That Better be a Stanley Cup You’re Sipping From! Homeschooling and the Freedom to be Uncool
That Better be a Stanley Cup You’re Sipping From! Homeschooling and the Freedom to be Uncool
Groupthink grabs us early
While driving one morning, I heard the radio host play a TikTok video.
A distraught mother explained how her nine-year-old daughter came home from school in tears. Turns out the mean girls didn’t approve of her cup.
“Cup?,” I thought. “Kids are bringing cups to school?”
As many of you probably already know, it wasn’t just a cup it was a Stanley cup.
It has little or nothing to do with hockey. It’s just a reusable water bottle—sometimes called a tumbler and officially it’s a “quencher"—but it’s also the latest must-have product according to social media influencers and celebs.
The hashtag #stanleytumbler has attracted nearly seven billion views on TikTok. And if you happen to encounter a post-workout Olivia Rodrigo, don’t be surprised if she’s sporting a Stanley.
Trouble is our nine-year-old protagonist didn’t bring Olivia Rodrigo’s cup to school. She brought the one mom purchased. At WalMart.
So uncool!
So how did mom respond to the weeping child?
Did she use the episode to talk about consumerism or the dangers of following the crowd? Did she address the bandwagon fallacy or explain what gives humans inherent worth and dignity?
No, mom did none of that.
Instead she bought her daughter the damn Stanley cup. She is, after all, a TikTok mom.
An entertainment executive friend of mine once told me about his days working for one of the biggest studios. He and his team would corral a bunch of kids and conduct focus groups. They’d show the kids a movie poster, tell them about the movie, and ask them what they thought about it. This giant corporation also enforced a rather peculiar rule—no homeschool kids.
The studio had deemed homeschool kids to be too independent minded. Execs learned that a single homeschool kid could “pollute” an entire focus group.
Instead of accepting the movie as described, homeschool kids would speak up about problems they had with the story and characters. The other kids would often follow their lead, leading to a frustrating experience for the execs.
How could they learn more about typical consumers if these atypical kids kept stirring up trouble?
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Fueling Fads
My friend knew I would get a kick out of that anecdote because he knows my wife and I homeschool our son.
Our son is the same age as Mama TikTok’s daughter, but he has never urged us to buy him the hot new thing that all the other kids have. From cups to clothes, he’s (so far) shown no interest in any type of brand-name anything.
He went through a phase where he made his own clothes, and by “made” I mean he’d use markers to draw pictures on white T-shirts. He’d wear those T-shirts everywhere.
He went through a longer phase of wearing costumes as clothes. He’d don the uniforms of many including an astronaut, Roman soldier, and medieval knight. (You should see the grins he got at Albertsons.)
I’ve noticed a similar disinterest in name-brand fads among the other homeschoolers in our neighborhood. One of my son’s homeschool friends was teased during a bus ride to a baseball game. Other members of his team chided him for using the “wrong” kind of bat (another WalMart purchase!).
My son’s friend was unbothered—if his hunk of wood does the job it was intended to do, why should he care what kind of logo it displayed?
The teasers on the bus were school kids and I can relate to that kind of peer pressure.
I attended public schools from kindergarten through college, and back when I was nine I was sporting short corduroy Ocean Pacific shorts, Vans sneakers, and socks with horizontal red stripes that I pulled up to my knees.
I topped it all off with my #80 Kellen Winslow jersey. I was living in Ron Burgundy’s San Diego, and I looked rad.
Or so I thought.
Like countless other kids, I thought I wanted those clothes, and in some sense I did. But I wanted those particular clothes because that’s what the other kids in my class wanted (well, maybe apart from the Kellen Winslow jersey).
My son’s friend didn’t run home and beg mom to buy him the “right” kind of bat. But maybe he would have been tempted to if he’d attended one of our neighborhood schools.
Teaching Groupthink
We often frame groupthink as being tied to something consequential, such as a political or religious position. And when it comes to schools, there is great potential for proselytizing.
But if the monoculture does its best to funnel Americans toward a particular worldview, the wide end of the funnel is often apolitical. It merely acclimates us to groupthink.
And for all the griping I do about the monoculture, it’s clear that groupthink exists beyond the monoculture turf of entertainment, media, higher ed, public schools, and so on.
My hunch is that particular features of the monoculture’s institutions make groupthink more acute, but herd thinking would exist even without those features.
Let’s return to schools.
Where Groupthink Grows
Even if they were run by the philosophical descendants of Socrates, schools would still be prone to groupthink as long as they segregated students by age and brought them to a central location every weekday for seven hours a day.
Over time, that kind of regular, prolonged interaction with the same people can generate all kinds of random examples of groupthink:
You must buy the right baseball bat!
Corduroy OP shorts are rad!
Stanley cups make you special!
Indeed Amelia Awad reports that her “pink parade” Stanley tumbler makes her feel special. In all, the high school sophomore owns 67 Stanleys, a collection that cost her parents $3,000.
To the extent that homeschooling mimics the centralized and segregated model, it too may spawn groupthink. But homeschool parents have more freedom to create environmental diversity for their kids.
For instance, my son regularly cycles among a variety of different environments and age groups: he’s at home with my wife and me, he’s at farm “school” among a mixed-age group of kids (the human kind and the goat kind), he’s at a mixed-age co-op, he’s going on a field trip to a nut farm, he’s heading out on a work trip to Los Angeles or New York with my wife and me, he’s at his grandparents’ house, at friends’ houses, and at jiu jitsu or soccer practice.
A while ago, I noted how the mixing of environments and age groups can help undermine bullies. The same features can also undermine early onset groupthink.
The mean girls and guys have much less time to put kids under their spell. And as their worldview grows wider, kids are less likely to simply follow the lead of their most charismatic same-age peers.
They can see that older kids and adults don’t have the hot new thing, and they’re doing just fine. Less, or at least diffused, peer pressure also weakens the pull to plunge into social media—that force that’s mighty enough to seduce the coolest of kids.
“I was actually TikTok influenced into buying this,” Olivia Rodrigo says of her beloved Stanley.
We all have our Stanley cups and OP shorts, and most of us still manage to (at least kind of) think for ourselves.
But wouldn’t we all feel more liberated if we were free to be uncool?
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
The right church can be a great intergenerational mixing bowl as well. Very healthy. I've recently started going to a new church, fairly small and full of young families, old people, and all other types. Kids generally stay for the sermon; of course they get fidgety, but it's good training. I'm just realizing that, compared to every other public environment, it is simply an oasis of nice, polite, respectful kids in stark contrast to the hostile, half-clad, tattooed & pierced feral youth everywhere else. Besides the obvious (Christianity), maybe there's a parallel effect of being regularly exposed to grown ups who expect them, sooner or later but mostly on-time, to grow up.