Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.
There's subtlety to this, high demands are not high expectations. If there's consequences for not meeting some high standard you set for children, you're going to create a very life-destroying kind of learned helplessness. Kids shouldn't be punished for failure.
And if it's something dangerous to try, then of course it's gotta be something you limit.
But beyond that, just don't assume kids aren't ready for something without evidence. Let them try.
Completely agree. In various volunteering capacities (think STEM fairs, youth baseball umpiring, etc) I end up working with 8-12 year olds a lot and I seem to be better at this than a lot of my counterparts. You nailed it.
The secret is to treat the kid like an adult until they demonstrate a reason(s) not to. A GF one time asked me why I talked to her nephew “like that?” and I was so confused. She said “you talk to him the same way you talk to me” (ie. the way I talk to anyone). Nephew and I were shooting free throws in the driveway. We get along great. This was very rambly but I think about it all the time.
I’ve gotten the brattiest kids to calm down and accept the situation in meltdowns in youth baseball with the same approach.
I’m not claiming this always works. Many times the situation or kid themselves demonstrates they must be treated like a kid. That’s fine too.
I have very similar lived experiences to yours and would extend the age range well into the teenage years (and even sometimes beyond) due to the fact that many young adults are still very sheltered and suffer from the same environments and mindsets established 8 - 12.
Some warning signs are medical illnesses where a young adult is being sheltered as if they are still in a crisis state of that illness, even though they've grown well beyond it and may benefit from being treating like any normal individual.
I have the same knack with kids, I’ve had it forever. “Oh you’re going to be such a good parent” was something I heard constantly.
It’s different when one’s own kids, and it takes extra patience to have the same skill set as you do with “stranger” kids. Without getting into it too much, being in a position of “authority” with a “stranger” kid changes the dynamic as compared to one’s own kids.
I dunno if that makes sense, but I’ve found it to be true for me.
I also seemed to have figured it out with my own kids, it just takes more work and more patience.
It makes my blood boil that my kid comes from the nursery saying things like "I did an ouchie". Kids don't naturally speak like this, they are taught like this. He's 3. At home he speaks his parents languages and he sounds like a 5 year old because we don't dumb it down for him. In English he sounds like every other English 3 year old in the nursery.
As someone who has a 2.5 year old learning multiple languages, I think a problem with English is that it's very verbose; we use full sentences to express things that can be expressed in other languages with only 1-2 words. And of course shorter sentences are easier for children as there's less grammar to be learned.
And specifically for expressing you hurt yourself, we teach children to express that they're hurt far earlier than they learn actual speech. So from ~1 we teach them to say "Ow" (or some variation), but then the words change from that to "hurt", and into a full sentence "I hurt myself", which is also redundant (myself and I imply the same thing, so why do we use both in that sentence in English?).
Anyhow just a thought as I'm feeding my son breakfast. "Would you like some breakfast" in English turns into 2 words in his second language.
It is just a different sound for the same thing. There is nothing dumber about "I did an ouchie" then "I got hurt". Ouchie is more infantile, but not stupider.
> Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.
I feel children's programming is reflecting those low expectations.
Daniel Tiger's fine, but an episode tends to be so focused on some narrow little thing. The older Mr. Rogers show it's based on tended to be much more wide-ranging, and often had segments introducing parts of the real adult world to a kid.
And there's stuff like Blippi, where you have a man engaging in extremely literal and unimaginative play, being "educational" by teaching colors over and over.
I think treating partial goals as bonuses is a good thing. Any goal that can be seen as a fun bonus challenge becomes more psychologically rewarding than if it's treated as a requirement?
At least I find that works when motivating myself. I didn't expect that I would finish this big skirace this year. But having it as a bonus goal made it very rewarding when I actually did finish it.
I wish we kind of celebrated failures and treated them as learning opportunities.
One of my main complains about my upbringing is that it didn't demand much of us, and it didn't provide opportunities to extend our wings and do and learn about cool stuff, while failures were treated as the end of the world.
Looking back, what was your parents' relationship to anxiety (especially low-level anxiety)?
I have felt similar to your sentiment as I raise my 2.5 year old, and as I investigate more, true failure was always insulated by my parent's anxiety preventing a true experience of outcomes. "Don't climb on that ledge because it's wet and you could fall" rather than a climb and tumble off a 2 inch curb with likely no consequence. "Don't eat that meat if it's still pink", etc.
