Dynasty
An entrepreneur, by necessity, leads an extreme lifestyle. I have seen fantastic results that stem directly from a businessman's way of life and are available only to men of business. That led me to consider the logical next step: how to extend this way of life to every other aspect of living.
The current system treats a person as an interchangeable atom, regardless of his parents' professions or his gender. After following the established path, he becomes a gear for which the system will find a place. This arrangement is not a fundamental law of the universe, nor is it objectively superior to every alternative. It is one system among others: a modern experiment whose post-war form is less than a century old.
This system may have helped us adopt modern technologies, but it is now obsolete. The family should again become the basic unit of society. A family is necessarily hierarchical, and its members are in no way interchangeable; each occupies a distinct position, with relationships and obligations that cannot simply be transferred to somebody else. Returning to this structure is a fundamental break with the mainstream and a redesign of the building blocks of society.
Here I propose a new paradigm for forming and guiding a family through a home-schooling programme. This project has been a part-time passion of mine for years. What follows is a brief overview, written for public preview to encourage interested readers to reach out.
I have a deep love of learning. At school, I often got into trouble for reading books under the desk instead of listening to the teacher. My “rebellious” behaviour was tolerated, however, because I placed highly in various scientific olympiads, achievements my teachers could turn into awards and recognition for themselves.
The reader will likely disagree with much of what follows. Discussing homeschooling with others has made it apparent to me that those who were taught find these ideas detestable, while only those who were themselves so-called autodidacts might find them appealing.
I remember reading the biography of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the widely acclaimed thinker and founder of LessWrong, in which he described himself as an “autodidact”. What surprised me was that he used the word to distinguish himself from others. At that time, I could not conceive of any other kind of learner...
Axioms
These are the starting points on which I build this approach to family life.
1. The school system wasn't designed to benefit the schooled.
Compulsory schooling was built to produce a manageable population, as John Taylor Gatto explains in Dumbing Us Down. Children learn to wait for instructions, seek approval from authority, accept their assigned rank, and abandon an absorbing task as soon as the bell rings. These daily routines teach dependence and obedience, regardless of the subjects on the timetable. The system serves the institutions that need compliant people, at the expense of the child's independence, judgement, and potential.
My father is a music teacher. He observes that children in their first year of school gladly make attempts and experiment, while older children become reluctant to try, fearing ridicule if they make a mistake. The willingness to explore gives way to concern about how an unsuccessful attempt will look to others.
2. The teacher's role is to indoctrinate the student.
Everybody goes through life with a doctrine: beliefs about what is true, what matters, and how one should live. A child raised by other people will acquire theirs through what they teach, reward, and condemn. It is a meek man who considers his own doctrine unworthy of being passed on to his children and developed with them for future generations. If he feels it is not worthy enough, he should improve it, not abandon his children to the doctrines of strangers.
I will pre-emptively answer the reader's objection that a teacher's role is to instil a love of learning. “learning should be loved” is itself part of one of many possible doctrines.
3. School is inefficient.
A century ago, students copied a teacher's blackboard explanations into notebooks. Cheap print had made books accessible, but difficult concepts still depended largely on a teacher in the room. Today, books, audiobooks, and video lectures offer access to the world's best experts, much of it for free, at the learner's own pace. A businessman can also readily afford mentors from top local universities to guide his children through harder concepts.
By any objective comparison of access to knowledge, quality of explanation, and flexibility of pace, the physical school model is obsolete. We take this access for granted, forgetting how recent it is. The internet is still young; in my view, the liberation of knowledge only truly came together around 2020.
4. Children don't need to be taught, but allowed to learn.
Children already learn by observing, asking questions, trying things, and correcting their mistakes. The parent's role is to provide an environment worth exploring: good books, useful tools, capable people, and time to pursue an interest. Guidance should help the child get past a difficulty and continue his own investigation, rather than make him dependent on someone else to decide what he learns next.
In discussions with many people, including successful businessmen and scientists, I have found that even among this group, people imagine homeschooling as a parent standing in front of a blackboard, chalk in hand, forcing his children to memorise facts in preparation for an exam.
5. Degrees are obsolete.
I see zero value in exams, degrees, or universities. What matters is a person's understanding, judgement, and ability to accomplish useful work. This may be difficult to accept because these institutions and credentials are foundations of our entire system. Those who recognise their obsolescence sooner gain an advantage: they can put their time and resources into acquiring real knowledge and building something worthwhile.
