Naval Ravikant: I actually think the problem is institutional schooling

"I actually think the problem is institutional schooling. If schools were six-person schools happening in people's backyard, it'd be a very different story. If one kid started getting unhinged, the other five would know. This is because of the industrialization of society.

There's a reason why terrorists blow up large airliners or try to hit trains or bridges, because these are large things. Humans are not meant to live in trustless societies and massive, massive groups. Dunbar number, which is how many people you can get to know and keep track of is pretty small, it's about 120 to 150 people, we're meant to live in smaller, higher trust societies.

And I think just aggregating people into large, low trust elements like schools, our public schools are not the right answer for the future. I'm much more of an advocate of pods, homeschools, small schools, local schools, local government, you know, state government, shrinking everything down to the size where people know each other.

But we've now come up with these societies where people move around, we're disconnected from friends and family, we're disconnected from larger families, we're disconnected from our neighbors, and we rely on the government to build trust and to maintain trust in everything.

And that's gonna end up a very violent and controlled place where someone top-down is looking down and saying, oh, you thousand people have nothing in common, but we're gonna shove you all in the same small area, force you to go to school, because a lot of kids are just forced to go to school. You're miserable here. And if one of you snaps too bad, there's lots of being a small enclosed space.

One of the interesting things about homeschooling is homeschool kids don't get bullied even by the usual bullies because the bullies know that in the homeschooling situation, if you're meeting with other kids, you're meeting by choice. It's like, I can't bully you. You can't bully adults because they'll just leave.

The reason why bullying works against kids is because there's this enforced little prison environment where they can't leave. I had a little quip on Twitter that, you know, schools are prisons for the lucky kids and prisons are schools for the unlucky kids. And I don't think there's as much of a difference from them as we would like to make it out to be.

Mandatory schooling, where kids are shoved off to school every day. I get it. I get why we do it. It's daycare for kids, so the adults can go about their business. But the industrialized education system is basically putting kids in a mini prison until they're 18, 20, 21 brain trying to brainwash them often unsuccessfully, and then shoving them out in the real world and saying, okay, now you're adults, now here's a gun, here's a right to vote, here's your alcohol, go make some good decisions."