Zoom and the Restoration of the Traditional Family
Remnant Review
The lockdowns have achieved in less than a year what Skype promised over a decade ago. Working from home is now an economic reality.
This is going to reshape American society and world society. Its social fallout will provide futurologists with endless speculation.
Telecommuting has been a "hot topic" for 35 years. This article in Reason was published in 1984: Telecommuting: Will the Plug be pulled?
The magnitude of a shift from a central workplace to the home is potentially enormous. Oddly enough, though, no one, including the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has any reliable data on how many people are now telecommuting—or even how many work at home in any capacity. Because of the lack of hard figures, educated guesses of the number of telecommuters abound. Labor Department official Michael Ginley says, "I've seen estimates ranging from 3 million to 40 million." But two typical estimates are 11 million (from a recent study by AT&T), and 5–10 million, reported in Consumer's Digest. In any event, most observers agree that home workers are already a substantial part of the work force. As for the future, social-trends watchers such as Alvin Toffler talk of 15 million people working at home by the end of the decade, and Consumer's Digest says the figure could rise to 15–20 percent of the work force by then.The prospect of such a dramatic increase, however, has not been universally welcomed. In at least one instance, local authorities have shut down a computer home worker because telecommuting violates local zoning laws. There is ample precedent for outlawing computer home work under federal labor regulations. And unions are sounding alarms about the prospect of expanding home work.
It didn't happen. We waited a long time. Then, overnight, we have arrived.
Sometime in between 1780 and 1820, the English-speaking West changed. It changed more than it had ever changed in recorded history. In Great Britain and North America above the Rio Grande, economic growth began to attain unheard-of levels: 2% per year per capita. This had never been sustained in the past. It has been sustained for over 200 years.
The result has been the complete transformation of the world. Most people didn't perceive this, year by year. The percentage gains were too small. But the compounding effect had begun to transform Western European society by 1850. By 1900, the West's society was not recognizable in 1800 terms. Economic growth and technological innovation had changed literally everything.
What it had changed most of all was the family.
LEAVING HOME
Throughout history, the vast majority of human beings have lived on small farms. That is obviously no longer the case today. The rural population is now around 2% in the United States.
This meant that fathers trained their sons in the fields. Mothers trained their daughters in the homes. Men learned how to grow food, and women learned how to cook it in ways that husbands found acceptable. This educational system goes back as far as there is a record of human society. It was universal.
Then, without warning, the Industrial Revolution changed it. As agricultural output increased as a result of the agricultural revolution, which began sometime in the 1680's, and which also included the extension of sheep herding in Great Britain, large landowners began to push tenants off the land. The land was more valuable for sheep than for tenants. So, common people had to move to the cities.
Meanwhile, expanded agricultural production enabled urban residents to buy food less expensively. This was part of the agricultural revolution. It led to an expansion of the cities. It led to a steady depopulation of the countryside.
Children from an early age had become productive on the farms. But in order for them to remain productive in cities, they had to work in the factories. This was the origin of factory child labor. It was not the origin of child labor. That had been with mankind throughout history.
Fathers left the household to go to work in a factory. Increasingly, so did children. Sometimes even wives did. If wives stayed home with small children, the homes were otherwise empty. The husbands did not come home for lunch. They came home after work in the evening. The workday was sometimes 12 hours.
Until the development of the public school system, the children either ran wild in the streets or they worked in factories. They did not get extensive formal education. One of the reasons Sunday schools were developed in the late 18th century was to provide an opportunity for street children to be taught how to read. This is a great breakthrough. Over time, however, members of the congregations decided that it was a better use of Sunday school time to train their own children. The original goal of the Sunday school was abandoned.
The face-to-face instruction between father and son that had marked humanity throughout recorded history was broken by the factory system. The fathers were not in the home or working with their sons in the fields. Whenever daughters went to work in factories, the face-to-face instruction of mothers to daughters also disappeared from society.
So, the price of the enormous economic productivity of modern society was paid for primarily by the family structure that had prevailed throughout history. There aren't many books on this, but this was a fundamental transformation of all human society. Wherever the division of labor has increased, per capita output has increased. This means that per capita wealth has increased. But this always came at the cost of breaking apart the nuclear family unit.
THE SCHOOL BUS
In 2004, I wrote an article about the two buses: the white bus carrying prisoners to prison, and the yellow bus carrying schoolchildren to the local public schools. I have reprinted it here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/18865.cfm.
In modern society, there are three major liturgical transitions from childhood to adulthood. The first comes when the child is forced by his mother to get onto a yellow school bus in order to be taken away to be instructed by strangers. Children universally hate it. Mothers go through great pain emotionally when this takes place. Anyway, mothers in my day did. Maybe they don't these days. Maybe they are glad to have the child leave. But the children don't like it. We can hardly blame them. I doubt that they liked going into the factories in 1820.
This allows the state to shape the social order by shaping the minds of students. This begins early in life. This bus ritual tells the parents that the state, not the parents, is in charge of the family's future. The state will instruct the children. The parents are pushed out of the picture. They never get back into the picture. This begins in most states in the fall of the year in which the child has turned six.
