For all practical purposes
The Gist of Pragmatism: Teach your kids what they actually need to help themselves and others in their day to day life, in emergencies, and on the job.
Part of my How Homeschool? Series.
When Bill Bennett was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, he outlined his ambitions for American children:
“Every student should know how mountains are made, and that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. They should know who said 'I am the state’ and who said 'I have a dream.' They should know about subjects and predicates, about isosceles triangles and ellipses. They should know where the Amazon flows, and what the First Amendment means. They should know about the Donner party and slavery, and Shylock, Hercules, and Abigail Adams, where Ethiopia is, and why there is a Berlin Wall. They should know a little of how a poem works, how a plant works, and what it means to remark 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.' They should know the place of the Milky Way and DNA in the unfolding of the universe. They should know something about the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and about the conventions of good behavior. They should know a little of what the Sistine Chapel looks like and what great music sounds like.”
Pragmatists insist that almost none of that should be known by every student. Which should not be confused with a bolder assertion that all of it should not be known. But Bennett’s list, a very good example of Traditional school’s aspirations, is luxury knowledge irrelevant to most people’s lives. A meaningful meaning of “academic” is “useless”. What’s the necessary knowledge?
Every student should know how to manage their own personal budget and how to negotiate a better deal. They should know the value of a healthy diet and how to cook for it; they should know some basic first aid and some basic self-defense, the importance of sleep, and the problems with intoxications; they should know some statistics - and some specific statistics about how life goes right or wrong in the United States, especially with respect to family life. They should know the value of being trustworthy and the value of not trusting everyone - and how the latter should lead to a healthy skepticism of government and its promises. They should learn how to be organized, how to clean their house, and how to do their laundry. They should know how best to look into something they’re interested in and how to write a good message, especially a cover letter for a resume. And they should be exposed to a wide variety of possible professions - ideally in the workplace - and given a very clear sense of what it takes to do them, including showing up on time and working hard.
Sometimes practical education is dismissed as being only suitable for the under-educated, but pragmatists insist that it is the Traditional adherents who are oddly universal in their ambitions. Not every student should know where Ethiopia is (the vast majority of Americans don’t know and don’t need to know) but every student, whether her future is as a CEO or a stay-at-home mom or a factory line worker or a doctor, should know how to manage her budget.
Figure 1. Surprisingly, “how mountains are made” does not come up in the interview process for the Rhodes scholarship or the Chick Fil A gig or 99.99%+ of possible professions. But the typical competent person can certainly indicate offline that the Amazon packages flow easily to his home. And he may be interested in the Donner party if you’d just let him know the time and place - is it on that street, Milky Way?
The pragmatist list above includes one vision of universal and durable necessities but a curriculum that leaned into pragmatism may go further: how a car works - or at least how to change a tire; how plumbing works - or at least when and how to plunge your toilet; how to sew a sweater - or at least sew on a button; how to survive if you’re ever lost in the wilderness - or at least if the power goes out; how to garden - or at least grow things you can eat. You may add still others, but the basic idea is that the Traditional academic curriculum has a weird obsession with exclusively teaching subjects very unlikely to actually help you in your day to day life or in an emergency or even in most jobs! Americans are learning helplessness.
Of course, “Traditional” education is pretty new! Pragmatism, with a heavy dose of Bible-reading, taught at home, was what original education in the United States looked like before education was institutionalized. Such life skills even made a comeback in the twentieth century before being killed off by elitist academics. Ray Moore was a USC PhD and education researcher who was one of the leading popularizers of modern homeschooling in the 1970s - and his recommended program was very pragmatic, recommending children be given tools rather than toys; focus on chores rather than school before age 8, maybe age 12; and when formal academics do begin, they get complemented by manual work and community service. Naturally, pragmatists are very open to children working - but, if not for money, you can learn a lot helping run a soup kitchen. Indeed, pragmatists would argue a lot more than sitting in a chair studying much of Traditional academics.
Pragmatists naturally lament the fact that so many kids are going off to college, all the more so because so many of them wind up piling up debt to go wait tables. Yet pragmatists are also inherently pragmatic: if a child is academically inclined, he should try to go to college. But that doesn’t just mean switching to the whole Traditional curriculum - it means he is going to get pragmatic life skills and then he is going to do his best to earn every scholarship he can to the best school he can afford where he is going to study something practical. Alternatively, a pragmatist is perfectly open to seeing that a child is not a good fit for college but will still insist on a viable career path of self-sufficiency, with perhaps a nudge toward such stable crafts as plumbing or welding. Pragmatists feel like America would be much better off if everyone took their approach.
