Why investing in slow, interest-led education matters for kids (and future generations)
Last Saturday, my 12-year-old son Jax was digging through the attic storage bin for his missing Lego Millennium Falcon set, and came up with a crumpled spiral notebook bound with a frayed rubber band. It was his first-grade after-school science project on native bees. He flipped to the first page, cackling at his crayon drawing of a bumblebee with seven legs and a googly eye glued crookedly to its thorax. I stood there holding my half-drunk cold coffee, and remembered the conversation I had with my dad over dinner that same semester, when I told him the $180 club fee was coming out of our annual beach vacation budget. “That money could go towards a math tutor, or extra college savings,” he’d said, wiping spaghetti sauce off his napkin. “He’s just playing with bugs. What’s that actually going to get him?”
At the time, I wasn’t even sure how to answer. I just knew Jax had come home from school every day for a week talking about the bee expert that came to his class, and he begged to join the club. I’d cut back on my weekly takeout runs to cover the fee, but I still had that same niggling doubt most parents do: is this a waste of money that should be going to something that actually “counts”?
Jax didn’t win any awards for that bee project. He didn’t get into a selective summer program because of it, and it never showed up on any standardized test score. A year after the club ended, he moved on to obsessing over Minecraft skate parks and collecting vintage Pokemon cards, and the notebook got shoved into the attic bin, forgotten. But slow investments don’t pay off right away. Last fall, Jax’s middle school science class did a unit on local habitat loss, and he came home talking about how school grounds are almost all non-native grass and no plants that feed pollinators. By the end of the semester, he’d written a proposal to the PTA for a small grant to plant native wildflowers along the school’s back fence, and started an after-school garden club to maintain it. Last week, I sat in on the first club meeting, and listened to him explain to seven other 12-year-olds why we need native milkweed instead of the decorative kind from the big box store. All that information, all that excitement, it traced right back to that after-school club I almost didn’t pay for six years ago.
That’s the thing no one tells you about investing in education. We’re all taught to think of it as a short-term transaction: pay for the tutor, get a higher test score, get into a good college, get a good job. But most of the things that shape who our kids become don’t show up on a report card. They’re the random interests they get to chase when they’re young, the space to explore something that doesn’t have a clear end goal.
I’ve started making small shifts in how I think about our education budget and time, and they’re things any parent or caregiver can do, no matter how tight your budget is. First, every semester, go through your kid’s scheduled activities and swap one high-stakes activity they’ve been complaining about for one low-stakes interest-led one. If your 10-year-old hates the weekly tutoring you signed them up for to boost their math score, try cutting it to every other week, and use the extra time and money for that $25 monthly geology club they keep mentioning. It doesn’t have to replace all structured learning, it just adds one thing that’s for them, not for a grade. Second, when you’re voting on your PTA budget or donating to your local public school, prioritize the programs that don’t have immediate test score payoffs. Most schools cut art, school gardens, and casual after-school clubs first when budgets are tight, because they don’t move the needle on standardized tests. But those are the programs that kids remember, and they’re open to every kid, not just the ones whose parents can pay for private clubs. Third, set aside a $100 to $200 a year “random interest fund” that your kid can spend on whatever they get obsessed with, no strings attached. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Mine has bought bee hotel kits, drawing paper, and a bag of rough rocks for tumbling. That’s it.
I don’t pretend this is some big solution to all the problems with our education system. I know a lot of families don’t have an extra $100 a year or an extra hour a week to spare. That’s why investing in education isn’t just something we do for our own kids—it’s something we do for all kids, by advocating for more funding for these kinds of programs in public schools, and voting for school budgets that don’t only prioritize test scores and sports. That’s the investment that pays off for future generations, not just our own.
Last month, Jax dragged my dad out to our backyard to see the bee hotel that’s still nailed to our fence. A few mason bees have moved in this spring, and Jax pointed them out, explaining how they don’t sting and how they pollinate the tomato plants in our garden. My dad stayed out there for an hour, asking questions, and at the end of the day, he pulled me aside and said he’d cover the cost of the new soil Jax needs for the school garden. We still disagree sometimes about how much we should be putting into college savings versus random kid projects. But that’s okay.
We still don’t know what Jax will do when he grows up. He might become an ecologist, he might become a graphic designer, he might do something no one’s even thought of yet. But I know that letting him chase the things that spark his curiosity, even when there’s no immediate payoff, is the best investment I can make. It’s not flashy, it doesn’t give me a quick win to brag about at parent night, but it’s growing, slow and steady, just like those wildflowers will be next spring.
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