Industrialization didn’t just change how we make things. It changed how we make people.
For most of history, families worked together. The farm was a school; the shop was a home. Then we invented the factory. To make the factory work, we needed the parents on the assembly line and the children in a holding pen. We called the pen a school.
This was an experiment. We’ve run it for seventy-five years. It failed.
When you remove parents, you remove the primary source of human warmth. You replace it with a bureaucracy. Institutions cannot love children; they can only process them. We traded mentors for administrators. We traded character for compliance.
The results are now visible. We see them in the rising depression rates and the falling birth rates. We see them in the “preparedness gap.” We legally bar teenagers from doing real work—apprenticeships that actually teach a craft—and then wonder why they reach twenty-two without knowing how to be adults. We block children from having real world role models.
We are currently paying for our own decline. The state spends roughly $17,000 per student every year. In a sane world, that money would follow the child, not the building. If a family wants to hire a master carpenter to teach their son, or join a micro-school, or stay home and learn online, they should have the capital to do it.
We have reached a strange peak. We are the wealthiest humans to ever live, yet we are socially impoverished. We have all the money, but we’ve lost the plot. We should stop subsidizing the factory model and start funding the family.
Traditional schools may work best for some families, they can continue that if they wish. Or families may partially utilize traditional schools like my family does.
Give families the funds ($17,000 per student here in Washington state). Use online accounts with restrictions like HSAs. Families find the best path for each of their children. They hire tutors, teach themselves, or find masters. Markets create options. Competition drives quality. Innovation lowers costs. Unbundle the school. Restore the home. Stop processing kids. Start raising adults. Save the future.