Seems a bit more feature-complete than this one.

And for the rest, you just need to pander to their belief that they're immune to that sort of thing.

- You have a broken arm

- Somewhere else in the world, someone has stage IV pancreatic cancer

- Therefore your broken arm should be of no concern even to you

The flaw should be intuitively obvious, especially to anyone who's ever had a broken arm. But hey, you actually concede you're a robot in your HN profile, your hyperalloy combat chassis is no doubt proof against such mishaps, and why should anyone expect you to understand or care what humans feel?

Certainly homeschooling isn't scalable. There are techniques, methods, curricula, which can be (and are quite widely) shared, but no one can systematize it into something which will guarantee a good result in every case. Unfortunately, I see no reason to imagine anyone can so systematize anything else, either. After all, the current lamentable state of affairs is the result of concentrated effort, over a period at least of decades, on the part of many of the world's finest minds. If they can't come up with a "one size fits all", why expect that anyone else can? Perhaps the "social sciences", so called, are fundamentally in error. Perhaps every family and every child is unique, a non-reproducible n=1 experiment -- and perhaps, cast in those terms, it becomes a little easier to see just how wrongheaded the concept of a "one size fits all" solution for human beings might possibly be.

As far as I can tell, the most common objection to homeschooling is that it doesn't work in the absence of parents who are interested and closely involved with the progress of their children -- not in the modern "helicopter" style borne only of a desire not to be seen to parent badly, but rather in a consistent and, to the extent possible, effective fashion, out of both genuine interest in the wellbeing and success of their offspring, and a sense of the duty to society which also inheres in parenting, that is, to bequeath upon the world children whose presence is more likely to be overall a benefit than a detriment. Or, to put it simply, that homeschooling can't work reliably because it doesn't work at all without good parents.

Unfortunately, as the last decades have also shown us, without good parents, nothing else works, either -- and a sufficiently broken system can easily overcome the effects of even the best parents, if only by being vastly larger than them and all but inescapable. Here we have a Yale professor telling us that the existing system is sufficiently broken -- and not really telling us anything we didn't already know. Do we assume that nothing else can work either, and that our kids are doomed? Or do we seek alternatives, even those which are utterly alien to the sort of systems-first thinking that got us into this mess?

I can't speak for anyone else, of course, and I'm not raising any kids of my own, but it seems to me that the only option compatible with even the most basic concept of parental responsibility is the latter one. After all, we've not only seen ourselves that what we've got doesn't work; here we have one of its highest exponents telling us it doesn't work, which should be authoritative enough for just about anybody. Perhaps something else might work better? It'd be very hard for anything else to work worse.

To answer your question as best I can, I really can't answer your question very well, because I'm not a parent and never will be, and thus have only a peripheral knowledge of the detailed mechanics of parenting. Based on what little I know, the first place I'd suggest looking would be the homeschooling movement, which seems to be gaining secular adherents quite rapidly of late for reasons appearing not much different from those I suggested in my earlier comment.

1. push [his] theoretical children into this race, or

2. let them eat into precious time to figure things out.

Whatever my opinion of the article under discussion, I can only agree with its author that option 1 is a horrible mistake whose consequences for his children may accurately be called lifelong impairment.

Option 2 is no better, and it only even seems that way if you don't think about it too hard. It implicitly accepts the premise, not that childhood is precious (which it is), but that childhood is precious because, and in the way that, academia claims it is. That's toxic as hell, and it will poison any parenting that proceeds from it.

Specifically: He won't be able to relax around his kids, because he'll always have that nagging ambivalence that he's doing wrong by them, failing to equip them to compete as functional adults in a world which does not care about them, and that will come through in his actions. It can't not, and his kids will pick up on it, because a young child's parents are by far the most important things in her world which are not actually her, and she notices everything about everything they do. She won't intuit any of the paragraph I just wrote, of course, because you have to be old and jaded and cynical for that. She'll just know her daddy is never happy or comfortable or relaxed when he's around her, and with the unconscious, inevitable egotism of the very young, she will assume that's because of something to do with her. And she'll almost certainly never get over that.

I don't know that I agree with David Benatar that bringing a child into the world is invariably harmful to the child. But I certainly have a hard time arguing other than that it's harmful to bring a child into the world to endure the kind of parenting I've just described -- hence my advice to GP.

