Why does institutional education require more time?

Or maybe it doesn't, we're just counting time differently

This is going to be one of those, “I do not know the answer to this question, I would love your comment” posts. And I think it’s a topic many of y’all have an opinion about so… hey, speak your mind in the comments. Yesterday Jeremy Wayne Tate of the Classical Learning Test mentioned that many homeschooling parents spend under three hours a day “doing school” but their children still test several grades above their age level.

Now our family has little experience homeschooling ourselves, and that was under strange circumstances (e.g. adopted daughter still learning English), so I actually don’t know what is typical. Is it the case, as one person suggested to me, that the “under three hours a day” people are actually a strange outlier, and you hear about them precisely because they are a strange outlier? My whole life (as student and teacher) has been "institutionalized" (ahem, now you know the truth!) so I don't know how things look on the other side all that well.

But I am attracted to such comments as someone who generally has sympathy for the idea that it…. feels somewhat unnatural that so much of a person’s time (child or adult, for that matter) is spent in controlled institutions (school or otherwise, for that matter). (New readers might see some past posts on that point.) And reading such comments as you do, it has occasionally bothered me as someone who works for a good classical school now that… wait a minute, we require more than three hours a day of people. All-inclusive (lunch, recess), we require seven (and then homework too). To what extent is that because we’re doing a better job than the homeschooling folk (people spend more time here, but they also learn more or better), and to what extent is that an expression of the inefficiencies of institutional education? (Because, just to be clear, I look around me and see great teachers and students learning. I mean, I think I do a pretty good job, by golly. If instead I saw terrible teachers and lazy students, the question would be easily answered!)

So I asked this question on Twitter, and I did not expect to receive, at the time I type this anyway, about 17000 views and 50 replies. People have some opinions! So I thought it was worth sharing some of that.

What did people say?

Babysitting

Probably the most common reply I got… does not really apply to good schools, but that most common reply was that school is babysitting. Both parents work all day, the kids have to be kept somewhere. Yeah, the implication was, you don’t need all that time, but the main thing is to give the kids somewhere to be. Here is a typical reply in that genre (private replies will have the name hidden).

Now I said that doesn't apply to good schools, but I have no doubt that it does apply to some and for some parents. We sort of caught of glimpse of what "really matters" during COVID, when public schools closed... but continued to dispense food to people (that happened everywhere), and in some places even partially opened as, well, babysitting centers staffed by non-teachers, but for some reason it wasn't safe to have school? OK, so I get it. The really essential aspects of public school are food distribution and childcare.

So there is an aspect of that going on, sure, but there are good schools that still meet seven hours a day that are not babysitting centers.

Inefficiencies

I had more sympathy for the suggestion that educating people as a group is simply less efficient (in terms of speed of individual learning anyway) than the one-on-one attention of homeschooling. Here are several replies that made that point.

I'll say more about that last in just a second here, but clearly these folks do have a point. You do spend time in obvious things like transitioning from one subject to the next, and you do spend time enforcing class discipline. (Side comment, but when I taught college I, and most of us physical science people, jumped into content almost immediately. We'd hear about these other professors who spent a day, or days, just laying down the class rules... my goodness, what are you folks doing.)

Per the last... it is worth saying, maybe, that the only reason institutional education works at all, the way we usually do it anyway, is because human quality X (intelligence, math ability, writing speed, whatever) is a bell curve, and most humans are close to the middle. That's why "class" works, if human ability was routinely wildly divergent we’d have to do something else. And it is probably the students furthest away from that middle on either side who would most benefit from something different. (As another good teacher at a good school told me when I was starting out, no matter how committed you are to doing a good job, you can't let the slowest student fall too far behind, and you can't let the fastest student get too far ahead, in an institutional environment.)

The school is doing a better job

And then, a few replies to say that… well the institutional school spends more time because it is actually doing a better, or at least a different, job. Your teachers know things parents don’t know, have skills parents don’t have. We needn’t be afraid to combine “parents have the primary duty of education” with “here are some highly trained people to help you out”. It struck me that these replies tended to come from people actually connected to the classical schooling world (whereas the “babysitting” people were really thinking of public ed, I think).

And worth saying up front that, I think the older you get (as an older child, and then as an adult), the more an institution can offer you a real "community of scholars" sort of thing that would be harder to replicate informally. That is good memories, that is a school at its best.

Per the first… sure. You go to an institutional school, you might take a class in drama. That counts as “school time”. You homeschool, maybe you take part in a community play, but it doesn’t feel like “part of school” to you, you don’t count it when someone asks how much time you spend homeschooling. But whatever you call it, it is time spent to learn X.

And one other nice comment:

Alternative models

And then, a few people made some additional comments about what school should look like that I thought it worthwhile to share.

University model schooling is something like two or three days a week of institutional schooling, with work completed at home the other days, an attempt to combine the “best of both worlds”. Seems to be a decidedly minority position at the moment, but perhaps growing in popularity.

THE END. Your comments are welcome.

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