Parents Spend More Energy Picking Backpacks Than Picking Schools

Toward the end of every summer, my family makes what has become a small back-to-school hajj to the western suburbs of Chicago. We hit Oakbrook Center, then the outlet mall nearby, and spend a day acquiring the things our children try to convince us they need to become well-educated Americans.

This year my son got an L.L. Bean backpack, and my daughter, a pink patterned one from Pottery Barn. Water bottles, teal unicorns, sketchbooks, chapter books. My son will read almost anything with a credible risk of dismemberment. Then shoes: He wanted something that made him look a little more like James Dean, whom he reported on last year. I doubt Dean bought his shoes at an outlet mall with his father, but we worked with what we had.

This is what American parents do in August. Using survey projections and K-12 enrollment data, Deloitte estimated the back-to-school market at $30.4 billion this year, or about $557 per child. We comparison-shop, chase sales, and adjust according to price, taste, and the lobbying power of the child standing beside us.

Somewhere between Pottery Barn and L.L.Bean, it struck me that we were exercising extraordinary discretion over everything surrounding school.

Except, mostly, the school.

I conduct focus groups with parents about education, and one of my favorite questions is meant to get them outside the school they already know: If you could build a school custom-tailored to your kid, what would it look like?

The first response is often dead air. Eventually come the safe answers: good teachers, safety, strong academics. Leave it sitting there long enough, and people start wandering. Maybe school happens mostly outside. Maybe the kids build things every day. Maybe it looks like a laboratory or a garage full of cars and go-karts to pull apart and, with luck, put back together again.

Once I let myself do the same thing, I have no trouble at all. For my son, I can imagine museums and national parks, robotics labs, and workshops where roller-coaster engineering and animatronics count as perfectly serious subjects. Maybe a year on the Great Loop with American history passing just above the bowline.

Then I look at what we actually choose from. Even a good school is built for scale, not for my son. The calendar, subjects, age groups, classrooms, and shape of the day are largely fixed before anybody meets the kid who has to live inside them.

For most of American history, there wasn’t much alternative. The school was where the school was. You took the package. Eventually, necessity hardened into habit, and we stopped expecting much of the education itself to be ours to decide.

Psychologists stumbled onto something useful here in the late 1960s. Martin Seligman and Steven Maier found that dogs exposed to shocks they could not control eventually stopped trying to escape, even when escape became possible. The finding became famous as “learned helplessness.”

Parents learned something similar about school. You could request the teacher, hire the tutor, pack the lunch, fill the afternoons. But the big decisions were already made: where, when, what, how, with whom, for how long. We got very good at choosing around school because choosing much about school itself rarely seemed possible.

Then Seligman and Maier went back to their own work and found the more interesting lesson.

Helplessness, they concluded, wasn’t really learned. When nothing you do changes anything, passivity comes naturally. Control is what has to be learned. You act. Something changes. So you act again.

Agency needs reps. Fortunately, by then we needed lunch.

We wandered into a restaurant hilariously embedded in the middle of Crate & Barrel, where my daughter ordered buttered corkscrew pasta and my son ordered tonkotsu ramen with chili oil and an extra soft egg. Same parents, same house, much of the same genetic material. Apparently none of it reached lunch.

Parents get absurdly good at this. We know who needs advance warning before plans change, who regards sauce touching pasta as an act of aggression, who is prepared to die over the precise shade of pink. We acquire an almost embarrassing amount of knowledge about the peculiar human beings assigned to our care.

Then, every August and September, millions of those peculiar human beings become third-graders and fifth-graders and seventh-graders.

Formal schooling cannot operate at that level of particularity. It was built to move enormous numbers of children through the same buildings, on the same calendar, according to the same clock. Schools have since developed a generous vocabulary for individuality: gifted, exceptional, differentiated, personalized. The language has changed much faster than the machinery.

What makes this moment different is that the machinery is no longer the only option. Charters, microschools, hybrid programs, co-ops, and online courses have made the landscape more varied than it has ever been. In a 50CAN survey of 23,000 parents published earlier this year, 70 percent said they feel they have a choice in where their children go to school. Yet only 26 percent had reviewed information comparing their school’s performance with others.

The choices are arriving faster than the habit of choosing.

After lunch, we resumed the hajj. Hours later, the bags exploded across the floor at home. My daughter’s teal unicorn bottle fit perfectly into the side pocket of the pink backpack. My son tried on the shoes one more time.

The James Dean effect remained modest.

Looking at the pile, I realized this was what reps looked like: small judgments made so often they become instinctive. This fits him. She’ll actually use this. He hates those. She needs that. Try something. Watch what happens. Adjust.

We already know how to do this. We just rarely think to do it with education.

Take the hour. Pull your kid out early because the robotics lab is open and he cannot stop talking about it. Take the day and go to the museum. Take three days and build the go-kart. Take the week and see the Tetons or Gettysburg, or follow some obsession farther than the school calendar finds convenient. Hell, take the semester and let him study somewhere that treats a roller coaster as a legitimate physics problem. Take the year, if you can, and build the strange little school you keep waiting for somebody else to invent.

Nobody needs to homeschool everyone or burn down the neighborhood school. Just choose something, then choose again, until taking some authority over your child’s education feels less like rebellion and more like what it has been all along: parenting.

The backpacks will disappear. The shoes will be outgrown. The unicorn bottle has, if history is any guide, a fighting chance of vanishing before Christmas. The hours are harder to replace. We gave a whole day to choosing the small stuff because nobody would dream of handing us the standard fourth-grade-boy bundle and insisting it ought to fit.

We do not make the child fit the backpack. We keep looking until we find the one that fits the child. Education deserves at least that much imagination.

Marc Oestreich is a writer and strategist in Indiana. Alongside his work with Crane + Grey, he writes on American education, energy, culture, and the institutions that shape American life.