A better third option, if anyone's interested, would be to opt out of the entire nonsense and raise your kids without reference to it. The trouble is that you are not more powerful than the society in which you exist, and it is interested in your kids whether you like it or not. You might find or make an enclave, and a method, in which to raise them without having them be too badly stunted by its more pernicious influences; people have done it before, are doing it now, and will no doubt continue to do so. Perhaps you will be among them. But it's not implausible that your notional kids are better off never having existed at all, if you're not even equipped to recognize the need to be willing to make the attempt.

But weren't you saying just the opposite? That being part of the elite, which here you call "meritocracy" because you're playing a card trick, drives people crazy?

Here's what I think: You're talking to the elite (if you weren't, you wouldn't be in the Atlantic), and you know said elite are more comfortable thinking of themselves in terms of "meritocracy" (even though one of your theses is that there's no meaningful merit involved), and you also know that pretending to care about unequal distribution of social benefits is currently in fashion among your audience (hence the preference for "meritocracy", because it implies that your audience's unequal share is earned). Keeping all three of these plates spinning at once is difficult; the sentence I quoted is them all hitting the ground at once.

>Davis: Some criticize this kind of self-reflection as narcissistic[...]

>Deresiewicz: [...]the main point is to know yourself so you know what you want in the world. You can decide, what is the best work for me, what is the best career for me, what are the rewards that I really want. And maybe you’ll end up saying that I do need a certain level of wealth, but you will know it because you will have come to know yourself.

Nope. Nothing narcissistic here. You know, in ages past when countries had explicit aristocracies rather than the implicit ones which deposed and replaced them, "the main point" as you put it was to serve others, rather than oneself. Can't imagine what brought that to mind just now, though. Totally unrelated to anything, no doubt.

>Gaining self-knowledge isn’t a simple or predictable process. Are there certain things that can only be learned outside the classroom?

Could there possibly be any wronger question to ask?

>Aside from the classes themselves, the fact that we’ve created a system where kids are constantly busy, and have no time for solitude or reflection, is going to take its toll. We need to create a situation where kids feel like they don’t have to be “on” all the time.

Are you sure? What it sounds like you're saying is that "we" have been doing the best "we" can for decades, and the result is barely tolerable. Are you sure it wouldn't help more if you just stopped creating situations? If the problem is that you're raising your kids inside a Skinner box, why would you think the solution is to make the walls less opaque? Are these the only terms in which you can think? You don't need to answer that one.

>When I taught humanities classes, I never talked about self-reflection, and I never invited students to talk about their feelings or their backgrounds or their experiences.

Well, you got that right, at least, if only by accident. And it has to have been by accident, because you think you got it wrong. The context couches this as a failure on your part, but why would it be? Why would you think that someone else's self-reflection should have anything to do with you? You don't need to answer that one, either.

So how does this amazing article finish? With its subject telling us about his own college experience, in the course of which comes this marvel, which I've emphasized so you don't miss it:

>I drifted for two or three years after college until I reached a cinematic moment in my life[...]

Why cinematic? Because we've all seen this movie. To call it "transformative" would be erroneous, because a plot twist doesn't change the shape of the plot, it's part of the story all along; to call it an "epiphany" would be the same, plus stupid, because we all know God is dead. Indeed, part of the interview describes how academia has tried to fill the former social role of religion and failed at it.

But this possibly quite significant point is glossed over entirely because it's not important to Deresiewicz's movie and therefore not important to the article or the audience, who are (presumed to be) in much the same state as the subject: their problem isn't that they've failed to live the movie plot they thought they wanted, it's that they've succeeded at it and found themselves nonetheless unfulfilled. Which is fine as far as it goes, what a shame for them but who cares, right? Except they've managed to inflict the same disaster on the next generation, because they are not only narcissistic but incredibly stupid besides.

And, having recognized the existence and nature of this error, what do they feel really matters? Is it that their descendants, their students, their supposed protegees, are going to have to find their way out of this clusterfuck on their own because everyone who might be expected to help them is too self-absorbed to bother and too stupid to succeed at it anyway? Of course not. No, what matters is who gets the blame, specifically that it be anyone but they themselves:

>But the take home message is that everyone has to liberate themselves from this system. Education should be an act of liberation. We need to make a better system but ultimately everybody has to claim their freedom for themselves.

These are literally the last words in the article. Do you think that's an accident? Because it's not an accident.