All of which might sound eminently reasonable - practical, one might say. But a critic might ask what this program looks like on a day to day basis and whether pragmatists are sufficiently academic to set children up for modern success - in particular, does pragmatism lock children in too early into a non-academic track? Plenty of pragmatists (like Ray Moore) do agree with unschoolers that formal academics is a waste of time for elementary age kids. They just have a different prioritization (chores) that won’t satisfy critics. And even the Moore program recommended parents informally read to their kids. Other pragmatists are keen to teach the basics early and well because they form the foundation of a practical program (you do in fact need math to understand your budget). Depending on whether a child has an academic knack, either group can decide whether to pursue advanced subjects to set one up for college - though all pragmatists lament that much of academics is only to get into college.
A third group of pragmatists is so hostile to the general uselessness of advanced subjects that they would insist that all their children pursue something vocational. This is a bogeyman for liberal critics of homeschooling, who accuse such parents of intentionally limiting the career opportunities for daughters in order to guarantee they can only be stay at home wives and mothers. But our correspondence is intended to help you make the best decision for your family. You can choose, if any of your children show an academic knack, to pursue it. On the other hand, if your daughter really and truly wants nothing more in the world than to become a stay at home mom, why compel the entire Traditional curriculum just to fulfill impractical feminist authoritarianism? If your son really and truly wants nothing more in the world than to become a master plumber, why insist on the elitism of borrowing to get an unfinished degree in pursuit of unfulfilling white collar work?
Figure 2. Obviously, you need to learn every school subject, no matter its utility, so that one day, from what you barely remember, you can help your children with every school subject, no matter its utility
I concede that I may be steelmanning pragmatism, both in this piece and as I’ve described it in criticizing other approaches, much more than how it would typically be used. Starrett pragmatism includes some knowledge of the Secretary Problem to optimize the most important search in your life - for a spouse. And Starrett pragmatism may do something like a unit study of sleep, really trying to drive home just how obsessed one should be with getting it right. Starrett pragmatism includes plenty of economics and statistics. But wouldn’t the typical self-described pragmatist dismiss all that as unnecessary overthinking? A lot of pragmatism can be summed up in a pithy remark that your grandfather might have said and insisted was common sense. But such sense isn’t so common. And I would argue that a real pragmatist program should be designed not just to mention the right paths, but to really focus on their execution and the why behind them, in the same way that Charlotte Mason insisted on a large amount of attention on habits. Success at its most basic is simple but hard: exercise restraint (thrift, delayed gratification, sexual modesty, etc.), reliability, adaptability, and industry.
But, ultimately, pragmatism has no set curriculum and a typical day is essentially impossible to describe. One possible day may include cooking your family three healthy meals, learning how to change your car’s oil, some chores, target practice, and Bible study. Whether further academics would be included would be dependent on the family’s choices and the individual’s knack, though pragmatists would, as ever, insist that a year’s worth of figuring things out like changing your car’s oil would be more useful than any year in Traditional high school. Ultimately, for a pragmatist, if your adult child is a continuous state of helplessness, you’ve failed. Aim to raise the responsible who can take care of themselves, their families, and their communities.
Figure 3. The fictional vibe of Pragmatism is nearly every single character in every Western you’ve ever seen. More modern: MacGyver. Or Ron Swanson.
But how might other homeschooling approaches critique and comment on pragmatism? (Note that this is imaginative speculation, not quotation, from each point of view)
PhD Dad Bryan Caplan: Pragmatists face a Catch-22. They are correct that most jobs don’t involve skills taught by Traditional academics - but society employs Traditional academics as an easy rubric for what they are really looking for: people who are intelligent, will follow orders (conformity), and will complete tasks (conscientiousness). As a result, employers just pick out the college graduates among applicants - even though college teaches nothing about waiting tables, waiters who graduate college earn more than those who did not. Pragmatism is still the best path for the academically disengaged (who risk dropping out) but pragmatists need a plan if their kids are academically inclined. Requiring the basics of literacy and numeracy expands their options, an eminently practical goal. Even cramming and only briefly knowing physics, calculus, a foreign language, etc. for a test can be practical because it enables your children to enjoy a college premium - even if they never use those subjects again. If you’re reading this, you probably went to college (or even graduate school), you probably enjoy a good standard of living, and yet: would you be able to take all your high school exams tomorrow and do well? But some can’t even cram and shouldn’t bother. There can be disagreements on exactly what should be the pragmatist baseline of skills and thinking to teach beyond academics, but a baseline can be reasonable to impose even on the academically inclined (note: economics is “luxury knowledge” that has lots of practical insights and might be worth considering, including the idea of comparative advantage.) Ultimately, society may very well indeed be better off if it embraced pragmatism, but it hasn’t, so pragmatists need to be very careful.
