The early bird special
The Gist of Specialization: Excellence requires focus and focus requires saying no to even good ideas.
Part of my How Homeschool? Series
If mastery requires 10,000 hours, and you work on your aspiration for four hours a day every single day without fail, you’ll need nearly seven years to hit your number. Take off weekends (but not holidays) and you’re looking at closer to ten years. Cutting back to a mere three hours a weekday will take more years than a child’s formal education from age 6 to 18. There are only so many hours in the day and only so many of those when you’re at your sharpest. Specialists do the math and conclude, if you want to be the best in the world at something, you’ve got to cut (or at least deemphasize) as much else as you can stand. Besides, everyone specializes eventually; specialists are just giving their children a head start.
Figure. 1 Of course, this may be the only math some specialists do.
The trouble comes with identifying as early as possible what your child is capable of (and, if of interest, interested in) being the best in the world at. One answer is to just plow ahead with determination to succeed no matter what - plenty of parents don’t wait for their child to demonstrate natural musical talent or inclination. They just set up Suzuki lessons as fast as possible and take a calculated risk that their child won’t mangle their hand - and even if she did, she would have started on the journey to learn how a subject is mastered. (Much more risky is trying to push a particular sport because a body’s development may not cooperate with world-class aspiration).
Another answer is to initially offer either broad exposure to a range of subjects or limited exposure to specific subjects you admire and then be super-attentive to what your children have a knack for or interest in. A typical high-standards parent might react to a pair of tests accurately graded A+ and B- by praising the former (maybe only briefly) and demanding higher effort with the latter, perhaps springing into action to hire a tutor. A specialist might cut the second subject out altogether or, if necessary, figure out the minimal necessary effort while plotting how his child can go in the first subject from top of his test to top of the world.
Figure 2. Traditional is an all-you-must eat buffet while specialization is your favorite gourmet meal.
These answers do highlight something notable: specialization often makes the extracurricular the curriculum. Sometimes (though not often enough) this is more academic - homeschoolers routinely dominate spelling bees - but there are fewer opportunities than in the past to signal being an intellectual standout (no more geography bees). Where it still exists, competition can be extremely motivating. But, importantly, there's no reason why you couldn’t pursue a program very early on that would maximize your child’s chances of being a top military officer, Supreme Court litigator, or real estate investor.
Those professions aren't going away, though these and similar careers go through college and even graduate school, which means you have to play the odd game of complying with the mainstream desire for well-roundedness (through state and college requirements that, as one example, mindbogglingly require every student take a foreign language) while telling your compelling unique story that accentuates your eccentricity and captures the attention of admissions officers. The specialist just does the minimum necessary. Or may even customize the curriculum in a unit studies kind of way such that math involves calculating artillery shell trajectories, figuring out lawsuit settlements, or reading balance sheets.
Although I've alluded to the prospect of pursuing your child’s interest to the maximum, my impression is that true child prodigies more often have to be pushed to achieve their greatest success. Children’s interests also can be fickle, especially over years, though there’s evidence that people continue to enjoy doing what they’re good at. Some world-class talents abandon the effort when they become adults free of their parents’ drive. Specialization also can come at the expense of truly nearly everything else, including character. Geniuses are often not very well-adjusted, for better or worse. Indeed, it is often the definition of “genius” to challenge reigning convention.
Many people, confronted with specialization, sputter, without explanation, that kids need to be “well-rounded.” But wouldn’t you rather they be “sharp”? Does well-roundedness adapt better than a dedication to success? Mastery might replicate. Is critical thinking really better taught through breadth rather than depth? Much of the reaction is just an assumption that the familiar is correct (it could be, but isn’t necessarily so).
