formed and run.)

Option #1: Mandatory state schooling

The upside to this option is that it is fair. All students will be learning the same things (or near enough, given regional differences, inborn genetic differences, socioeconomic differences in family situation, etc.). If the government teaches Truth, all students learn Truth. If the government teaches Falsehood, all students learn Falsehood.

And an argument can be made that a well-run government is more likely to have come upon Truth than some random set of parents who want to homeschool. After all, the government’s ideology must have been considered and agreed upon by many more people than merely two randos for it to have been elevated to its present status as national policy. Not to mention that a government seeking Truth surely has more resources and time to pour into the problem of finding it than our two randos as well. (Of course, this is not to consider the external factor of motivation, and whether our government is likely to want to find Truth in the first place. But are our randos necessarily any more motivated in this regard, either?) Thus, assuming governments are likely to have Truth than individuals, students in state-schools would have a better chance of learning Truth than those homeschooled.

The problem with this option is the same as its first advantage, though – the homogeneity. If the government teaches Truth, then all is well. But if the government ideology, despite the above considerations, turns out to be False or harmful – well, now there’s a problem. By not allowing alternate ideologies and viewpoints to be taught to the next generation, it has effectively just purged itself of any kernels that might have been able to grow into Truth, making it much more likely that whatever False beliefs have taken hold will continue to persist as the mainstream thought of society for a long time thereafter.

And what about the rights of parents? Children may have a right to learn Truth – but don’t parents also have a right to teach their children their own values? After all, they’re the ones paying for and raising the little scamps, aren’t they? Shouldn’t they at least be able to get something out of them, if only another little shill for their own beliefs?

Option #2: Optional homeschooling

The downside to this option is that it is unfair. Some students will hopefully be taught the Truth, whether by the state or by their parents. But as long as there are multiple ideologies existing in the country, and at most one of them can be the ideology of absolute Truth, some students will necessarily be taught Falsehood.

But, at the end of the day, children are people too, and have agency and capacity for judgement of their own. Shouldn’t they be able to look at what values their parents or schools are teaching them, look at what society’s values are, compare them, and decide for themselves which seems right to them? (And if both sets of values are wrong, well, that’s fair in its own way too.)

This option, indeed, isn’t fair – but the world is not fair either. If we accept that children will differ in their original endowments of socioeconomic status, genetic ability, and so forth, why get so hung up on equality in quality of education either?

Is it the role of government to make sure every citizen receives the exact same opportunities or outcomes as every other? Or is it instead the role of government to make sure as many of its citizens as possible possess knowledge of the Truth?

Um…neither? asks the poor confused friend. What planet do you live on where you’re finding all these governments that want only either Truth or Fairness, anyways? What though, then, is the role of government? It seems we will not be able to answer the homeschooling question without some basic grasp on that.

Why do people have government? While there are a lot of deep philosophical and historical answers to this, a relatively anodyne one is that government exists to assist the individuals that make up society coordinate their activities to maximize the prosperity of them all. Whether this includes ensuring fairness, or maximizing economic activity and production, or influencing or policing the moral values of the citizens, depends on how you define “prosperity.” For now, though, we will take the definition at face value and leave these ambiguities to churn nebulously at the back of our imaginations.

So, the upside to optional homeschooling is that it may allow more children to be taught Truth, especially if the government ideology turns out to be False – and depending on what Truths are involved, this may lead to greater social prosperity.

Option #3: Mandatory homeschooling

I.e., no state-schools. (Possibly allowing private schools.)

The advantage to this option is that we can eliminate most of the Department of Education, and instead invest that money in a state-run media, which the US has long been sadly lacking. Public-school teachers, unfortunately, will have to find work elsewhere, or go into tutoring, or journalism, or something.

The disadvantage here is that literacy rates among the young adult population once this option is implemented are about to drop quite sharply. A lot of parents are either insufficiently motivated or incapable of making sure that their children learn basic knowledge (whether shaded by ideology or not) without the default system of state-schools to make this happen.

Compulsory schooling, however progressive schools may have become, is still mainly about teaching some basic skills which allow an adult to function in the modern economy, where the ability to read and do basic math are fundamental even for the lowest-income jobs. Whatever ideology gets taught on top of that may be True or it may be False, but Truth and Falsehood are less relevant when the actual value of an education can be measured by the very real and objective ability of the individual so-educated to hold a job.