Figure 4. Maybe you don’t need four years of a liberal arts “education” and tens of thousands of dollars in debt to move plates 20 yards. But to pronounce “quinoa”?
Evidence-based Traditional: The problem with pragmatists is that they don’t have a formal program describing what exactly their kids should do and thus they risk falling into an unschooling regime of just living and learning when they instead should just take the Traditional curriculum and add on whatever they want as an extracurricular. Whether you’re a true believer in Traditional academics or a cynic like Caplan, there is plenty of evidence about how you can best prepare your child to master the Traditional curriculum and equip them to go to college. With nearly 2/3 of children at least starting college and a substantial college premium on pay, it’s actually the most practical option to pursue. And a broad-based academic curriculum gives children a lot of different options for potential high-paying career paths. The Moore recommendation to wait until nearly 12 years old for formal education is not just an assertion - it was the product of Moore’s scientific analysis - but it is almost certainly an outlier if you’re ultimately trying to produce good test results. Some precocious children under six can even start Traditional academics! If Pragmatists want to add, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t subtract. Pragmatism can help you get through life, but an evidence-based traditional regime will help you get to a career.
Unschoolers: In meaningful ways, pragmatism is a variant of Unschooling. Pragmatists understand that formal academics isn’t necessary so young and they lean into teaching children through life and work experiences. But Pragmatists err if they compel a child to learn self-defense when she just wants to read Shakespeare (and ideally, a parent should curate even more Shakespeare, even if it’s “impractical.”) If something is truly practical, a child will learn it eventually; if you think he needs to learn it in advance, then make your case to him.
PhD Dad Art Robinson: In order to do some of the things well that Pragmatists want to do well, they still need a solid foundation of numeracy and literacy. A PhD Dad approach of mandatory math every day can lead to really understanding budgets and statistics or a very practical advanced degree like engineering. But Pragmatists should be especially wary that cutting their kids’ mathematical (and eventually scientific) literacy makes them overly reliant on others. Pragmatists do get some significant things right; more families should consider homesteading - “the self confidence that comes to a child from the knowledge that he is independently carrying on an activity that is essential to the survival of the family is valuable indeed.” But such productive work should not come at the expense of basic academics. And pragmatists need to consider reading more than just manuals - knowing history and economics may be necessary to navigate future social troubles; stories of virtuous heroism can inspire the right attitudes.
Classical: This is for barbarians who think Julius Caesar may have invented a salad. “Pragmatism” is just a synonym (if Pragmatists know what that word means) for “ignorance.” The problem with Bill Bennett’s stated ambitions was that they did not go nearly far enough. Pragmatists disinherit children from Western civilization, wasting time on day-long chores when they could be memorizing facts. Pragmatists give CliffNotes on deep wisdom and call it common sense. It’s especially laughable that they think society would be better off if everyone was a Pragmatist because society as we know it may no longer exist without a rigorous defense of its foundation.
Charlotte Mason: Pragmatists admirably pay attention to habits but serve up academic malnutrition. Of course, their list of habits should be inspired by or taken from Charlotte Mason. Mason did advise that the girls of her day should be taught how to manage a household but that was in addition to a broad education. Pragmatists’ exclusively utilitarian education is immoral because it deprives children of mindfood that allows them to enjoy and understand all aspects of God’s creation. It’s the difference between being educated for earning a living and being educated for life. Distressingly, a Pragmatist program may involve very little reading, which is the best way of training and forming the mind.
Unit studies: You can certainly have unit studies on each of the things Pragmatists want to do - but what they would reveal is that everything has much greater depth than Pragmatists imagine. Pragmatists’ stubborn skepticism of academics misses out on the fascinating complexity of the world they occupy which can only be perceived through interdisciplinary unit studies. Pragmatists teach you to fish; unit studies teach you the science of the ecosystem, the art of the lure, and the philosophy of conservation. Why just eat when you can understand the feast?
Figure 5. Meanwhile, Pragmatists insist that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and you don’t need to analyze every single thing as if it is present in a great mystery novel and may somehow be key to your life’s ending. Just fix the dang lock, don’t research the history of doors from the beginning of time to today with a diversion along the way sampling Jim Morrison
Specialists: Pragmatism aspires to form the everyman, Specialization aspires to form the pinnacle of achievement. Many Pragmatic requirements about first aid or laundry involve opportunity costs in the same way as Traditional academic requirements. You should aspire for your children to delegate such things as much as possible. The whole specialization ethos is if it can be cut, cut it. But Pragmatists do get some things right key to performance, like the importance of diet and sleep. And, in one version of Specialization that focuses less on achieving world-class talent and more about pursuing a stable career like master welding as fast as possible, pragmatism is in close harmony.
