This week Steve Krouse’s essay “What Shall I Teach My Son?” sat at the top of Hacker News with 291 points and 356 comments — hundreds of adults debating whether a father ought to teach his kid to code, to solder, to build things with his hands, to read the right books in the right order. Twelve days earlier, on October 9, K-12 Dive published a quieter piece: districts around the country are closing schools as enrollment falls. These are the same story told from opposite ends. One is the demand side announcing it will handle things personally. The other is the supply side handing back the keys and walking off the lot.

The Essay Is Not Really About the Son

The parental syllabus is the most flattering literary form available to a certain kind of parent, and I say that as someone who has drafted a few. It casts the father as curriculum committee, headmaster, and last competent adult on earth. Notice what the question assumes: that the boy has no other teacher worth the name, and that the father’s judgment about what matters is the scarce input.

What actually made the question urgent this year is not the schools’ failure. It’s that the father’s own expertise just became a commodity. The calculus tutor costs nothing. The Python instructor costs nothing. The Latin drill costs nothing. Whatever the essay’s author imagined he uniquely possessed — the ability to explain a derivative at the kitchen table — is now the least defensible thing in the house.

So the syllabus becomes the remaining moat. If you cannot be the only source of instruction, you can still be the only source of taste. That is a real thing to give a child. It is also, conveniently, unmeasurable, which is why it makes such good comment-section material.

What the School Actually Sells

Strip the building down to its functions and there are three. A peer group that did not choose him. A rotating cast of adults who hold authority over him and are not in love with him. A schedule enforced by someone who is not his mother.

None of those appear in the 356 comments. They cannot be taught at a kitchen table, and they cannot be tutored. They are also the first things to disappear when districts consolidate, which is what the October 9 K-12 Dive reporting describes: declining enrollment forcing closures, consolidations, and the slow conversion of a neighborhood school into a bus route.

Here is the part that ought to trouble the people celebrating the essay. The institution is not fighting to keep the job. It is quietly resigning it. NPR reported on September 24 that the federal Education Department hasn’t been dismantled so much as degraded — staff describing it as more inefficient than before, not leaner. Nobody needs to abolish the school system. Shrinking enrollment and administrative drift are doing it without a press release.

“The arithmetic is the argument,” a board member told me in the parking lot after a vote to consolidate two elementaries, a folder still under her arm. She had voted yes and looked like it. “We can’t run a building for ninety kids and we can’t bus them forty minutes, so we do neither and call it a plan.” Then she got in her car.

The Tutor Was Never the Missing Piece

England’s education department has pitched one-to-one AI tutoring as moving extra help “from a privilege of the lucky few to every child who needs it.” It is a good line, and it contains the era’s central error: the belief that the binding constraint on education is the supply of instruction.

It isn’t. The constraint is demand — a child’s willingness to be instructed by someone who is not impressed by him. Chalkbeat has spent the year documenting chronic absenteeism as a long-term structural crisis rather than a post-pandemic hangover, and that is the number that should organize every conversation about tutoring. A free tutor for a kid who isn’t in the room is a subscription nobody opens.

Which is why the AI-tutor optimism and the teach-him-yourself essay fail in the same direction. Both imagine the child as a receiver of content, and both route that content through a channel with no friction. Friction is the product. The boring teacher who is not your father, the classmate who is smarter than you and doesn’t care about your feelings, the bell that ends the interesting part — that is what a school is for, and it is why the syllabus was always the least of it.

Teach Him to Be Taught

If I had to answer Krouse’s question in one line, it would be: teach him that the world is full of people who know things and are under no obligation to adore him, and then put him where they are.

That is a smaller ambition than the essay’s, and a harder one, because it requires an institution to still exist and a parent to surrender the best seat in the room. The parents now writing curricula for their sons are, whatever they tell themselves, answering a question the schools stopped asking about a decade ago. The honest version of the essay would be titled “What Shall I Do When the Building Closes.”

The curriculum was never the hard part. Showing up was. It still is — and it is much easier to show up somewhere that hasn’t been consolidated into a bus route.

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