Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from

parents just like you all over the world. Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Value this more than that. Grades count for something. Test scores reveal helpful insights, and you have to

send your kids to school. It's the law. The math is pretty clear on the value of a college

education these days, and kids who don't graduate from high school are at an enormous disadvantage

in life. As parents, we have to figure out how to hold these assumptions simultaneous with the reality that it doesn't

matter that much, and it never has. There's always been a big difference between schooling and

education. What counts in life is rarely learned in the classroom and the people that make the

biggest differences in this world so often seem to have gotten very little out of being in one.

We talked recently about the impact that Susan Wright had on her two young boys, Oroville and Wilbur, by tolerating

their projects and in fact preserving all of them, no matter how minor or messy they were. As it

happened, she and her husband were very much on the same page. David McCullough explains in his book

The Wright brothers that Bishop Wright gave his boys a lot of space to explore an experiment too.

Between formal education at school and informal education at home, McCullough writes,

it would seem that he put more value on the latter. He was never overly concerned about his children's

attendance in school. If one of the other of them chose to miss a day or two for some project

or interest he thought was worthy, it was all right. And certainly he rang to reading as worthy.

So the boys missed some school, but they read a lot of books. They missed some classes, but they

made the world their classroom. They were learning to trust their instincts to follow projects through to their

conclusion. It was the space their mother and father gave them to do this that would change their

lives and the world. Hey, thank you for listening to The Daily Dad podcast.

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