I used to think I hated children. No, I hate bad parenting. Friends had kids and talked to them like adults (not when they were toddlers, obviously) and the kids turned out awesome. I think it’s easy to handicap children by limiting your expectations of them.
This is the framework my wife and I use with our boys as well. Let them explore things, use regular words, even if you think they don't understand them (they do).
Like you said, set the bar high, but keep in mind they're still kids and failure should never be punished. We found that doing that for some time results in them setting the bar high for themselves _all on their own now_. Their confidence is beaming, and they're never afraid to try new things, or try again after failing.
The safest and best approach, as far as my limited parenting & school volunteering experience has demonstrated, is to go in with the assumption that the kids are just as smart as you and that they only suffer from lack of life experience.
Yes, the fact base kids have is limited due to limited experience & education, but they are able to learn and reason just as well as adolescents and adults, and should be treated like that. What they need is exposure to reasoning methods, clear explanations of logical fallacies, and necessary background information that will help them both articulate complex thoughts and set context for their reasoning.
I would argue that, in many cases, kids are "smarter" than adults because their lack of experience also correlates to increased creativity. Rather than pattern matching based on experience they'll frequently try out-of-the-box methods to solve problems -- this should never be discouraged.
This may be the correct attitude towards school-age kids, but is plainly wrong when dealing with toddlers. For one thing, very young children are usually unable to empathize. So they are unable to understand why it's bad to seize their cousin's toy, they are unable to understand why it's bad to leave a mess for someone else to clean up - they can be taught a set of rules of behavior, but they won't really get the principle underlying those rules until their brain grows more and develops the ability to imagine themselves in other people's shoes.
From around 8 years old (depending on the child), this is probably an accurate assumption. Many children younger than that do not have a fully-developed theory of mind to understand different perspectives on the same issue. This may not matter too much for natural science topics, but it does impact their ability to comprehend social or political issues.
Sure, but also as an adult, you're expected to have learned some resilience to failure. You're expected to be able to be able to withstand some criticism and see negativity as a chance to improve.
I know it doesn't always work that way, but a lot of times our failures aren't just "on us", but affect others.
This should not be surprising to anyone who has a preschooler. They're also way better at problem-solving than most people expect, it's just that you often don't want them solving their "problems".
When my kid was 18 months old, we had gated him off from a playroom with a bunch of toys used by his older brother that were not baby-safe. We had a DoorMonkey [1] placed up high, about 5 feet tall, so that only adults could reach. My kid gets a chair from across the room, pushes it next to the door, climbs up on top of it, unlatches the DoorMonkey, pushes open the door, climbs down from the chair, enters the playroom, looks at me, and says "Bye!" At that moment my wife gets out of the bathroom, sees the tableau, says "____? What are you doing?" and my toddler says "Uh oh."
I have a similar story about our child, at a similar age! He waited until I'd left the room before dragging a chair away from the dining table and then climbing it, in order to reach a toy I'd accidentally placed on a high shelf on the book-case.
When I came back he immediately knew he'd been caught. Though I wasn't at all mad, it was a wakeup-call that from then on placing things too high was probably a challenge for him, rather than an absolute protection.
100%, my son will be 2 next month and he's even started saying his own name in the tone we do when we're telling him it's not safe and then giggling to himself!
He can recognise a lot of birds, trees, flowers (daffodils, primroses, hyacinths, tulips) coming out in the garden at the moment, only needs to be told what it is once or twice for it to stick.
My kid did the exact same thing with the phrase "be careful!" in the same intonation I used
Except in her case it meant "Witness me!!, as I do something exceedingly dangerous!", or alternatively "Look at the aftermath of this dangerous thing I just did, see the blood?"
Mine is two years, three months and has recently started trying to loid the magnetic child safety cabinet locks in the kitchen with any piece of strong cardboard she finds. I do not know how she came to the realization that that should work, but it definitely feels like we underestimated her.
Luckily she's only succeeded once so far, but nevertheless we're trying to figure out how to make sure the knives are safely out of reach (because she's also figured out how to climb the counter with a chair, obviously) without it becoming too inconvenient for us as well.
My kid is about the same age. We recently bought a safety lock to prevent him from getting into cupboard under our sink. It had great reviews on Amazon.
The first time he went into the kitchen after I had installed it, he notices it immediately, walks straight up to it, grasps it with both hands like an adult would, and has it unlatched within 5 seconds. He then proceeds to look at me like "Is this some sort of test?"