The sophisticated version of this critique, articulated in the book Range, is that specialization works especially well in highly structured things with defined rules and outcomes like chess or Classical music but that a generalist approach allows one to better navigate mystery and ambiguity that is the common feature of business, politics, etc. “Specialists flourish in such ‘kind’ learning environments, where patterns recur and feedback is quick and accurate. By contrast, generalists flourish in ‘wicked’ learning environments, where patterns are harder to discern and feedback is delayed and/or inaccurate.” But are those “kind” learning environments especially helpful to navigate early on, to build discipline, even if you don’t actually wind up a chess grandmaster? And as the New York Times notes, even the book’s examples of greatness eventually specialize, and do so with extraordinary focus. The question is: how fast can you find your vocation?
Figure 3. Arguing range is better may be a coping mechanism for those who haven’t dedicated 10,000 hours to mastery! He’ll finish one of these projects sometime, maybe after finishing Shogun. But wait - hey - maybe he really is a specialist in TV trivia? And yet, can he remember all the details of that one show he watched 5 years ago?
Andrew Carnegie once advised that you should put all your eggs in one basket - and then watch that basket. Specialists have the confidence not to diversify. If you have high ambitions for your children, the right specialization could let them ignore history books so they can one day be featured in them. The focus here is whatever you want to excel at.
But on grounds specialists would be sympathetic to, you might attack by saying those who make major changes to fields often are applying an insight from somewhere else. But it still requires familiarity (specialization!) and that type of challenge is rare. Ask the typical expert in one field a reasonably hard question from another field (even another subfield) and you’ll get blank stares.
Another significant problem with specialization is that there are clear examples of success but there's also survivorship bias. So Tiger Woods is a good example of a dad who was obsessed with golf and taught him from toddlerhood on. But how often does that fail and does it fail because the parent doesn't have the willpower to pursue the object to the ends of the earth or the child simply doesn't have the talent? Biographies of people like Warren Buffett, which talk about his entrepreneurialism and business sense from a young age, might also be looking too hard to find foreshadowing of the future (lots of kids have lemonade stands without becoming billionaires). It is also true that the vast majority of very successful people today went through a Traditional school institution, though that’s because the vast majority of people have. Of those successes, a substantial number specialized as much as they could within the constraints of general pursuit (think of the athletes who take their sports but not their academics seriously). Who knows how much more (or faster) successful they might have been if they had been able to specialize further?
Specialization also has perhaps the highest potential financial cost of any homeschooling approach. Getting world-class tutors and competing at the absolute top of any field ain’t cheap, though families can try to get creative, especially if there is an obvious future income stream being developed. Then again, specialization doesn’t require world-class history-making ambition. You could swear off debt-incurring university and specialize in becoming a handsomely paid master welder.
A typical day? Whenever your child is most fresh, spend hours on your specialty. Spend the rest of the day doing whatever is necessary, including getting enough renewal to take on the next hard time. In the world of specialization, every other subject is like a distant cousin at a family reunion – acknowledged but not given much attention. Notably, because specialists so often are seeking the outside world’s help or validation, they have to be more responsive to other people’s schedules than the typical homeschooler.
But how might other homeschooling approaches critique and comment on specialization? (Note that this is imaginative speculation, not quotation, from each point of view)
Evidence-based Traditional: Specialization is the hedge fund to Traditional’s index fund - rarely it achieves something better, but why take the big risk? What if your child, despite the best training in the world, just doesn’t have the natural talent to get to the most elite level? What if your child gets injured? What if your child is stubbornly resistant? What if colleges eliminate scholarships and recruitment for the less popular sport that you have attempted to moneyball? Or what if colleges change their requirements such that something you deemphasized is now important? Or, if you’re really convinced by specialization: what if your child is capable of being best in the world at something you neglected? Broad exposure allows for cross-application of insights and pursuing specialization when eventually appropriate. And the truth is you can do the equivalent of factor investing: there are still enough hours in the day to specialize once you’ve mastered the standard curriculum, and those bent on success master the standard curriculum.