Surely, having functional citizens and a functioning economy (i.e. economic prosperity) is at least one of the primary purposes of government, even if not the sole one. Thus, any policy which causes a significant fraction of the population to lose economic value is not going to be a very moral one for a government to take.

So, mandatory homeschooling seems a distinctly inferior answer. State schools serve the purpose of making a more prosperous society, however you define prosperity: whether monetary prosperity through teaching basic skills to allow individuals to function in the economy and increase GDP, or prosperity through equality by giving every child the opportunity to learn these basic skills as well as the chance to get indoctrinated with the government ideology (whether true or false). The only definition of prosperity on which the analysis falters is when it comes to moral prosperity, and whether these schools help the citizenry obtain better values. But a government education surely is at least as good for teaching moral values as no education at all –unless the government actively teaches immoral values.

III.

So we come back to our original question, only now having eliminated one of the options, since the mere existence of state-run schools appears to be a net positive in any of the so-far-considered scenarios. To decide between the first two options, we now must ask – is it moral, then, for a government to allow homeschooling?

But, what criterion can we use to judge whether something is moral for a government to do or not? Going back to Aristotle, what is right for a thing is what serves that thing’s purpose. What is moral for parents to do is what is best for their children, because the purpose of a parent is to raise their children into good adults. Similarly, what is moral for a government is that which causes it to better serve its function, which we have already taken to be increasing the prosperity of the citizenry, however prosperity may be defined.

So, does allowing homeschooling increase the prosperity of the citizenry?

If we go back to the first two prosperity definitions, it might seem that no, it does not. It fails if we consider maximizing economic prosperity, since by allowing homeschooling, some parents will surely fail to teach their children the basic skills necessary to function in the modern economy. It also fails if we consider maximizing fairness (“justice prosperity”), since not all students will then receive the same opportunities for education – homeschooled students won’t get to go to state schools, and state-schooled students won’t get to be homeschooled. Whether it is the homeschooling parents or the state school teachers who are teaching more of the Truth, some student somewhere is getting short-shrift. Without anything to counterbalance these costs, then, can there be any justification for allowing homeschooling?

But the third purpose of government, the third definition of prosperity from above, remains to be accounted for. The government has a moral duty to promote the best morals and values in its citizens, since these people will be then more “prosperous” in a moral sense (some would say the greatest sense of prosperity of all). And part of this, surely, is to make sure children and citizens are taught the Truth, since this will by definition include the best moral system, or at least the ability to recognize the best morals when one sees them. Not to mention, there is deep doubt as to whether Falsehood can serve as the best basis for economic prosperity or fairness, either. Since we cannot know ahead of time whether the government has the most moral and True ideology, or whether the homeschoolers do…

Is it moral for the government to forbid parents, who might possess Truth, from homeschooling, on the grounds that it thinks these parents probably only have Falsehoods to pass on?

Under our current working definition of morality, this is equivalent to asking – which of these strategies will maximize Truth within society in the long term? The answer depends on whether it is Truth or Falsehood that is the cream that rises to the top.

If you believe Falsehood is most likely to prevail in the long term, then building a Truth-based society is a lost cause, taking this as the mission of government is impossible and pointless, and thus there is no cause for government to pursue it, and people should just accept what they have got now. State-schools should be mandatory.

If you believe Truth is most likely to prevail in the long term, though, then the argument for allowing homeschooling becomes very good. Since by allowing it, the government allows alternate ideologies to persist that go against the mainstream government narrative. If these ideologies are wrong, well, they will probably die out since Truth tends to prevail. In all likelihood, the government already has the correct ideology, since Truth has already had a lot of time throughout history in which to work its way up. But in the case it has not quite managed it yet, then allowing other ideologies a chance to flourish, some of which may contain some residual Truth, can only hasten the rise of Truth to its rightful place at the top. And as for any Falsehoods that are allowed to grow as a result, well, they are not much of a threat anyways and doomed to soon die out.

IV.

