Innocence Lost

A path to restore our children's childhoods

We are sacrificing our young to the education machine. Our children lose their childhoods to endless hours of classrooms and homework. This must end. 

A true childhood is lived wholly in the moment. Concern about the future is an adult’s burden. 

The intrusion of digital stimulation into the quiet of childhood robs children of wandering thoughts, of their own strange myths and little misunderstandings. The premature introduction of an education sends forth facts that cut mercilessly through dreams and fantasies. What room for wonder when all is laid bare?

A utilitarian education is necessarily future-facing. It tests and measures and shapes. Under evaluation, there is little room for innocence. Children’s misconceptions must be trimmed off, their wandering thoughts focused. 

And so dies what Jean Cocteau calls “that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

Arthur Rackham, He Passed Under the Bridge (Peter Pan)

Yet our hand is forced. In the society we have built, this little death has become necessary. The responsible parent gives their children a modern education, which starts early.  

To get a good job, you need a good degree. To get into a good college, you need exceptional grades. To get exceptional grades, you must study. 

This desperate rat race is rigged against our young. The college selection process favors those groups that are willing to sacrifice their children to a brutal study-culture, or those groups that don’t need to, because their minority identity renders exceptional grades unnecessary.  

This system is the result of the progressive project to obscure reality. Due to constraints on employers’ ability to test candidates for intelligence, organizations must crudely infer candidates’ aptitude from their credentials. This mechanism can be manipulated by the Left, which controls the credential machine.  

The power that control of this system affords is tremendous. By manipulating the selection mechanism that sits at the heart of our society, progressives can ensure that leftist-favored groups receive artificial advantages, and that anyone else that wants to benefit has to spend a fortune on an education that achieves little except to propagandize students and to enrich the Left. 

To stand a chance of entering the elite, our young need exceptional grades on tests that require rote memorization. This means a childhood spent locked in the classroom, to the particular detriment of young men, who are ill-suited to this stultifying environment. 

Even if the recent Supreme Court ruling does prove to reduce race-based admissions, most of these undesirable structural effects will persist. The rat race will continue, and the colleges will continue to grow richer and more progressive.  

If we could find a way to circumvent and starve this system, the ramifications would be profound. But the answer is not a simple one; we cannot simply refuse to play the game. If we suddenly cease optimizing our children’s educational prestige without making other preparations then they will fail to secure strong careers.   

Before we fix education we must fix hiring. It must become standard across all our own businesses to conduct our own assessments, rather than unthinkingly continuing to rely on legacy credentials controlled by our political foes. We must have the confidence to interface directly with reality where they do not.  

This is easier said than done. In my former professional life, I led teams that hired elite software engineers. Despite all the flaws with the college system, checking which program an entry-level applicant had graduated from was by far the most efficient heuristic to determine competency. This is now standard at all the big tech companies, even those that once had more creative hiring processes. 

To supplant this system we must have a mechanism that is efficient and precise. This mechanism exists - if we have the confidence to embrace it.