The second transition comes when the child goes off to college. I call that the dorm-key ritual. When the person at the dormitory desk hands the room key to the young adult, the parent is ritually separated from authority. That authority is never restored. For college-bound students, this is the fundamental transition from childhood to adulthood. Yet it is marked by a peculiarity: the child is economically irresponsible. The parents retain economic authority, but at that point, the parents lose institutional authority. The children learn to grow up apart from the parents and also apart from the responsibility of paying their own way. That's when the state's agents impose what is basically a mopping-up operation. The public schools began it; accredited universities complete it.
The third transition has been with us from the beginning: a child leaves the household in order to be married. That sets up a new household. It is marked by an exchange of rings. At this point, the parents are out of the picture until such time as they become too old to care for themselves. Then they come under the authority of one or more of the households that their children have created. Parents had better plan how to make that transition between the exchange of the rings and moving in with the kids.
WORK AT HOME. LEARN AT HOME.
Today, more than at any time in history, there has been a reversal. High income parents have moved back into the household. They no longer leave home during the day. The West has gone back to 1750. This has taken less than a year.
The social structure has not yet made the transition, but the economic structure is rapidly making the transition. Businesses are now beginning to let high-output people stay at home. Businesses are beginning to sell high-priced properties in densely populated downtown areas. The price of commercial real estate is falling.
Technically, it is now possible for the children to be educated at home. Now the parents face a problem. They don't really want the children at home. Even if they do want the children at home, some parents have not been able to make that transition yet. These tend to be low-productivity workers who do not earn their living through the manipulation of digits.
Online education is now technically feasible. The Khan Academy has proved it. The Ron Paul Curriculum has proved it. But there are not many 100% online programs. They are coming, however. The public schools have made the transition at least temporarily. They made it last spring, and they have not yet completely abandoned it.
The great advantage of self-taught homeschooling is that there can be multiple teaching methodologies. Different students learn better with different forms of instruction. One size doesn't fit all. This is a fundamental premise of homeschooling. Parents had little control over the methodologies and the content of formal education until the Internet made possible comprehensive formal instruction either free of charge, as in the case of the Khan Academy, or inexpensively, as in the case the Ron Paul Curriculum.
Parents are resisting the return to 1750. They don't like the added responsibility. They were trained in a system in which the state was in charge of their education. Education was funded by the state. This let parents off the hook. Now they are capable of being put back on the hook. The vast majority of parents are resisting this. About 85% of parents send their children into the public schools. Only about 3% of parents homeschool.
Under the new conditions, parents are at home. They can legally keep their children at home. They can still keep their children at home if the children are being taught online by means of curricula that are specifically designed to be self-taught. The children are kept in a safe environment. The state is out of the picture.
Because of the rise of the factory, families crossed the Rubicon two centuries ago. Family members scattered during the day. Now, because of the lockdowns, and because of Zoom, Skype, and Microsoft Teams, millions of parents have crossed the Rubicon in the other direction. But there remains an anomaly: the public schools. The children are still being removed from the households, even though their parents remain at home.
The public schools have done their job well. Over the past century, public educators have persuaded parents that only the state and state-approved methodologies and curriculum materials are suitable for educating children. Because the state offered free education, parents took advantage of it. They knew they were going to have to pay the school taxes anyway. They decided that they might as well cash in on the deal. So, mothers placed their children on the yellow buses.
This is going to stop when the free money from Washington stops. The great default is going to stop it. The economic crisis created by that default will have ripple effects across the nation. One of the ripple effects is that there won't be any more federal money for state and local school programs. The cost of education is going to be placed more and more on parents as local taxpayers.
Public schools will continue to fail to educate. Parents who want good educations for their children will remove them. This will mark the transition back to liberty. It will be a transition back to the fundamental principle that parents are responsible for the education of their children. The state has persuaded parents that this is not the case. That began systematically in Germany in the late 18th century. By the late 19th century, it was universally assumed in the West that the state, not parents, are responsible for the education of children. It also was assumed that the state had the competence to do this better than the parents did. But now, because of digital innovation, that assumption is no longer supported by the evidence.
CONCLUSION
What we have seen since last March is the greatest single reversal of state authority in my lifetime. The presupposition that children must be removed from the household in order for them to be well-educated is being challenged by online educational programs.
It was also assumed prior to March that high-output workers had to be removed from their homes and brought to distant digital factories called offices. That assumption has been challenged more effectively than ever before in American history. Workers as well as business owners are learning that the workers' productivity not only did not fall because of the return of workers to their homes, it actually has increased. Now this cost-benefit analysis works against business office environments. It works in favor of the restoration of the household.
This reversal has taken place in the lives of heads of households. It has not yet taken place in the school systems. But, curriculum by curriculum, innovation by innovation, children are going to remain in their households in order to be educated. It may take two decades. It may take longer. But this is clear: it is cheaper to educate children at home than it is to fund the modern public school system. The brick-and-mortar environment is now visibly less cost-effective than homeschooling. The educrats are attempting to keep this realization away from parents, but as property taxes continue to rise, and subsidies from Washington eventually end, the public will vote to de-fund the schools. Parents are going to stop sending their children into the public schools. They're going to reclaim their authority over their children's education.
This will be the primary visible mark of the restoration of liberty in the United States. Until this happens, nothing fundamental will change in terms of the distribution of power and money: first to Washington, and then back out in the form of subsidies to local government agencies.