6. School is the worst possible way to socialise.
Socialisation is the first concern many people raise about homeschooling. Yet school keeps children stuck for years with the same people, of exactly the same age, with vastly different interests, inside a pointless system. School is no better at socialisation than a jail.
A better environment brings together people of different ages who are highly motivated to pursue a shared goal. Chess, martial arts, and robotics clubs do this, as can a three-month immersive Latin course in Rome, a two-month finishing school, or a thematic conference. Solving problems publicly also attracts collaborators and mentors who care about the work. The participants have a reason to be there and something to learn from one another.
7. Letting strangers raise your children is a bizarre phenomenon.
We are so used to other people raising our children that we rarely stop to consider what we are handing over: their daily environment, habits, loyalties, and understanding of the world. Paris offers a striking example of how normal an extraordinary arrangement can become. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parents routinely sent newborns to paid wet nurses in the countryside, often for the first two years of their lives, and sometimes considerably longer.
Of roughly 21,000 babies born annually in Paris in the late eighteenth century, fewer than 1,000 were breastfed by their own mothers, and most were sent away to be cared for elsewhere. Families accepted prolonged separation from their babies as an ordinary arrangement. Familiarity can make a custom feel natural long before anyone asks whether it serves the child.
8. “Letting children figure out what they want to do on their own” is a cowardly stance.
Setting a path for your entire family demands far greater responsibility than choosing only for yourself. You can choose badly and ruin the lives of those who trusted you.
But the upside of a family working towards a shared goal can be exponential: skills, capital, trust, and relationships accumulate, and each generation can build on the work of the last. Family farms, workshops, and businesses were the ordinary way of life for our ancestors, and shared family enterprise remains common across much of the world outside Europe. In this historical perspective, atomisation is the deviation; working together as a family is a continuation of an established way of life.
The four methods of education
I propose an education that brings together four traditions:
Classical education
Allow the student to assimilate the intellectual accomplishments of his people over the last 2,500 years through their literature, history, and philosophy. He should inherit the ideas, arguments, and examples developed before him and be able to use them in thinking about his own life.
Aristocratic education
Include Machiavellianism, judgement about power and motives, and control of one's emotions. These practical disciplines are often missing from the education of today's intellectuals. A man must be able to govern himself, understand the people around him, and act effectively under pressure.
Scientific education
Scientific knowledge has never been more accessible. The student needs a firm grasp of the fundamentals of physics, chemistry, and biology. A life devoted to becoming an accomplished scientist does not serve the aim of founding a dynasty, but understanding how the world works is necessary to it.
Business education
The standard of health and family life I am pursuing requires a great deal of money and free time. Business education must teach the student how to build and operate enterprises that provide both.
We live in a unique period when all four bodies of knowledge can be acquired easily and efficiently. Material that once required years of study and access to scarce teachers and books is now readily available.
An aristocrat had no choice but to read the Iliad in the original, requiring him to learn ancient Greek first. Yet knowing the language did not by itself explain the world behind the poem. Without explanations of its customs, beliefs, and references, he could read the words while missing much of their meaning. Today, translations and detailed footnotes provide that background, while ChatGPT lets a reader ask about an unfamiliar custom or passage as he encounters it.
The Grand Problem
The often-quoted claim is that 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% by the third. Extrapolating a 70% loss rate at each generational transfer would mean roughly 99% had lost their wealth by the fifth generation.
The grand problem, then, is how to ensure that each generation can sustain and renew what the founder built. That requires passing on the judgement, discipline, and shared purpose that created the wealth, as well as the assets themselves.
I have found the Venetian families most worthy of study. From the consolidation of hereditary patrician rule in the early fourteenth century until the Republic fell in 1797, Venice maintained its aristocratic political system for nearly five centuries. Its continuity stands out against the upheavals of many other European cities and states. Families sustained their position through institutions, marriage alliances, and obligations that extended beyond any one lifetime. I want to understand what made that system endure, and which of its principles can serve a family today.
The goal is to build a system stable enough to keep the family motivated indefinitely, yet flexible enough to survive the vast technological changes ahead. Each generation must find purpose in contributing to the family's work and be able to adapt its methods and enterprises as the world changes.
A Lonely Road
Few people will be in a position to pursue this approach. Consider the requirements and assign rough odds to each. These are illustrative guesses; each percentage applies to those who have already met the preceding requirements.
- Have the money: 10%. He must be able to support the family and pay for mentors, education, and health without financial pressure dictating every decision.