Montessori: Pragmatists have a lot of the right ideas - after all, Montessori starts with practical life very early and ends with high school kids running a farm and hotel. But Pragmatists are too intent on seeing the practical use of every possible step when a bankshot is sometimes more likely to produce the better outcome. For example, Montessori attempts to entice children’s entire focus, which can involve using abstract materials pragmatists would dismiss as useless, but they help train a child’s attention and later understand important concepts. Pragmatists also probably typically need to be better at putting the child at the center of education; it’s easy to think that it’s “more practical” for the father of a toddler to unload a dishwasher because he can do it better and faster, but you miss out on passing on a helpfulness to your children.
Pioneers: A lot more boys would rather work on cars than read great literature. The Pragmatist approach is both more understanding of hands-on learning and also puts the non-collegiate (which disproportionately includes boys) on the best possible path. There’s more of course that boys are typically interested in that a Pragmatist may or may not reject - competition, science fiction, history of great men. But the type of things that Pragmatists generally pursue are going to satisfy a lot of boys more than Traditional academics - and, even more importantly, are likely to bring them in contact with adult men who, if carefully selected, can serve as role models. Ultimately, though, Pragmatists may be more inclined to put their boys to work in the fields and Pioneers may be more inclined to let them loose in the wilderness.
Mentors: A purist Mentor program would be more explicitly elitist, trying to find the most successful and brilliant adults for your kids to spend time with, and that would tend toward people who have been academically successful (and almost certainly don’t know how to do everything Pragmatists would like and instead delegate much). But Pragmatists can seek mentors of their own variety, too, who teach all the desired skills. Parents have to make decisions about whether a mentor’s genius or skilled self-reliance or virtue is what matters most. Pragmatists admirably are more inclined than almost any other approach to bring their children into the adult world and workforce, which allows kids to see competent adults in action. But they also need to pay attention to the informal adult social milieu of their kids to advance their goals.
Bible First: Pragmatists need to understand that total self-reliance is impossible and that we are broken, sinful beings who need God. Pragmatists may especially face the temptation to become too caught up in the affairs of men or the things in front of them that they miss the divine, especially a deep study of theology. As Pragmatists find their vocations, they must ask how to glorify God in doing so. Aspire to be more like the early Americans who combined pragmatism with faith, a concern for life with a bigger concern for the afterlife.
Cyberschoolers: A major unstated motivation of Pragmatists is that they are trying to derisk their children’s lives - but parents should instead think about what it means to embrace and understand risk. Pragmatists have a refreshing skepticism of school - but they want to redirect kids into durable professions rather than taking a Thiel scholarship and trying to found a multibillion dollar company. Relatedly, Pragmatists are too inclined to think that it’s the 1950s (or the 1750s) and miss out on modern society. Yesterday’s Pragmatists would have very reasonably insisted on horsemanship. Today’s Pragmatists should be perfectly willing to let their kids do projects for money on Upwork or develop social media skills, but how many are? You can now just ask AI to take a picture of what’s in your refrigerator and give you a step by step recipe for healthy food: how hard is Pragmatism? With all the time you have left, are we so sure that you don’t need to know even more science than Traditional education teaches? Pragmatists dismiss a lot of formal academics as being chalkboard learning but real professionals really use science - and who is more practical than an engineer?
My own takeaway: even though I myself am not capable of everything a Pragmatist might insist on teaching, I am very sympathetic to a baseline Pragmatism as necessary for everyone (or at least my own kids!) - but not sufficient for everyone. Pragmatism really is more typically useful than most formal academics - but formal academics are the currency of modern society. More notably, Pragmatism is more typically useful than most extracurriculars - and that’s an easier substitute. Regardless, it’s worth bringing the background into the foreground - don’t just set your kids up for academic success with the understood implication that it will help them in life and career. Explicitly discuss and concentrate on what it means to be successful in life and from there build up character and work skills. And even if success can ultimately mean delegating much, a Pragmatic baseline is helpful to everyone.
Further reading would include:
The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan
Yes, Bryan gets his own category for what he did with his kids, but this book, which I previously reviewed here, is a very good analysis of what’s wrong with Traditional education that I personally think vindicates much of Pragmatism if society collectively agreed.
Ray Moore was a homeschooling pioneer whose recommendations had a deep practical streak and his work is worth reviewing.
Various manuals and skill guides, perhaps including the SAS Survival Handbook and the Survival Medicine Handbook: The Essential Guide for When Help is NOT on the Way
Figure 6. The most stereotypical student of Pragmatic homeschooling.
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