On Education

I always said that delivering RV’s would be a dream job until I had a kid. I went 7 years without living anywhere. Traveling full time. And not in the sense that I lived in a vehicle in a stationary place. I see that all the time on social media. That's just people living in a van instead of a house. I was traveling every day. Only sleeping in the same state for more than a day or two when I was visiting someone. The longest I’d be somewhere was over the holidays, with family, or staying in AirBnB’s in different countries. I'm a traveler type. It was perfect for me.

But then in 2023 my wife and I got pregnant. We were at a rest stop in Iowa when she came out with the positive test. It’s still in my car. Our world collapsed. We’d need to buy a house. We’d need to live somewhere - have neighbors, buy toilet paper, go back to the same place for more than a couple weeks at a time. I’d done it before, but it felt so foreign. It seemed so boring. Pittsburgh, PA was the obvious choice. About an hour from our parents. The closest concentration of intellectual capital. The closest place we could regularly expose our child to ideas, cultures, food.

Like most soon-to-be parents, we were at least aware of the schools in the areas where we were looking at houses. We had enough money to buy a fixer-upper in some of the best school districts in the state of Pennsylvania. And we looked at some houses in some of the top school districts in Pittsburgh. But in the end we didn’t prioritize the quality of the schools. We went with a neighborhood that was safe enough to regularly walk the dog (watching people shoot at each other isn't for everyone), and that had an ethnically diverse population (for Pittsburgh; one of Pittsburgh’s cons is how white it skews).

In my mind, we prioritized education, if not the schools. If the goal is to create a well-rounded education, we have the rural bases covered. Farms. Woods. Open space. Our kids will get plenty of that. Being in America, the suburbs are basically unavoidable. And to be honest, we’re not as worried about educating our kids about suburban life. Partly because I think it skews boring. Partly because, as I mentioned, they’re unavoidable. So we chose what we like: a walkable neighborhood with lots of shops and restaurants. It’s not that fancy - pretty much any other neighborhood in the city with similar amenities is almost double the price. But everyday our son will be exposed to diverse people and cultures as he walks around town.

My wife and I are both educated. We’re aware of the importance of schools in a child’s education. We’re just not convinced that exposure to ideas and facts and theories in some of Pennsylvania’s best school districts (and Pennsylvania, as a state, has pretty good schools) will be better than the exposure that comes with life in a city. And let’s be fair. We’re privileged in the sense that we’re each capable of filling gaps that might exist in a smaller, poorer district. Our kids will have a rigorous home-based curriculum that will accompany them wherever they go to school. Regardless of how much success I have in getting institutions and companies to adopt travel-the-world platforms and programs, our kids will be educated around the world (especially with the prevalence of remote curriculum).

We’re in a different spot than most parents. I’m not trying to be critical of folks who want their kids exposed to the best education a state can offer. But consider this. A handful of the best students from these schools will go to Ivy League (or equivalent) schools after they graduate. They’ll come out of programs that were somewhat racially or ethnically diverse, but socio-economically homogenous. They’ll test well. Evidence suggests that socio-economically privileged kids tend to test well. They’ll play music and sports and participate in a variety of extra-curriculars. They’ll do all this from the comfort of their fancy suburban neighborhoods. And then they’ll go to my Alma Mater (Yale University) and learn about the importance of diversity and equity. They’ll talk about the importance of helping the poor, and why more opportunities are needed for the under-privileged. Then they’ll get out of class and be too terrified or incompetent to interact meaningfully with anyone beneath their socio-economic spectrum.

I watched it happen every day with almost no exception in New Haven, CT. We’d sit in class and talk about how to build businesses that were more inclusive or that created more value for more of society, and then class would end and no one would dare leave the Yale bubble for the reality of New Haven. And it wasn’t that New Haven is that bad. It’s just that it’s one of the few cities in all of Connecticut that has poor areas. (There are a handful of them, but most towns in Connecticut are smaller, very cute and wealthy). There’s an interesting article from The Atlantic a few years back about this sort of thing: parents furthering the inequality in society by all struggling to get into the neighborhoods with the best schools at the expense of anyone making less money than them. That’s an other-centric stance - “don’t get into the fancy neighborhoods with the good schools and pull up the ladder because it hurts others”. I’m arguing from a selfish perspective. Ensconcing ourselves in as fancy an enclave as possible and disregarding everyone else is actually terrible for our childrens' education.

My arguments on education generally skew toward “as much exposure to as much as possible (age appropriate obviously) in as short a period of time as possible”. So we’d all be better off if we had the whole world as our canvas. That’s not reality yet. Very few, if any, people on earth are able to get a fairly thorough knowledge of the inhabited continents before they’re 30. It currently takes a lifetime and a lot of ambition to become well-traveled and well-read. So if we’re serious about moving toward a more educated, more equitable, more capable world - it makes zero sense to try to educate ourselves by closing ourselves off from different people, places, or (sub)cultures.