You Watched Three Reels. You Are Not a School District.

There is a particular kind of modern parent who discovers something approximately eight minutes before everyone else, immediately becomes an expert, and then starts speaking with the confidence of someone who has spent decades studying it. Cold plunges, sourdough, seed oils, pickleball, Montessori, magnesium, red-light therapy — and now homeschooling.

The funniest part is that these people never think they are following a trend. They always say they “did the research,” which usually means they watched three Instagram reels, listened to half a podcast, and forwarded one article to their spouse. By dinner, they are suddenly explaining why the entire American education system is broken.

You are not a school district. You have Wi-Fi.

Retail Bankers Are Especially Vulnerable to This

Bankers cannot simply raise children. Everything has to become a thesis. Ask a normal parent why their kid goes to school and they will say, “Because that’s where kids go.” Ask a banker and you are about to receive a presentation on the risk-adjusted return of traditional education.

Somewhere right now, a 39-year-old banker who has never taught anything in his life is explaining to his wife that schools were “designed for the industrial age.” Somebody sent him a podcast, and now he is Socrates.

Within 48 hours, he has built a spreadsheet called EDUCATION_STRATEGY_FINAL_v8.xlsx with separate tabs for curriculum, extracurriculars, socialization, college admissions, and something called “Alternative Learning ROI.” His six-year-old just wants crayons.

Trend Followers Always Think They Discovered the Trend

Nobody ever admits they are doing something because everybody else is doing it. Instead, they say things like, “We’ve really been questioning the traditional model.”

Have you? Because your questioning appears to have started exactly eleven days after your Instagram feed filled up with homeschooling videos.

The modern trend follower is incredible. They buy the same clothes, listen to the same podcasts, take the same supplements, vacation in the same places, install the same cold plunge, and suddenly develop concerns about seed oils during the same six-month period. Then they proudly announce that they “don’t follow the crowd.”

Correct. The crowd is apparently twelve feet in front of you.

Your Kitchen Is Not USC

After the intellectual conversion comes the aesthetic conversion. Suddenly there are wicker baskets, wooden toys that cost $140 and appear to do nothing, a giant map, a globe, linen, and a chalkboard announcing “Nature Study.”

Your dining room now looks like Teddy Roosevelt opened a Montessori school.

Somehow every family bravely rejecting conformity ends up with the exact same beige homeschool room. Independent thinking has apparently settled on one very specific color palette.

Buying a globe does not make your house an academy. Putting The Iliad on a shelf does not make you Aristotle. Yesterday there was spaghetti sauce on this table. Today you moved the air fryer and declared it a “learning environment.”

Teachers Are Apparently the Only Professionals Everyone Thinks They Can Replace

If you need a root canal, you call a dentist. If your roof collapses, you call a roofer. If you get sued, you call a lawyer. Nobody watches three TikToks and decides to perform their own appendectomy.

But teaching reading, writing, science, history, math, and childhood development for thirteen years? Apparently Brad from private wealth management has that covered.

Real teachers spend years learning how children learn. Brad is very good at EBITDA.

These are not the same skill set.

“But We Finish School by Noon.”

Of course you do. There are two students.

A commercial airline could board incredibly quickly if it only carried one passenger.

Bankers especially love this argument because they see school as an efficiency problem. Why does school take seven hours when the academics can be completed in three?

Because children are not leveraged buyouts.

Some parts of childhood are supposed to be inefficient. Recess is inefficient. Friendship is inefficient. Standing in line is inefficient. Getting into an argument and learning how to fix it is inefficient. Sitting next to the annoying kid and discovering that you somehow still have to function is extremely inefficient.

These experiences also happen to prepare you remarkably well for adulthood.

Your Child Needs to Meet Someone You Didn’t Select

School exposes children to people their parents would never personally choose. The loud kid, the shy kid, the strange kid, the funny kid, the rich kid, the kid whose family is struggling, the teacher everybody loves, and the teacher everybody hates.

That is society.

A twice-monthly homeschool co-op where eight families who all listen to the same podcasts build birdhouses together is lovely, but it is not quite the same sample size.

Children occasionally need unfair teachers, annoying classmates, bad cafeteria food, losing teams, awkward conversations, embarrassing moments, and group projects where one kid does absolutely nothing. These are not failures of childhood. They are training for adulthood.

The world is eventually going to contain people you did not personally approve.

Maybe You Just Like Control

Homeschooling offers something extremely attractive to anxious parents: control. You choose the curriculum, schedule, books, classmates, influences, activities, and adults your children encounter.

Control can feel a lot like good parenting.

The problem is that your child eventually has to leave.

The goal is not to build such a perfect bubble that your child never encounters friction. The goal is to raise somebody who can function perfectly well once the bubble disappears.

Otherwise your son is going to meet his first incompetent manager at age 24 and request an emergency family meeting. Dad will immediately open Excel.

Send Your Child to School

Let your children have teachers who aren’t you. Let them meet people you didn’t select. Let them lose occasionally, get embarrassed occasionally, sit next to the weird kid, and maybe even be the weird kid for a semester.

Then let them come home and tell you about it.

And now, after several hundred words of unsolicited educational commentary, we should probably explain why a Chicago pizza company has strong opinions about homeschooling.

We can’t.

But we do know one thing: your kitchen has already suffered enough.

Stop turning it into a school and use it for what God intended — heating up deep dish pizza.

Order Rupiani’s today.