by Ancapistani | 2025-05-20 19:37:43+00:00
Unfortunately, in my experience, it's not the teachers that are the problem. It's the administration and regulatory environment.

A lot of the best teachers have been driven out of the field, so uninvolved teachers are over-represented. That's a solvable problem, though - good teachers _want_ to teach, we've just built a system that doesn't compensate them.

For my children, my wife and I have never enrolled them in a government school. We call ourselves "unschoolers", but that community probably wouldn't accept us as we'd be unable to pass their implicit ideological purity tests :)

Basically, our kids live alongside us. When they were younger, I'd build them mechanical and electronic toys. That lead to them wanting to help, which lead to some light electrical engineering. When they were old enough to show interest, they got devices of their own. As they got older, that went from an Amazon Fire tablet in a foam protective case to an iPad Pro in a keyboard folio.

We don't filter anything. I log everything at the router level, and have MitM SSL termination configured there. That used to be monitored by a cron job and a set of grep scripts that look for keywords, but these days it's augmented by an AI that summarizes usage and sends me an email once a week. I very rarely look at it.

We have two daughters, and our oldest is 16. There have been a handful of PornHub visits in the past, as is to be expected. The first time it happened, she was 12. I sat down with her privately and asked if she visited it intentionally. She had, because a friend had mentioned an act that she hadn't heard of - so she looked it up. The visit was ~5m long, and that was consistent, so that was the end of the discussion.

Subsequent visits have been similar things, so I only mentioned it in passing to her to let her know it was visible. A longer visit happened a few months ago, shortly after she turned 16. It was still fairly short, and based on the titles and durations it was clear she was looking for information rather than self-gratification. Still, she's shown no reason for me not to trust her and was getting to the age where privacy should be a growing concern for her.

I pulled her aside again, only this time I asked her to bring me her devices. I told her that she's shown that she can be trusted, and that while she is definitely still a child her parents trust her to make good decisions for herself. I excluded her devices from the router logs, removed the MitM SSL certs, and showed her how it was all set up.

Our oldest taught herself to read at a high school level when she was seven years old, because she needed to be able to read quest text to progress in Guild Wars 2.

My youngest taught herself arithmetic with fractions because she loves to cook, and wanted to be adjust recipes to make batches large enough to sell at the farmer's market.

Both of my children learned algebra, geometry, and some basic trig on road trips. When I'm driving we often just talk through things. Sometimes that's math, sometimes history, sometimes politics. Both of them have gone from basic arithmetic to polynomials over the course of a single road trip (different trips!). For geometry and trig, we used iPads and Apple Pencils. These days I carry a reMarkable Paper Pro that gets used a lot for similar reasons.

---

All of the above is to say: kids learn thing naturally. Teachers are not a requirement for learning, nor is school. If you give a child a supportive environment and access to the resources they need to support them, they will seek out knowledge.