Forget coding, we need to teach our kids how to dream
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I have no idea how to teach someone to dream. I can teach someone to look at a piece of lumber and see a jewellery box or a bird table or a guitar. I can teach someone to look at a pile of scrap electronics and see a headphone amplifier or an egg timer or a robot. I can teach someone to look at a group of bored people and see a theatre company or a choir or an expedition.
IMO, we're seeing a generation of young people who want to change the world, but only know how to write essays and recite facts. There's a desperate lack of doing in the lives of our children - they have been taught by thousands of hours of schooling and after-schooling to be obedient followers. They're very good at being squeaky wheels, but they don't know how to make things happen. Their lives are bereft of making and doing, of unstructured and unsupervised play.
I love to imagine what some older folk must've have said about "kids these days" back in the 60s and 70s. Probably a pile of useless fornicating, high-seeking hippies...
But I digress.
From my perspective, we're seeing this generation swoon over the dream of being doers and entrepreneurs. Isn't the lifeblood of nearly every startup young and hungry talent willing to work to "change the world" or make "the next big thing"? Isn't the average age of YC founders in the mid 20s? Aren't technology companies are often criticized for being agist?
I often wonder about adults these days...
[0]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/when-...
What percentage of young adults work in a startup? I know we're on HN here, but don't forget there's a world outside Silicon Valley...
I'm not a naysayer or a nostalgic pessimist. I think that there are clear trends in society, some positive and some negative. It's obviously great news that we no longer consider it acceptable to beat children or to smoke during pregnancy. There is a clear trend in parenting and schooling towards more structure, more pressure and far less independence. We have seen a huge increase in educational attainment and college admission which is overwhelmingly a good thing, but the greater focus on academic study has come at the cost of other skills.
For every twentysomething who founds a startup, there are dozens of baristas with liberal arts degrees. A lot of those baristas might dream of founding a startup, but very few of them have the skills, experience and confidence to do so. Research indicates that the average age of an entrepreneur is actually 40; most successful businesses are founded by people with an established career and a great deal of professional experience. High rates of youth unemployment and underemployment are likely to have a significant impact on innovation in ten or twenty years.
http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2010/05/the-anat...
Innovation is corporate-speak for actual company processes where they change things up like their business model, or their target customers or their product etc. I believe he is talking about teaching some of those techniques in an education environment.
The attributes he mentions (relationships, curiosity, agility, creativity, empathy) are teachable skills in that context. The sort of lateral thinking exercises that Edward De Bono advocates or other brainstorming methods are used in the more kiddy version in alternative style schools like Montessori or Steiner schools.
In those schools it is an active-learning, constructivist philosophy where kids have to cooperate with each other on projects and seek out the info rather than be fed info. It's not like practical skills aren't taught. Some are very hands-on. They might build a windmill or something. As they do, they learn all about physics and mechanics.
We can't all be managers.
> We can’t begin to imagine a career in 2020, let alone 2030.
Come on. Those are 3 and 13 years away.
It talks about "fake news" needing to be fought, but then advocates against factual knowledge to do so. The way you know something is fake is by having a well of knowledge to draw from. It's not just rote memorization, it's putting the pieces together, which you can't do if you just rely on Google for everything.
Come on. Those are 3 and 13 years away.
I wrote my entrance essay on digging in the dirt. Maybe I got lucky. I think that AP classes, and extracurricular activities are like being a Stanford grad when applying at a big tech company. They are a way for hiring managers/admissions officers to avoid bad outcomes not to optimize for good ones.
Baseline requirements: near 1600 SAT and near 4.0 unweighted GPA taking the hardest classes. To the school, this proves you'll be able to survive at a top 10. Again, this is a requirement for consideration not admission.
What gets you in: curiosity, creativity, and passion. The most compelling candidates have a narrative and a drive that speaks through the application. Say your kid loves botany, dance, travel, music, or engineering. Foster those interests and enable them to achieve in what they love. An admission officer would swoon over a kid with a passion for biology and husbandry over the directionless one who took every AP science class in the books and joined umpteen honor society.
Now maybe I'm just complaining about being a bad student, but I'm at least a little suspicious of students who have so willingly grabbed onto that system and don't see through it for the farce it is. I think it's more likely that you'll get excellent employees out of those people than it is that you'll find great creative passion. The time investment required for such marks certainly weighs against it.
