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Notes -
Minor quibble: Kids have no real frame of reference, so they are easy to satisfy. Every kid at my daycare except the screaming one-year-old would have said they liked me and the daycare ladies and the food and most of the other kids. One kid (the one who never spoke) tried to refuse to return to the daycare when I quit, though- because she now had a point of comparison.
Main point: Does it matter? Think of watching a movie with a kid and all the jokes and references that the kid doesn't even realize are jokes and references. He doesn't know what he's missing. He might enjoy the movie more than you did, but your experience of the movie was richer/denser. The entire world is like that, all the time, and as you become more culturally educated you realize how many well-credentialed adults are in the same position as the kid watching the movie. Doctors and physicists and professors all the way down to gas-station clerks are missing a huge part of human experience and there is no way to even explain that to them since they don't even realize it's there. So all that wordcel cultural stuff is of limited economic benefit, but it is of extreme personal benefit. And it is a benefit that I want to pass to my kids. But there's too much to absorb to start late, so having a dad like me isn't enough. There needs to be teaching and exposure.
So you learn algebra when you're nine, because algebra is easy- it requires no real experience of the world. And then, when all the other 16-year-olds are learning algebra and how to write a sentence (really), you can start philosophy and literature because now you understand death and fear and maybe love. And you don't have to start by learning to read archaic English because you've been reading archaic stuff since you were 7 even though it didn't matter and you can engage the material because you aren't just stepping into the cultural conversation cold- you've been sitting at the grown-ups' table, silent and listening, since you were 10. And when everyone else is taking out student loans to go get an ersatz "The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Feminism" liberal arts education, you already have one at least as good as what they will get, probably better, and you can now study something that pays because you need money but you also need a lot more than that.
So I'd say it matters very much.
I can second everything in this comment. My upbringing was like the one you mentioned, and people frequently think given that I keep talking about the Greeks and Romans and use Big Words etc. that I must have studied philosophy or something humanities/liberal arts like that when in reality I did Pure Mathematics and leveraged my learning there to get into quant finance where I make pretty decent money.
In my case I still needed to do a large amount of catching up on the liberal arts stuff during and after my degree just because there is so much out there. Indeed this catching up is going on to this day, I'm currently going through the (absoutely excellent) art history course on Khan Academy, which although being extremely "liberal" and "progressive" tinged is still extremely useful and informative as I know from my metis of the structure of the world what is actually important and I should care about and what is merely progressive "kissing the ring" and can be safely discarded.
I could very well see someone who doesn't have a good bullshit detector falling for the progressive worldview which is heavily implied and softly pushed by the teachers behind the course but if you know the pitfalls you can avoid them pretty easily and get a solid and relatively deep understanding of not just Western art, but the artistic history of the whole world, all for free.
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Of course they do. Their own home, mostly.
Yeah, I was homeschooled in a conservative community, so I have a lot of experience with not understanding references. It isn't really that big a deal? Or, rather, we get to choose which references we get vs not, based on how we spend our time. I now understand a lot of culture war references from spending time here. Bravo, me. Very rich.
Lol. Your daughter is smart at math. Congratulations. But don't belittle the majority with passing dismissive remarks.
And you feel very self-satisfied about this. It bolsters your self image as a very good and cultured person, who deserves a good life and family and job. You start a Substack. It is a nice hobby. You belong to a very pleasant book club. Is it a better hobby than joining a sports team? How would one know?
Or you go to a Great Books college and engage in a perpetual book club for several years, then work at a grocery store for a while to be near your community, then teach for a bit, notice that algebra is not easy for everyone, marry and raise children, spend time at the park with the children, unschool them while feeling a bit lonely. Are still a nice person to have in the book club, but can't come for a decade or so, on account of the children.
This is all fine. I've lived like this, and have no problem with it. But it's unclear that one child seeks out Dostoyevsky and another basketball primarily on account of education or conscious choices, vs personality and proclivities.
Are you basing this on actual people you know? If so, how old are they? I come from a "read Les Miserables in second grade" kind of family, and it's fine. I have nothing against it. But am not sure it's important, based on the fact that I spend my free time on Internet forums, full of rich references and people complaining about Moloch (a multi-level reference!) eating everything.
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but IQ is doing much of the work, no, not the parenting? There is so much information for free online and elsewhere, as well as scholarships, that bright kids should not be deprived too much by not having top-tier parenting. Maybe 50-100 years ago it was like this, but tech has leveled playing field a lot.
IQ lets you use the info, but it doesn't make you prefer it to video games. Parenting removes the possibility of video games.
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You seem to be assuming that kids will know to find all the resources on their own, and generally do the executive function things a parent would likely be much better at. Parental encouragement, purchase of supplies (robot, pencils), and setting up the house comfortably for the hobbies (desks, quiet space) all matter greatly on top of what you can get by googling "learn to code"
It seems like part of the problem with the Caplan take, is that people imagine wildly different parameters for the parental Overton window.
Parents will obviously buy pencils. The few children so deprived they don't even get pencils from home are given them at school (along with paper, snacks, and some other things).
Most parents can and will get desks and a lower end robot, keyboard, hard drive, or whatever. This is especially true if the kid is credibly using it for educational purposes. Some parents also have better connections, more money, more home space, and time to take the kid to clubs, but this seems in some sense intrinsic -- most parents won't be able to change these things just by wanting to.
A quiet space can be surprisingly hard! Maybe the kid should go to the library?
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