- Have the time and be in excellent mental health: 10% of those remaining. He needs both the time and the mental clarity, energy, and emotional stability to study, guide his children, and develop the family's work. A business that consumes his entire life, or a mind too exhausted to use his free time well, leaves little room for this.
- Understand English well: 50% of those remaining. Much of the material this approach draws on is in English. He must be able to work through books, research, and lectures himself.
- Be an autodidact himself: 10% of those remaining. He must already know how to educate himself, judge sources, and pursue difficult questions without a teacher assigning the next step.
- Have a like-minded partner and align at least part of the family: 10% of those remaining. His partner must share the direction and be willing to build this life with him. At least some of the wider family must be prepared to participate; his conviction alone cannot create a shared undertaking.
- Have the character to carry the responsibility: 10% of those remaining. Setting a path for people who trust him means accepting that a bad decision can damage their lives. He must carry that burden, follow the consequences of his choices, and correct his mistakes.
- Question the consensus without losing his judgement: 10% of those remaining. He must be open-minded enough to conclude that everyone else is wrong, yet discerning enough to reject a crazy or destructive alternative. Disagreeing with the mainstream does not make another path sound.
Multiply those estimates: 10% × 10% × 50% × 10% × 10% × 10% × 10% = 0.00005%, or one person in two million. The requirements are related, and the percentages are guesses. The calculation illustrates how demanding the combination is, rather than predicting how many people meet it.
This is why I expect a lonely road. Agreement with the ideas is easier to find than the means and character to act on them. Even among capable businessmen, finding another family prepared to commit to the same undertaking may be difficult.
The Last Five Years
For the past five years, my main focus has been ensuring the best possible health for my children. Alongside this, I have rejected modern children's books and built a library of hundreds of children's encyclopedias published in the UK in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
The UK produced a disproportionately large share of exceptionally good children's books during this period, many of which were later translated for other markets. It was a unique time in children's publishing, and these books are worth seeking out today for the quality of their illustrations, explanations, and breadth of knowledge.
I much prefer books that allow children to live in the world of ancient heroes, such as Marcia Williams's retellings and Gareth Hinds's Iliad. These are far preferable to Winnie-the-Pooh, an unreliable nincompoop and a slave to his cravings. The characters children spend time with help shape their expectations of themselves and of life.
Avoiding screens has so far posed no challenges. Theatre and audio stories have been received well. In the spirit of Montessori, the children have their own bookshelf with hundreds of books they can choose for themselves, following whatever catches their interest.
Babysitters who are native speakers of languages I want my children to acquire offer a simple and pleasant way to introduce a second or third language through play and everyday conversation. I consider formal language learning through grammar a modern mistake, an attempt to over-intellectualise a simple and fun process. A language can become part of a child's ordinary life from the beginning, through relationships with people who speak it.
Subsequent Years
I plan to teach from source materials rather than third-hand textbooks written to prepare students for exams. I want the children to encounter the observations, reasoning, and discoveries of the people who did the work.
Publishers specialising in reprints make many interesting works accessible again. One example is Andreas Vesalius's richly illustrated De humani corporis fabrica (1543), developed during his work as an anatomist in Padua. Books like this allow a reader to see how the author observed and represented the subject, with illustrations that form an essential part of the explanation.
I will also avoid science books written by journalists and “writers” and seek out those written by scientists themselves. I want to learn from someone who has worked with the subject and understands it firsthand.
Another kind of book to avoid is the author's performance of “look how well I know this”. I want the opposite attitude: “I put in extra effort and suspend my ego so that you can achieve my level of understanding.” Such an author takes care to explain the difficult steps and gives the reader the means to follow his reasoning.
I estimate that there are roughly 1,000–2,000 foundational books worth treating as “the” books in their subjects. Even at my current busy pace, managing a business, health, and homeschooling, I read 24 books a year without making any special effort.
A sixteen-year-old can comprehend the same concepts as a forty-year-old, provided he has the necessary background knowledge. Not yet burdened by adult responsibilities, a teenager can therefore casually study 100 foundational books a year.
Several Nobel laureates did their defining work in their early twenties. James Watson was 24 when he and Francis Crick worked out DNA's double-helix structure in 1953. Lawrence Bragg was 22 when he formulated his law of X-ray diffraction in 1912, and Werner Heisenberg was 23 when he made his foundational breakthrough in quantum mechanics in 1925. I wonder how their lives would have changed with today's access to information.
Homeschooling is currently the most fun part of my life. It feels like I've stumbled on an infinite money glitch.