I do think calling the system a farce is a rather extreme exaggeration. Imagine you want to be an engineer. In what way are the AP math and science courses inadequate preparations for what's to come in college? Yes, a kid could choose to mindlessly take these classes, but if he's taking them while building and racing go carts, would you not see him differently?
> Took almost every AP class, 1600 SAT, tons and tons of random clubs. Got in nowhere.
I wish people new how not uncommon this is.
> Yes, a kid could choose to mindlessly take these classes, but if he's taking them while building and racing go carts, would you not see him differently?
This is a great and completely realistic example. It's tough to read good applications that have specific examples along these lines and say anything other than "wow, that's cool" (Note: there are also weak applications that have narratives like this, but that's a different issue -- it's not a crude formula).
This is a half truth. They do things that typically are not that difficult for smart kids with good study skills like get good grades and get good SAT scores.
> I'm at least a little suspicious of students who have so willingly grabbed onto that system and don't see through it for the farce it is
The really smart and wise kids precisely see it for the farce that it is. As such, they do what it takes to get good grades and spend the rest of their time doing something that is actually interesting and/or productive.
The idea that getting into an elite school is just a matter of grinding harder than the next person is just a misguided perception that works occasionally at best, and often for reasons that aren't stated. For example, a recruited athlete who can also grind academics is actually a strong candidate, but the key is the "recruited athlete" part rather than the "grind academics" part.
And there you have it. If you have to have perfect grades you can't experiment or take any risks. A hardcore science student for whom math is easy could never study a language, or work on something they're not as good at.
Foreign language and writing skills are a requirement. Assuming a school has non-STEM class like history, its expected that they'll take those classes too. Admissions doesn't penalize a student for getting a B in a "risk" class like music theory. Remember its near 4.0.
I also think you're missing the point.
In great part, schools deny a student for his own good. They feel that student should go to a less demanding school so he can nurse his academic skills instead of drinking from a firehose.
For most of the students top schools admit, 1600 and 4.0 unweighted isn't a particularly difficult achievement.
"It's for your own good" is a pretty arrogant attitude. There are tons of people who are capable of drinking from the firehose who don't excel in High School. Why not just admit that your selectiveness is a form of risk-aversion on your part, as in you'd rather not take a chance on a B-student.
- If a smart student has strong learning strategies, high school classes as a general rule should not be difficult to get good grades in. There are exceptions for demonstrably capricious teachers --these teachers should definitely be avoided and are generally not difficult to identify except in one's first year of high school (even then...). If a student struggles in a class or in a certain discipline (e.g., math or foreign languages) in high school, then I humbly suggest that they are either not that smart, have significant gaps in their learning strategies, or have some sort of learning block. IMHO, all of these things if they persist throughout high school are potentially valid reasons to reject a person from an elite university since they will cause much bigger problems later.
- Contrary to what 'fny says, you can actually get quite a few Bs in high school and still get accepted to an elite school. Ditto with an SAT score that is not close to 1600. The catch is that the applicant needs to make up for it elsewhere in the application. Really interesting candidates don't have problem with this.
- If you think studying Greek and Latin tenses for 20 hours a week is the key to getting a high SAT verbal score, then I think you have been grossly misled. For smart kids, just regularly reading and understanding "high brow" magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Weekly Standard, The New Yorker, etc. is more than enough to build a very healthy SAT-ready vocabulary as well as high level reading comprehension skills. If you mention the idea of Greek and Latin roots to smart kids, they will be able to figure out what a lot of the core ones are based on their reading. Note that this type of reading will also give them good schemata for higher level writing.
- The "it's for your own good" comment definitely seems arrogant, and it kind of is. That said, it's kind of right, too. It's rough to see a smart kid struggle at an elite school because they lack some fundamentals that a lot of the entering class comes in with (e.g., study strategies, writing skills, background knowledge, etc.). That said, the ones who can "drink from the firehouse" despite mediocre grades are usually obvious to admissions committees since they excel to a phenomenal level on some other vector (e.g., international science fair winner, amazing inventor, etc.).
- You are half right with your comment on risk aversion and taking a risk on a B-student. Without any other evidence that this hypothetical B-student will fit in and/or excel, they are likely to be unhappy as well as be a minor or negative contributor to their peer groups (i.e., they will have to be "carried" in group work and/or they will set the team back by not being able to do adequate work). One of the things that makes elite schools amazing (as well as some honors programs at 2nd tier schools) is that you can learn a lot from your peers.