Classical: Why be a one-trick-pony when you can be a Renaissance man? Specialization is an autist’s view of education for savants who think the Odyssey is only a minivan and Calculus was a Roman emperor. Classical shapes a whole citizen in touch with all of civilization; specialization outputs a technically proficient, civically indifferent, malformed barbarian chieftain. To the degree it focuses on the extracurricular, specialization isn’t a form of education, it’s a minimization of education. If you want to win contests, you can get a gold medal on the National Latin Exam every year with a Classical education - but also so much more.
Figure 4. The antler helmet in particular made him very difficult to defend against.
Unit studies: Trying to see the universe through a specific lens is useful if specialists bother to look at other things. But how often do specialists actually use their particular field to study all the subjects, pursuing football and understanding the physics of throwing balls, the biology of peak body health, the literature of great sports writing, the history of the game etc.? Even if they do, specialization is intentionally myopic in rejecting other lenses that would give a complete picture of how subjects interrelate and therefore the big picture is a blur. Specialization is a microscopic approach, studying bark and missing the forest.
PhD Dad Art Robinson: Specialists are right to cut the substantial waste from the Traditional curriculum that makes students mediocre at everything but they err if they neglect numeracy, literacy, or values, which are the absolute baseline for success. Specialists are probably in particular danger of pursuing some faddish current thing rather than something universally applicable. Specialist parents tend to run themselves ragged, pushing and arguing with their kids so much, driving them across vast geography to champion various contests, and it’s all so unnecessarily stressful. A great deal of specialization also fails to set children up on a path of self-teaching.
Unschoolers: Specialization is perfectly reasonable and even advisable if, and only if, the child is interested. If a child wants to generalize, then a parent shouldn’t force specialization; but if a child develops a special interest (possibly at a parent’s invitation), then deemphasizing or cutting unattractive alternatives is exactly right. But stick with the child and be ready to move on if she does. Tiger moms eat their children - for them, parenting isn’t a bonding experience unless it ends with the biggest trophy.
PhD Dad Bryan Caplan: Specialization based on interest can be worthwhile so long as math is taken care of regardless of interest. Importantly, a substantial part of any specialization should involve reading and enough high quality articles and books exist to occupy practically any interest. These statements are true so long as your child is trying to go to college and keep options open for a high-paying job. Insofar as that is the case, specialists also need to be careful that they don’t specialize so narrowly that they fail to signal what most colleges and employers ultimately want: conformity, conscientiousness, and intelligence. Signaling conformity is already a potential problem for homeschoolers, all the more so if they do something really different - but winning contests can be an excellent form of external validation. Signaling conscientiousness should be very easy for any determined specialist. Signaling intelligence will depend very much on the specialization. You should also be skeptical of your nurture overcoming their nature.
Cyberschoolers: Specialists admirably rethink education from first principles but need to be sensitive to sunk cost, the idea that their initial choice is no longer optimal and they need to pivot to a new specialization. A majority of actual specialists seem to focus on physical activities that they could have pursued a century ago; though they can pursue them even better today with the help of modern resources, such activities may not be the best choice in the digital era. Certainly specialists need to worry about pursuing something, intellectual or physical, that will become obsolete.
Figure 5. If I had specialized and been more than a terrible cartoonist, I might have been replaced by AI!
Mentors: More than any other approach discussed, specialists are probably the most attuned and determined to finding the best adult coaches/tutors for their children - and that’s awesome. At its best, specialization seeks out the best people in the world in a given subject and tries to give their kids as much exposure to them as possible, especially in-person in real interactions and not just reading them or about them or watching them. Specialists would do best, however, to focus on intellectual domains where children are likely to make significant contributions as adults.
Pioneers: boys tend to be highly motivated by and love competition - and specialists tend to use competition as a major organizing device for their efforts. Many boys would love to focus their all on winning. Coaches are also often the only men that boys get to regularly interact with outside their family - and boys need positive male role models. But specialists need to be sensitive to the particularities of boys and should not compel their sons, to give just one example, to pursue ballet against their desire just because it is against masculine type and is a moneyball way of attracting collegiate attention.