This is tangent, but your comment reminds me of this essay that floats around HN every so often about how limiting school is. Young children are absolutely capable of greatness beyond what we ever ask of them, and most of us are okay with them growing up in the rigid, ordained box of modern public schooling:
https://map.simonsarris.com/p/school-is-not-enough
I prefer my kids going to school then being limited by what a single household can teach them. Modern schooling is way better then what conservative attacks on it claim. And I would strongly preferred to live in a country with functional public school system then one without it.
My own experience is I went to an amazingly pre school. Like teachers invite students and their families for dinner at their own house, let kids do what they wanted during free time unless and until they actually did something bad. That freedom and trust created an environment where I taught myself how to ride bikes during preschool recesses. No teacher came running out to tell me the right way, they just watched. And they just had real bikes for preschoolers to use at their own comfort freely accessible. Needless to say by the time I got the first grade I had a hard time adapting.
I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.
This argument is immensely popular. It looks a bit like a warmed over Rousseau - just shake off the chains of the old fashioned education system, give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor, and they'll do pretty well.
Let's look at a few counterpoints:
- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.
- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).
Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.
Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.
But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
They are basically lacking the experience and have limited knowledge of the world around them. And us adults often fail to understand their mental model, since we usually won't connect the same dots, but there is definitely logic to their reasoning. It's best to try and ask more questions to know how they've come to some ridiculous idea, and they usually reveal one or two steps that I wouldn't think about.
Maybe it's not that we don't value it, but that we don't recognize it. I've run into a number of ostensibly less-educated people who nonetheless made astute observations about their economic incentives. Generally a lot of game-like situations seem to have players who understand the game in some way without having any formal instruction, and without being what we normally think of a being particularly intelligent.
I have a relative who does well at poker, despite not finishing school. A drainage guy I know has a good understanding of the business and where the opportunities are. In general a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it". I've run into a bunch of these people who you don't think of as being intelligent, but if you frame something as a game, they know how to play.
None of these people could be taught high school calculus, for instance, but they are still intelligent in a way that's useful to them.
If we're talking about kids, from about the age of four they learn to trick you. "Dad, you have to give me ice cream. Mom says so. Don't wake her up." And it gets more and more sophisticated as they get older.
Socially, emotionally, physically for example are ways people can be intelligent that is ignored in regular schooling.
Intelligence is largely related to STEM and memory in most instances. But there are a vast number of other ways to be intelligent. Perhaps you excel at emotionally connecting with people, maybe you're really good at cooking or tooling approaches. All of these are ignored in school.
School is nothing more then a checkbox along your path, you need to be able to read, write, do math, etc. But we ignore a large amount of our populace who may excel at grunt work, or maybe they are really good at leadership.
Just because you don't know y=mx+b or struggle at reasoning/logistical challenges does not mean you are not valuable to society. Maybe your 300lbs of rock solid muscle and in a past live would have been a top tier hunter. We do appreciate some amount of sports, but even that stops unless you're in the top 1-2% of the country.
One thing that always strikes me in assessments of intelligence in young children (specially in comparisons with animals) is that they focus on what children can do, where as the really remarkable thing about young children is how fast they can learn.
Some languages are supposed to be very difficult & mentally taxing to learn, because they have many conjugations. But a native speaker with very low intelligence (however you measure it) has zero trouble conjugating it all correctly.
> TIL Psychologist László Polgár theorized that any child could become a genius in a chosen field with early training. As an experiment, he trained his daughters in chess from age 4. All three went on to become chess prodigies, and the youngest, Judit, is considered the best female player in history
The problem there is that just because you can do it doesn't mean it's good for them. I have two cousins who were trained at playing classical instruments from extremely young age(like 2 years old), one of them went on to become a very successful and well known violinist, but......she hates it. She will be the first one to say that the constant almost daily lessons were an absolute nightmare and that she's had no childhood because of it, and it also locked her into being a violinist despite whatever else she might have wanted to do.
Great "achievement" for the parents, but I wouldn't personally do that to my child.
The part of the Polgár story that amazes me the most is that all three daughters showed enough interest and engagement in chess for the experiment to work so successfully. Because with my own children, I’ve seen again and again that you can encourage and expose them to certain interests, but they’re their own people - many of the things I exposed them to and tried to get them excited about just weren’t interesting to them.
