… The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself. This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all. “What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.” “The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don’t fit that track anymore,” he said. “And the result is, we want to call it a disorder.” … Later in the article: “Rather than wait for changes to come, many parents are giving up on the system altogether. A poll in 2023 found that about one in three home-schooling parents were unhappy with how their schools had educated their children with special needs, prompting them to leave. Parents are also increasingly turning to microschools, essentially learning pods with small numbers of children who can receive more individual attention. “Some of these parents identify as being part of an “unschooling” movement, in which they believe that school has done more harm than good for their children. They may be onto something. A 2016 paper showed that many young adults with childhood diagnoses of A.D.H.D. saw their symptoms improve once they left school and began working in a field that interested them.”

My interest in homeschooling and for that matter alternative schooling —and I was interested in alternative schools before I became interested in homeschooling. My interest in it is that it makes it at least possible for those people who want to give their children a natural, organic, uncoerced learning experience to do so. Not everybody is going to use it that way. People start schools which they hope will be even more coercive than the schools that exist. There are certainly some people who teach their children thinking that they can pound in learning faster than the local schools who were doing it. I don't think many of them stick it out very long because they find out it doesn't work. … I mean if I look far enough down the line I like to think of schools as learning experiment activity centers. Somewhat analogous to public libraries, but rather wider in scope. Places to which people can come if they feel like coming to do the things that they want to do for as long as they want to do them. … I would hope that somewhere we would find a way to call these places something other than schools. Because they're really very fundamentally very different. …We have to understand we're going to probably have to agree to disagree about this. Because nobody who walks into a room believing in some kind of forced learning is going to walk out of the room not believing in it because they've heard me preach this little mini-sermon about it. But I want you to be very clear about where I personally stand. And I should say, by the way, that I suspect that the number of homeschoolers or alternative school people who really agree with me is probably well under 50%. I mean, I think this is a minority even among homeschoolers. You don't have to believe what I just said to be a homeschooler or to run an alternative school. But I'm the one who's sitting up here and that's what I think. …

In 35 randomized control trials in 18 countries, he and other researchers found that when students are allowed some opportunity to take their own initiative, they are more engaged in class and better able to master new skills, they have better grades and fewer problems with peers — and they are happier, too. The effect sizes were often between 0.7 and 0.9, a significant degree of impact. Importantly, the teachers did not need to change the curriculum they taught or alter their disciplinary approach. They just applied a few new teaching practices in the course of their normal lesson. [My emphasis—PF]

There is no question that a Custom GPT can “automate the boring” when it comes to grading. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to grade one student essay (leaving comments in the margins, assigning rubric scores, and writing a two-paragraph summary of my feedback). Using a Custom GPT could cut this down to 2-3 minutes per essay (stripping out identifying information, double-checking its output, etc.). With 20 students in a class, that would save me something like 5-6 hours of tedious work. Multiply this across several assignments per semester, and it quickly adds up.