- Note that I think 'fny is largely talking about the standards for Caucasian and Asian non-athlete non-diversity applicants from the NE corridor and the west coast. There are a metric shit ton of B-students (and worse!) at elite schools. They tend to be recruited athletes (esp. in football and basketball, but in other sports as well), diversity candidates (note that this is not just racial diversity, but also geographical diversity), z-listers, or people coming in with a lot of social capital. There are also vastly different standards for applicants at universities like Penn where they apply to a school within the university. For example, the average profiles for Wharton students and Nursing students are quite different, and this difference can sometimes be magnified by other factors like geographical preference (e.g., a nursing student from rural PA might have an application that would shock a few HNers).
This is a pet topic of mine. If you have any more questions, I will be happy to answer.
+ What do you recommend as reading to parents? E.g. my daughter is blessed with a great memory (e.g. memorized the periodic table at 3.5 years). I'm aghast at how bad the world of parenting media is. Our goal is to set her on the path to use her talents in interesting, fulfilling ways, not to turn her into an automaton.
As far as admissions matters, I have worked with and/or on admissions committees for two Ivies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I have never been an admissions officer myself (I am on a different career path), but I am really glad the people who do those jobs seem to love it -- it can be a surprisingly tough job.
A few comments:
- RE similar/boring resumes from Ivy students -- The dirty little secret is that only about 10-30% of Ivy grads actually stand out intellectually. The rest are very meh -- smart and often hardworking, but definitely meh. This doesn't change after they graduate. This may seem to conflict with other comments that I made in this thread, but it actually doesn't. There are a ton of Ivy students who are bringing other things to the table (e.g., recruited athlete, social capital, diversity metrics, etc.), so getting good grades and a good SAT score is enough to push them over the top. Said another way, they may not be interesting intellectually, but they are interesting in other ways that the school values.
- RE strong school crazy side project -- These are the people I love. The best part is that for the most part it doesn't really matter where they go to school -- they will be winners in life. Seek these people out as often as possible, and your life will be rich.
- RE recommended reading 1 -- I am slightly embarrassed to say that I am not up to date on recommended readings for parents since I basically "roll my own" research-backed plans at this point. That said, I can tell you some of the authors I have read who shaped my concepts of learning. I am a neo-Piagetian, so my bias will show in the following list of academic authors: Jerome Bruner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Howard Gardner (be careful about derivative works by others -- they sometimes bastardize his original work), Robert Sternberg, Lev Vygotsky (usu. in summary... he wrote in Russian), David Perkins, Robert Kegan (esp. In Over Our Heads), Kurt Fischer (esp. Human Behavior...), Eleanor Duckworth, and Jean Piaget (seriously, just know the basic idea of stages of child development -- his ideas have been significantly refined over the past few decades). Just search Amazon for these authors, read the reviews, and pick one that sounds interesting. Most of the books are accessible for non-academics, but they are backed by solid research with accompanying solid research publications. Given that I have just given you a list of accessible graduate level readings...
- RE recommended reading 2 -- For high school students and soon-to-be college applicants, I have heard that Cal Newport's books are good. Note that I have not read them myself, but the comments on Amazon and various blurbs seem to show that he is on the right track. That said, I hope that he doesn't provide a formula ("just do these 15 steps to get into your dream school"), because a strict formula won't work since people and contexts can often be very different. I would hope that the main takeaways are abstracted one level so that they can be applied to a variety of contexts. Other than that, I don't have much for you.
- RE great memory -- I am curious about why your daughter memorized the periodic table. Was she encouraged to? Did she do it naturally? Is she normally encouraged to memorize things? Feats of memory often turn into a type of parlor game that young children can use to get positive feedback from adults, and it's an unfortunately easy crutch to lean on. If you are looking for a non-automaton, I would try to steer clear of heavily rewarding this behavior if at all possible. Specifically, let them know that it was a good job to memorize something, but that memorization needs to have a purpose. The big rewards should come with the higher-order thinking accomplishment that the memorization facilitated. That's just my opinion...