And that’s completely fine. I was never forceful about it and they have their own deep interests in things that I just never got into or understood. I just find it surprising that in some families, these exceptional skills and interests are so readily passed from one generation to the next.
There was a 3-part BBC documentary called "My Brilliant Brain" with one that featured Susan, who was the oldest and is today one of the best live chess commentators in the world. The doc talks about her father's theory and practice. His most important understanding was that the child must choose the endeavor of their own free will, and then he merely helped them optimize their learning curve.
Susan has a great quote about showing up to a men's chess club, when she was still young. She said, "I don't think I ever beat a healthy man." Because they were always not feeling well, or whatever lame excuse they conjured up.
The other two parts of the series are on different topics, but are also interesting, but Susan's is our favorite, and I got them long before our son started chess.
And Laszlo's book on chess problems is on my son's bookshelf. It has more than 5000 "problems, combinations, and games". It's been replaced by chess.com's and lichess's puzzle games, but it is still the reference book on chess puzzles, to my understanding.
anybody who has spent time with kids can attest to this
i have a 2.5 year old and its extremely interesting just how much her thinking is clearly 'logical', but it operates in what i like to call 'toddler logic'.
If you ask kids questions, and really listen, their lines of thinking are very clearly following an internal logic. It just isnt one that is entirely compatible with 'adult' reasoning - unless the adult in the room intentionally chooses to communicate in 'toddler logic' operators. Most adults are, sadly and imo, not very good at this!
sometimes the chain of logic and premise is grounded in a different ontology entirely (this is what i am referring to as 'toddler logic' for shorthand). this doesn't invalidate the conclusions or chain of logic used to derive them, when you (adult) is using different ontological anchors, which leads to different conclusions.
being able to inhabit the Other's (toddler's) ontological world and navigate it with them helps sharpen their reasoning skills!
they can figure out the Adult Ontology stuff later and apply those reasoning skills then. It's important to let kids be kids sometimes :) Encouraging their conclusions, and building confidence in their reasoning abilities, these are important endeavors in their own right.
I’ve seen this often. My son is 3 and often tells us his reasoning: “we need to run for the bus because it doesn’t wait for us!”
He always says it like he isn't sure we know about buses yet making me think it’s hard to model others as separate minds with differing information until much older. But his modeling of the world logic is very solid. He can easily use multiple tools to reach high up snacks, or build complex block forts, or reason about what will happen “we will grow up and then go to kindergarten!”
My daughter who is 3 is only recently poddy-trained. She now knows to go to the bathroom next to her room. Before she was trained we had a "portable" toilet (think plastic bowl sitting in a toy-like toilet shell basically) she would occasionally use in her room.
Similarly we've recently trained her when she's done with eating to bring the plate to me or my wife to clean/put up (she can't reach any countertops).
Today she had to go and my wife was in the shower so she couldn't use her normal bathroom. She used her portable toilet, picked it up, and brought it to me to clean :).
This sort of "logic" happens all the time every day and I probably miss 90% of it but I definitely thought of it when I read your question.
My daughter has a number of stuffed animals, and she's attached to one in particular named Eloise.
Often, when we're having trouble persuading her to do something, I can tell her Eloise wants to do that thing. I'll use teeth brushing as an example.
Eloise, being an independent 'person' of sorts in my daughter's mind, accepts the premise that Eloise would want to brush her teeth, (we remind her, Eloise doesnt want cavities, and my daughter agrees with Eloise: cavities are bad!). So we go and pretend to brush Eloise's teeth in the bathroom. Once Eloise is done, my daughter is usually all too ready to brush her own teeth.
As one might imagine, this tactic would not work on most adults. but toddler logic ontology imbues her stuffed animals with a sort of pseudo-agency (sometimes daughter insists Eloise does NOT want to brush her teeth or whatever, but that doesnt happen often, funnily enough).
I blame the laws applying children for why this misconception is so widely spread. If companies hired children more people would realize how capable they are. Instead now they have to segregate and start their own companies or work for free where they won't coexist with adults. Adults have a superiority complex over children and don't want them to compete with them as it would shatter their ego.
Kid's are underestimated all the time. Some personal anecdotes that I think show off that kids know more that we expect of them:
My daughter routinely remembered things, while 3 and 4, that happened a year and sometimes longer ago. She would bring them up, like "last time we were here, was before my last (2nd) birthday". Me: "wow, how do you remember that?"