Pragmatists: How bankable is the field of specialization? How many child prodigies become competent adults? Will they be able to take care of themselves (or boil water without burning down the house) when the spotlight dims? How many people in the history books are well adjusted? Substantial specialization isn’t necessarily bad, but it certainly can be, and its value is totally context-dependent on practicality - but everyone needs to know some things about the way life works.
Bible first: A specialization in theology can be admirable but is not necessary. We’re not all called to be full-time preachers and you can glorify God in any true vocation. So long as God comes first, substantial specialization is fine. But specialists are in particular danger of worshiping counterfeit gods, putting their whole self into a false idol that will inevitably disappoint and can never be as fulfilling as God’s embrace. Specialist parents too often would rather have a winner than a saint.
Montessori: Specialists correctly appreciate the capability of children but frequently discount their dignity and especially their autonomy. Specialists pursue focus but they too often compel it rather than curate it. Ultimately, the younger the child, the weaker the case for specialization, especially imposed by a parent, and children deserve a fuller picture of the world.
Charlotte Mason: Specialists wrongly treat all of education as a great game, which they then narrow to a tennis court. They may institute habits narrowly to achieve a prized peculiar success but miss out on shaping the whole person. Specialists too often push too hard without renewal, try to focus too long, and fail to understand the necessity and value of expansive reading, depriving children of a love for many different things that can bring them joy throughout their life. Such adults may wind up tilting at windmills without realizing they aren’t fighting the dragons they trained for. Mason actually wrote: “Specialization, the fetish of the end of the [19th century], is to be deprecated because it is at our peril that we remain too long in any one field of thought.” Such a narrow, utilitarian education is actually immoral.
Have I missed an important critique of Specialization? Let me know.
My own takeaway: opportunity cost is the most powerful secular concept I ever learned. Every minute you spend on something is time you can’t spend on something more valuable. Pursue fewer things done better - and don’t be afraid to cut the extraneous to pursue excellence. Specialists should also inspire homeschoolers to get creative about receiving external validation for the good you’re doing for your kids. I am broadly sympathetic to specialization if a child’s interest and knack are there for something you approve of, though the more you cut elsewhere the more confident you’d have to be in the specialization. I feel much less comfortable imposing a specialization I can imagine being valuable and I ultimately would admire my children more for leading a virtuous life than having a fabulously successful career.
Figure 6. GPT’s impression of the resulting stereotype of one specialized homeschooling regime. Don’t look too closely at the board. The fictional vibes of specialization can be seen in Ayn Rand’s brilliant architect Howard Roark, who would rather a building never be built than compromise one iota; Dr. Gregory House, an unconventional medical genius who lacks balance; most of the players in Friday Night Lights; the driven drummer at the center of Whiplash; and even Dr. Victor Frankenstein.
Further reading would include:
Outliers: the Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
A classic popular book in this genre that popularized the 10,000 hour theory of Anders Ericcson (who himself wrote a book). Talks about how hockey is dominated by players born early in the year - because they were older in school; Bill Gates had unusually early access (for his era) to a computer; etc.
Raise a Genius! By Lazslo Polgar
Probably the book you actually want to read if you’re pursuing this, about a Hungarian dad who was absolutely convinced that he could raise chess grandmasters from birth, ended up only having daughters (chess is dominated by men), one of whom became the best female chess player ever and all of whom were world ranked. Polgar courted his wife with this explicit ambition in mind, fought Communist authorities to homeschool his daughters, and, after they achieved their success, proposed adopting children from the Third World so that he could demonstrate the power of nurture (his wife objected). If not the book, at least read his Wikipedia page.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
Chua’s two daughters went to institutions but Chua actively pulled them out of classes she found stupid and had them practice their music instead. The book is entertaining, sometimes in a reality-tv kind of cringe way, and it gets at the fundamental question of what it may take as a parent (and the toll) to push children to high achievement. Her second daughter stubbornly resisted the program for excellence.