The Parenting Trap

Forget all the advice. Forget the special tutors, camps, coaches, and therapists.  A father of four argues that the biggest problem kids face is the byzantine education-industrial complex known as school, which ruins the most carefree and memorable years of their lives.

By A. A. Gill 

            Under no circumstances are you to cut this out and stick it on the fridge door. Or put it in the file marked "Kids' Stuff." There's nothing here for you. Nothing to do, nothing to act on. No consciousness-raising or attitude-flipping. No strategies or slogans. There is no help. And absolutely no solace. Because, really, what the world doesn't need now is any more advice on raising children. We're done with the finger wagging and the head patting. We've tried everything and we've read everything. We've asked, tweeted, blogged, prayed, and read it all. We've sat up at night and commiserated with other parents when we should have been having sex or at least paying off the sleep deficit. We've done everything, and still it's like a cinnamon-and-lavender-scented Gettysburg out there.

            Why don't we just stop trying and do nothing? Because nothing can't make us and the kids feel any worse than we feel now.
            I have two lots of kids, a boy and a girl and a boy and a girl. They neatly bookend my responsibilities as a parent. The elder girl is in her last year of college. The youngest two are just starting the times table and phonetics, and the older boy is somewhere in Southeast Asia, on what he calls his "gap life," collecting infections and tattoos of what he thinks are Jim Morrison lyrics written in pretty, curly, local languages but in fact probably say, "I like cock."
            Having spent a great deal of money to educate the first two, I realized along the way that I've learned nothing. But then, none of us have any idea what we're doing. That's right, none of us know anything. I stand at the school gates and watch the fear in the eyes of other fathers. The barely contained panic as they herd their offspring, already looking like hobbit Sherpas, carrying enormous schoolbags full of folders and books and photocopied letters and invitations to birthdays and concerts and playdates and football and after-school math clubs. You know my younger kids carry more paperwork than I do? And my job is paperwork. And they can't read.
            In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we've managed to take the 15 years of children's lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure. Education is a dress-up box of good intentions, swivel-eyed utopianism, cruel competition, guilt, snobbery, wish fulfillment, special pleading, government intervention, bureaucracy, and social engineering. And no one is smart enough now to understand how we can stop it. Parents have no rational defense against the byzantine demands of the education-industrial complex. But this multi-national business says that they're acting in the children's best interests. And we can only react emotionally to the next Big Idea or the Cure or the Shortcut to Happiness.
            No, scrap happiness-we'll settle for success. We gave up on happiness at about the age of six. Childhood is a war of attrition, like some grisly TV game show where the weak and the kind and the quixotic and the dreamers and the gentle get dumped at the end of each year. Only the gimlet-eyed and the obsessively competitive and the driven make it to the finish line.
            Over-achieving Hillary Clinton smugly told us that it took a village to bring up a child. Oh my God. If only. If all it took were some happy, thatched, smocked village, we'd all have bought villages, have bought 10 villages-we'd have adopted a village. But no dusty, higgledy-piggledy, clucking, mooing, sleepy-town hamlet is going to get you into the only pre-school that is the feeder for that other school that is the fast track to the only school that is going to give your child half a chance of getting into that university that will lead to a life worth living.
            Oh no, we need far more than the village. We need au pairs who speak three languages and musical nannies and special tutors and counselors and professional athletes with knee problems to coach hand-eye coordination. We have to have orthodontists and yoga teachers and voice coaches and judo masters. There have to be camps for creative writing and tennis and swimming instructors and exam strategists. We need analysts and nutritionists and speech therapists.
            We need to stop all this. I can't do it anymore. I can't face the next decade of having conversations about extra-curricular activities and tutors. And I can't go on with the phony, smiling interests in other people's kids' achievements and the seething resentment at their success and the hidden Schadenfreude at their stammers and alopecia. Or the self-deluding midnight belief that my own children are late starters or slow burners. I gave a talk at an educational festival in England this year. They asked me in the way that Methodists glean godliness by exhibiting hopeless recidivist drunks in tents-I am a chronic and inspiring example of academic failure. I asked a roomful of teachers if they'd enjoyed their own school days. About half put up their hands and said they had. Not actually a great average. And then I asked that half if the things that made school fun had happened inside or outside a classroom. And only two said they'd enjoyed being taught. The rest liked school despite schooling. They remembered their friends and getting drunk and feeling each other up and laughing till they were hunched over with hilarity. There is of course the old chestnut of the one teacher, the magic one, the one who let in the light. Introduced us to Keats or Darwin. But that's not much for 15 years, is it? A couple of odes and some finches. 
            If you want to see the absolute proof that we've got it all wrong-that education is really about the fear and guilt of parents projected onto their children, then go to your own school reunion. Obviously most normal people would rather attend a naked consciousness-raising workshop. But do it once and you'll see what the Adonises and the Venuses of your halcyon days actually did with all that promise. The boy who was captain of everything, who strode the halls like a young Alexander; the girl with the glistening hair who memorized poetry and whose golden limbs danced across a stage as a Juliet no one would ever forget. Well, they're both sorry, seedy never-wases now. Their finest moments are behind them. Everything after that brilliant year at school or college was mediocrity. Nothing good ever came from peaking too early. The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents. This isn't wishful thinking. It's the rule. My advice to any child reading this: If you're particularly good at the violin or math, for God's sake don't let anyone find out. Particularly your parents. If they know you're good at stuff they'll force you to do it forever. You'll wake up and find yourself in a sweaty dinner jacket and clip-on bow tie playing "The Music of the Night" for the ten-thousandth time in an orchestra pit. Or you'll be the fat, 40-ish accountant doing taxes for the people who spent their school days copping a feel and learning how to roll a good joint.

Vanity Fair, December, 2012.