My friend recalls being ~2yo and deducing how to move a chair and pull a drawer to reach the top of the clothes dresser. After climbing to the top, she recalls sitting, enjoying the view, not knowing how to get down, and crying for help.
My very earliest memory is before I was two. It involved an inflatable weighted balloon, the one's typically with a clown on it and if you bat it down, it rocks back upright. I saw one that was a friendly cop. I can recall several elements of the memory. I recall playing with one of those colorful wire sculpture things where you slide the blocks around like an abacus on drugs, went over to the the balloon cop, and thought to myself, "that is a good guy, why would you a good guy on a toy you hit? It should be a clown." Then I smacked it and went over to see my mom who was at the counter. Looking back, that feels like a lot of reasoning for a <2yo. Years later, when telling my mom that story for the first time, she said that the building where that was was for appointments we had when I was a year and a half old.
It is possible to talk to young children in a grown up way faster than people think, at least for those that do not have recent experience with toddlers.
My son is 2 1/2 and making sure we know he wants to do things his own way.
But if you take time to explain a situation like an adult he backs down eventually. Or, it could be I am just boring him to death and he gives in to shut me up.
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There's subtlety to this, high demands are not high expectations. If there's consequences for not meeting some high standard you set for children, you're going to create a very life-destroying kind of learned helplessness. Kids shouldn't be punished for failure.
And if it's something dangerous to try, then of course it's gotta be something you limit.
But beyond that, just don't assume kids aren't ready for something without evidence. Let them try.
The secret is to treat the kid like an adult until they demonstrate a reason(s) not to. A GF one time asked me why I talked to her nephew “like that?” and I was so confused. She said “you talk to him the same way you talk to me” (ie. the way I talk to anyone). Nephew and I were shooting free throws in the driveway. We get along great. This was very rambly but I think about it all the time.
I’ve gotten the brattiest kids to calm down and accept the situation in meltdowns in youth baseball with the same approach.
I’m not claiming this always works. Many times the situation or kid themselves demonstrates they must be treated like a kid. That’s fine too.
Some warning signs are medical illnesses where a young adult is being sheltered as if they are still in a crisis state of that illness, even though they've grown well beyond it and may benefit from being treating like any normal individual.
It’s different when one’s own kids, and it takes extra patience to have the same skill set as you do with “stranger” kids. Without getting into it too much, being in a position of “authority” with a “stranger” kid changes the dynamic as compared to one’s own kids.
I dunno if that makes sense, but I’ve found it to be true for me.
I also seemed to have figured it out with my own kids, it just takes more work and more patience.
And specifically for expressing you hurt yourself, we teach children to express that they're hurt far earlier than they learn actual speech. So from ~1 we teach them to say "Ow" (or some variation), but then the words change from that to "hurt", and into a full sentence "I hurt myself", which is also redundant (myself and I imply the same thing, so why do we use both in that sentence in English?).
Anyhow just a thought as I'm feeding my son breakfast. "Would you like some breakfast" in English turns into 2 words in his second language.
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I feel children's programming is reflecting those low expectations.
Daniel Tiger's fine, but an episode tends to be so focused on some narrow little thing. The older Mr. Rogers show it's based on tended to be much more wide-ranging, and often had segments introducing parts of the real adult world to a kid.
And there's stuff like Blippi, where you have a man engaging in extremely literal and unimaginative play, being "educational" by teaching colors over and over.
At least I find that works when motivating myself. I didn't expect that I would finish this big skirace this year. But having it as a bonus goal made it very rewarding when I actually did finish it.
One of my main complains about my upbringing is that it didn't demand much of us, and it didn't provide opportunities to extend our wings and do and learn about cool stuff, while failures were treated as the end of the world.
I have felt similar to your sentiment as I raise my 2.5 year old, and as I investigate more, true failure was always insulated by my parent's anxiety preventing a true experience of outcomes. "Don't climb on that ledge because it's wet and you could fall" rather than a climb and tumble off a 2 inch curb with likely no consequence. "Don't eat that meat if it's still pink", etc.
Ironically, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone I've ever met.
Like you said, set the bar high, but keep in mind they're still kids and failure should never be punished. We found that doing that for some time results in them setting the bar high for themselves _all on their own now_. Their confidence is beaming, and they're never afraid to try new things, or try again after failing.
