School’s out for summer. Finally!
I’ve heard that at the end of the school year, a lot of teachers have started sending home notes warning parents about the "summer slide"—the documented phenomenon where kids lose two to three months of academic progress over break.
The message is usually some version of: keep them reading, practice math facts, don't let them forget what we spent the last nine months teaching.
It's probably well-intentioned, but I think it’s kind of funny how it also assumes that the most important thing your child can do this summer is avoid losing ground on whatever the school was working on.
It reminds me of all the stories of great Americans that don’t get covered in school. Not because the people or their lives were controversial, but because it's inconvenient for the institution doing the teaching to tell the truth.
Remember when the government started making tobacco companies essentially advertise against themselves? I wish they’d make schools do the same thing.
Warning: this product has been shown to result in a compliant population with low capacity for critical thinking and a high probability of not becoming an entrepreneur.
Thomas Edison spent approximately three months in a formal classroom.
His teacher eventually told the school inspector that "the boy" was "addled" and "not worth keeping." Edison overheard it, went home crying, and told his mother. She went straight to the school and, in Edison's own words from a 1907 interview, “told the teacher that he didn't know what he was talking about, that I had more brains than he himself, and a lot more talk like that."
She pulled her son out of school and educated him herself at home.
"Then," he recalled, "I found out what a good thing a good mother is."
He held over a thousand patents when he died.
Andrew Carnegie's formal schooling ended at 12, when he immigrated from Scotland and immediately began working 12 hours a day in a textile mill.
His education came from a man named Colonel James Anderson, who opened his private library of four hundred books to working boys every Saturday. Carnegie showed up every week.
"To him I owe a taste for literature which I would not exchange for all the millions that were ever amassed by man," he wrote after becoming the richest man in the world, and after going on to fund the construction of 2,811 public libraries because he wanted every child to have what Colonel Anderson had given him.
The pattern is not hard to find once you go looking.
The people who actually built things—who invented things, who changed industries, who generated the wealth and the products and the ideas that shaped the modern world—were almost never produced by the system.
They were shaped by a curious adult who believed in them, by books they found and read because they wanted to, and by problems they decided to try to solve instead of hoping someone else would do it.
In truth, a solid argument can be made that compulsory education by its very nature discourages people like Edison and Carnegie from ever reaching their fullest potential.
School is a specific kind of thing, structurally. It was designed in a very specific way, where children are removed from their families for most of the working day, sorted by age, moved by bells, and asked to learn what the curriculum committee approved for that grade level.
It’s a system made to manage people, and systems optimize for what systems can measure: compliance, test scores, and the ability to sit still and follow instructions.
Those qualities are not what produce the innovators, inventors, and outside-the-box thinkers that the world needs if it's going to progress in the future in a bright and prosperous way.
The summer slide is real for kids whose parents don't engage with them—for whom September marks a return to the only learning environment available.
But that's not your family.
The dinner table conversation about why the food truck got shut down by the city teaches more about how markets and government actually work than a semester of social studies. A book about how a pencil gets made—the thousands of people across the globe who each contributed a small piece without any of them knowing the others existed—gives kids a framework for thinking about prices and voluntary cooperation and spontaneous order that most adults never even fully grasp.
Talking through these ideas, letting your kids argue with you about them, asking them what they think and pushing for them to think more deeply, produces a different kind of learning than what happens in classrooms from September to May. It’s a kind of learning that doesn't slide, because it is born out of genuine curiosity and genuine connection with people they know and trust.
We built the Tuttle Twins books for parents who understand that the goal isn't to maintain the school's progress over summer. It's to take their kids beyond the future the government has planned for them.
From books like The Tuttle Twins and the Food Truck Fiasco, and the Miraculous Pencil, to our full course on Entrepreneurship at the Tuttle Twins Academy, we’ve created resources for parents who want to help their kids build foundational frameworks of knowledge through which they will build their entire worldview.
Three months is a lot of time.
The possibilities are pretty endless.
— Connor
