My wife and I have a son who is 24. We supported him through the long journey of primary and secondary schooling, paying attention to his interests and what we thought would be good, which largely didn’t end up involving academics.
We started by putting him in Waldorf/Steiner-inspired schools in preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school, where the parents and the school shared the view that young kids should be using their imaginations and not constantly be exposed to images in media. Also, he had a nature day there, where one entire day of the week was devoted to being in nature.
Support for respect for individual paths ended around 5th grade when his school decided that it was hazardous to their future to not keep their students up with the public school students because students transferring to public schools were behind public school students in progress and that seemed to make the school look bad, which wasn’t our concern. As a result, my wife home-schooled him for 6th and 7th grades, which he enjoyed. He attended an outdoors program one day a week, took a ceramics class, played music, traveled to out-of-state museums focused on the natural world, and also did some academic work, including a fair amount of math. That ended when he decided he wanted to play baseball in high school, and wanted to attend public school for 8th grade to get to know more kids.
High school was both inspiring and disappointing. His favorite class was auto shop. He swapped a couple of engines and transmissions, including an engine on his own truck, which he drove home on the last day of school in 12th grade. This class ended up being the only thing keeping him in school.
He was not able to take wood shop because the facility was taken over by an academic program in which he was not interested and to which all students who worked in the wood shop must belong. My wife volunteered at the school attempting to resurrect the cooking program, in a classroom with 10 ranges, which ended up being turned into a computer lab. There was also a sewing program, with multiple sewing machines, that got canceled as well with the sewing machines stuffed into a closet. The school was favoring high-tech over basic life skills.
On the academic side, he learned how to write and enjoyed that he could write reasonably well, maybe even more because his 5th grade teacher had ridiculed him about how little he wrote. He liked learning U.S. history and politics, but didn’t care for teachers with what he saw as obvious biases toward a particular political side.
More of his focus and interest was outside of school. He stopped participating in baseball. He worked for a summer as a carpenter’s assistant building a garage. He got a job in the equipment rental department of a local hardware store and learned how to fix small engine-powered devices. He bought a series of diesel pickup trucks, fixed them up, and sold them. He did the same with multiple small powerboats.
Community college was canceled during the pandemic, so he was not able to study welding beyond the first year. He got jobs working construction for a sewer line company and a remodeler. After a couple of years, a neighborhood friend suggested he work at the local water district where he worked, so he applied for a job there and got hired, first reading meters and then fixing water main breaks. A lot of that water main repair work was at night paying overtime and getting a paid day off the next day when he worked long enough at night. He gets promotions and is valued for his work. He made over $100K last year and expects to do the same this year.
It was a continuous set of experiments to figure out what worked and what didn’t. We had to keep trying stuff and evaluating how the stuff turned out for him. As well, we had to keep focused on what was working for him even if it didn’t work out so well for the schools.