Yes, the fact base kids have is limited due to limited experience & education, but they are able to learn and reason just as well as adolescents and adults, and should be treated like that. What they need is exposure to reasoning methods, clear explanations of logical fallacies, and necessary background information that will help them both articulate complex thoughts and set context for their reasoning.
I would argue that, in many cases, kids are "smarter" than adults because their lack of experience also correlates to increased creativity. Rather than pattern matching based on experience they'll frequently try out-of-the-box methods to solve problems -- this should never be discouraged.
Let’s be nice to each other and ourselves when try..and learn.
I know it doesn't always work that way, but a lot of times our failures aren't just "on us", but affect others.
Children seem to demonstrate when given support to explore their curiosities as a gateway to learning (Similar to Reggio Emelia approaches).
When my kid was 18 months old, we had gated him off from a playroom with a bunch of toys used by his older brother that were not baby-safe. We had a DoorMonkey [1] placed up high, about 5 feet tall, so that only adults could reach. My kid gets a chair from across the room, pushes it next to the door, climbs up on top of it, unlatches the DoorMonkey, pushes open the door, climbs down from the chair, enters the playroom, looks at me, and says "Bye!" At that moment my wife gets out of the bathroom, sees the tableau, says "____? What are you doing?" and my toddler says "Uh oh."
[1] https://doormonkey.com/
When I came back he immediately knew he'd been caught. Though I wasn't at all mad, it was a wakeup-call that from then on placing things too high was probably a challenge for him, rather than an absolute protection.
He can recognise a lot of birds, trees, flowers (daffodils, primroses, hyacinths, tulips) coming out in the garden at the moment, only needs to be told what it is once or twice for it to stick.
Except in her case it meant "Witness me!!, as I do something exceedingly dangerous!", or alternatively "Look at the aftermath of this dangerous thing I just did, see the blood?"
Luckily she's only succeeded once so far, but nevertheless we're trying to figure out how to make sure the knives are safely out of reach (because she's also figured out how to climb the counter with a chair, obviously) without it becoming too inconvenient for us as well.
The first time he went into the kitchen after I had installed it, he notices it immediately, walks straight up to it, grasps it with both hands like an adult would, and has it unlatched within 5 seconds. He then proceeds to look at me like "Is this some sort of test?"
This is similar with people. Many people are quite intelligent, just not in a way we value or understand.
I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.
Let's look at a few counterpoints:
- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.
- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).
Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.
Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.
But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
I have a relative who does well at poker, despite not finishing school. A drainage guy I know has a good understanding of the business and where the opportunities are. In general a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it". I've run into a bunch of these people who you don't think of as being intelligent, but if you frame something as a game, they know how to play.
None of these people could be taught high school calculus, for instance, but they are still intelligent in a way that's useful to them.
If we're talking about kids, from about the age of four they learn to trick you. "Dad, you have to give me ice cream. Mom says so. Don't wake her up." And it gets more and more sophisticated as they get older.
Intelligence is largely related to STEM and memory in most instances. But there are a vast number of other ways to be intelligent. Perhaps you excel at emotionally connecting with people, maybe you're really good at cooking or tooling approaches. All of these are ignored in school.
School is nothing more then a checkbox along your path, you need to be able to read, write, do math, etc. But we ignore a large amount of our populace who may excel at grunt work, or maybe they are really good at leadership.
Just because you don't know y=mx+b or struggle at reasoning/logistical challenges does not mean you are not valuable to society. Maybe your 300lbs of rock solid muscle and in a past live would have been a top tier hunter. We do appreciate some amount of sports, but even that stops unless you're in the top 1-2% of the country.
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1d9gjeh/til_psycholo...
Great "achievement" for the parents, but I wouldn't personally do that to my child.
And that’s completely fine. I was never forceful about it and they have their own deep interests in things that I just never got into or understood. I just find it surprising that in some families, these exceptional skills and interests are so readily passed from one generation to the next.
Susan has a great quote about showing up to a men's chess club, when she was still young. She said, "I don't think I ever beat a healthy man." Because they were always not feeling well, or whatever lame excuse they conjured up.
The other two parts of the series are on different topics, but are also interesting, but Susan's is our favorite, and I got them long before our son started chess.