Of course, there are some people who define the “prosperity” in the statement of the purpose of government above to mean “freedom” in the sense of individual liberty to do what one pleases. In which case, the tradeoff is not of Truth with Falsehood, but the rights of the parent to teach their children what they please, and the rights of the children to learn what they please. But forcing children to learn from the state rather than their parents hardly seems to increase children’s personal freedom in this regard. Thus, when maximizing liberty, it is only the parent’s freedom which is in the balance, so allowing homeschooling is the obvious conclusion under these assumptions.

Alternately, there are those who believe the purpose of government is to grant power to those at the top, and allow them to keep it. For these people, mandatory state-schooling is as equally a foregone conclusion as the opposite in the prior case. But our original question was what government policy was most moral, not the most useful, and the people in this category do not generally care much about morality, so this question is not so relevant to this discussion.

But what if there is no Truth or Falsehood? What if there are just ideologies and other ideologies?

Well, then there isn’t any morality either, and the question is moot again.

Thus, optional homeschooling is the most moral government policy under any usual definition of morality. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably works for a teacher’s union.

But as Nietzsche asks – why not, then, untruth?

That is, what if we don’t take distinguishing Truth vs. Falsehood as the fundamental ideal of education? When is it better to teach children Falsehood, and which government and individual methods of schooling will best include those Falsehoods that are found desirable?

From an individual perspective, if we don’t care whether our children learn Truth or are morally good people, a next best alternative might be to want for them to be successful. Going off of this criterion, when is it best for children to be taught Falsehood?

It is when that Falsehood is high-status, the dominant ideology, the thing all the successful people believe and that is in fact a pre-requisite for society to allow them this success –  i.e., when it is the government ideology. These are, not-coincidentally, exactly the sort of Falsehoods taught in public schools.

So we see that in this scenario in contrast to the earlier, it is better from an individual perspective to send your children to public school rather than to homeschool, no matter whether you believe that the public schools educate or brainwash. The only exceptions are if the public schools are so bad that you doubt your children can obtain enough basic skills there to function effectively in the modern economy (i.e., the teachers there understand calculus even less than you do), or if they teach ideologies or behaviors that are actively harmful and suppressive to their own adherents.

What about from a government perspective? We shall assume the government in question wants the same as earlier – a maximally prosperous society. But this government thinks to ask – does Truth always bring about a more prosperous society? Maybe not. After all, not every revolution was sparked by lies.

Then, what Falsehoods are most likely to lead to prosperity? Prosperity is more likely to come through an internally peaceful and cohesive society, as Moldbug discusses at length. Also, this is simple common sense – a society that works together to either produce useful things or steal them from some other society that is producing them, is going to be more prosperous than one where its members are focused on blowing up each others’ useful things. Thus, the best education is the one that leads to the most internal peace and coherence, i.e. the one that leads to the most stable government, i.e. the one that leads the citizens to be most likely to follow the government, i.e. the one that teaches the state ideology (But what if your state ideology is eternal revolution? Yet somehow this still works – how? I don’t know, go ask China.). That is, under these assumptions, mandatory public schooling is the most moral option since it leads to the greatest prosperity.

But this is only if Truth is irrelevant. Public school, then, is the option of those who believe in the victory of Falsehoods and Lies. If Kellhus had only had enough time, you can bet his empire would have had mandatory public schooling.

But what if you believe in a different role of government – or a different definition of prosperity? What if the most moral option is the one that maximizes human variation? Suppose that the most moral policy or government action is the one that brings about the most interesting actions by its citizens – the one that most increases their exploration of the breadth of both Falsehood and Truth, regardless of that policy’s effects on peace or fairness or economic growth or personal virtues of the citizens.

Then, of course, we can only choose our previously disqualified option, mandatory homeschooling, as the best in both the individual and government cases, since this will bring about the most variation and conflict of ideas among the population. People, when forced to find something to teach their children, will have to think more deeply and more clearly about what they actually believe and know. They will become more invested in their own ideologies, and this mindset will then be passed to their children. Let a hundred-fifty-million flowers bloom (taking just the US) and fight it out amongst themselves – literacy rates, economic growth, and fairness and equality be damned. When ultimately they’re cut down en masse like weeds, the carnage will be all the more beautiful. After all, from where did the uniformity of modern society emerge, but out of just such an ideological hodgepodge? At this point, growing the garden again from scratch is unlikely to make it any uglier. And if the ultimate result is again universal mandatory state-schooling – well, all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.