And Laszlo's book on chess problems is on my son's bookshelf. It has more than 5000 "problems, combinations, and games". It's been replaced by chess.com's and lichess's puzzle games, but it is still the reference book on chess puzzles, to my understanding.
i have a 2.5 year old and its extremely interesting just how much her thinking is clearly 'logical', but it operates in what i like to call 'toddler logic'.
If you ask kids questions, and really listen, their lines of thinking are very clearly following an internal logic. It just isnt one that is entirely compatible with 'adult' reasoning - unless the adult in the room intentionally chooses to communicate in 'toddler logic' operators. Most adults are, sadly and imo, not very good at this!
I can concoct some flawless chain of logic leading to some conclusion but it’s all for naught if the premises it is based on are invalid.
An intelligent listener can listen and find where the base misunderstanding is and teach from there. Teaching from the false conclusion is a mistake.
sometimes the chain of logic and premise is grounded in a different ontology entirely (this is what i am referring to as 'toddler logic' for shorthand). this doesn't invalidate the conclusions or chain of logic used to derive them, when you (adult) is using different ontological anchors, which leads to different conclusions.
being able to inhabit the Other's (toddler's) ontological world and navigate it with them helps sharpen their reasoning skills!
they can figure out the Adult Ontology stuff later and apply those reasoning skills then. It's important to let kids be kids sometimes :) Encouraging their conclusions, and building confidence in their reasoning abilities, these are important endeavors in their own right.
He always says it like he isn't sure we know about buses yet making me think it’s hard to model others as separate minds with differing information until much older. But his modeling of the world logic is very solid. He can easily use multiple tools to reach high up snacks, or build complex block forts, or reason about what will happen “we will grow up and then go to kindergarten!”
My daughter who is 3 is only recently poddy-trained. She now knows to go to the bathroom next to her room. Before she was trained we had a "portable" toilet (think plastic bowl sitting in a toy-like toilet shell basically) she would occasionally use in her room.
Similarly we've recently trained her when she's done with eating to bring the plate to me or my wife to clean/put up (she can't reach any countertops).
Today she had to go and my wife was in the shower so she couldn't use her normal bathroom. She used her portable toilet, picked it up, and brought it to me to clean :).
This sort of "logic" happens all the time every day and I probably miss 90% of it but I definitely thought of it when I read your question.
Often, when we're having trouble persuading her to do something, I can tell her Eloise wants to do that thing. I'll use teeth brushing as an example.
Eloise, being an independent 'person' of sorts in my daughter's mind, accepts the premise that Eloise would want to brush her teeth, (we remind her, Eloise doesnt want cavities, and my daughter agrees with Eloise: cavities are bad!). So we go and pretend to brush Eloise's teeth in the bathroom. Once Eloise is done, my daughter is usually all too ready to brush her own teeth.
As one might imagine, this tactic would not work on most adults. but toddler logic ontology imbues her stuffed animals with a sort of pseudo-agency (sometimes daughter insists Eloise does NOT want to brush her teeth or whatever, but that doesnt happen often, funnily enough).
So yes, I’d say people woefully underestimate the abilities of children.
We seem to have a very very strong bias towards assuming less/no intelligence in anything that isn’t an adult human.
And people ascribe intelligence to Eliza, a 200-line Basic program.
My daughter routinely remembered things, while 3 and 4, that happened a year and sometimes longer ago. She would bring them up, like "last time we were here, was before my last (2nd) birthday". Me: "wow, how do you remember that?"
My friend recalls being ~2yo and deducing how to move a chair and pull a drawer to reach the top of the clothes dresser. After climbing to the top, she recalls sitting, enjoying the view, not knowing how to get down, and crying for help.
My very earliest memory is before I was two. It involved an inflatable weighted balloon, the one's typically with a clown on it and if you bat it down, it rocks back upright. I saw one that was a friendly cop. I can recall several elements of the memory. I recall playing with one of those colorful wire sculpture things where you slide the blocks around like an abacus on drugs, went over to the the balloon cop, and thought to myself, "that is a good guy, why would you a good guy on a toy you hit? It should be a clown." Then I smacked it and went over to see my mom who was at the counter. Looking back, that feels like a lot of reasoning for a <2yo. Years later, when telling my mom that story for the first time, she said that the building where that was was for appointments we had when I was a year and a half old.
My son is 2 1/2 and making sure we know he wants to do things his own way.
But if you take time to explain a situation like an adult he backs down eventually. Or, it could be I am just boring him to death and he gives in to shut me up.