- RE general parenting -- Kids are intellectual sponges -- they are naturally born scientists, artists, and sociologists. The best thing you can do is facilitate their exploration and model best practices for them. Help them push their own intellectual boundaries in a relatively safe way (easy to say, hard to do -- short hint is to bring them back with a small success once they have hit cognitive break down). Model good processes for them -- for example, likes-dislikes-questions-improvements review process, revising (or refactoring code, or drafts for papers, or studies for art, or whatever similar concept that top performers do for revisions and development), etc. Modeling good empathy practices from a young age can reap huge dividends. I could go on......
- RE parenting media -- It's hard to do one-size-fits-all media on good parenting. As I mentioned before, people and contexts can vary widely. Another issue is that sometimes parents are bringing their own issues to the table, so seemingly good parenting advice can sometimes go sideways when interpreted through the parent(s) with issues. A top-notch parenting book would probably start with "make sure you have addressed all of your own major issues" and would lose a big chunk of their readership/market right there.
OK, wall of text achieved. I will stop here. Let me know if you have more questions, and we can touch base via other means.
Admissions officers look for born-geniuses that can effortlessly get perfect scores. Then they fill the rest with lesser geniuses that had to work at getting the perfect scores.
Once you get IN Ivy top 10, it is not that hard to survive.
"An admission officer would swoon over a kid with a passion for biology and husbandry"
Thanks for sharing and I've heard this to be case from multiple sources as well, which means, it can also be gamed. Parents can structure their children's lives in order to weave this kind of narrative.
Meh... I hear this a lot. This is a gross over-characterization of the reality. There are plenty of true geniuses with high grades and high SAT scores who do not get into elite schools. The applicants need something else.
> Thanks for sharing and I've heard this to be case from multiple sources as well, which means, it can also be gamed.
This is a half-truth.
A mediocre applicant will have nothing to show from their experiences, and their recommendation from a person in that field will probably be something like "applicant is nice, shows up, and tries hard". A strong applicant will have something like a publication or a documented initiative that they led, and their recommendation will be something like "applicant did things that went above and beyond what many of our regular employees do -- I don't want this applicant to leave for school because we will be a worse place without them" (with believable detailed examples). Even that will be gamed, and sometimes it is, but there will usually be gaps in the narrative unless there is a decent-sized group of people who are colluding together.
Whenever someone thinks that there is a new formula for getting into elite schools, they don't realize that the key ingredients are things like creativity, curiosity, and leadership. These are ridiculously hard to fake in a compelling manner.
As I have said elsewhere, this is more like a typical (but not universal) requirement for a specific group of people -- specifically, Caucasian and Asain non-athletes non-diversity candidates (including and especially geographical diversity) who live in the NE corridor on on the west coast.
There are lots of kids who get into Ivies who do not have near 1600 and/or a near 4.0 unweighted GPA. That said, they are usually bringing something else significant to the table.
> What gets you in: curiosity, creativity, and passion.
I think this is the key. There is a ton of forgiveness for things like less than ideal grades or SAT scores, the characteristics mentioned above can go a long way towards ameliorating any perceived deficiencies.
As a simple example, I know one student who was admitted to an elite school with an SAT score in the 1400s, quite a few Bs, quiet student... who also happened to be a self-taught EDM musician who was highly popular and in high demand on the EDM circuit.
His experiences developing music and navigating the EDM scene while also being a pretty darn good student showed that he is one of those people who can get cool shit done.
They will definitely need awesome grades in non-puff classes as well as a very high SAT score, but this is not terribly difficult for kids smart kids who have figured out the fundamentals of learning strategies.
The jammed-packed extracurriculars and overweighted AP classes done to the exclusion of interesting things just makes them a clone of a bunch of other applicants that don't really stand out.
First, the myth of the "increasingly unpredictable world". It's common, perhaps especially so in tech circles, but not particularly sound when seen in the greater context of history. "A world more divided and polarised than ever" is just rot. (And talking about history: "In recent years, we have considered maths, reading, and writing as the basic building blocks for survival" - has this guy ever heard about the septem artes liberales? Even the Romans had the "three Rs" in their education!)
Secondly: yes, we do still need to have factual knowledge - even in the age of Google and Wikipedia. The Internet can furnish you with just about any piece of information you desire, but information does not equate knowledge! Of course, critical thinking is indeed just that - critical - but thinking requires knowledge. Trying to think without a base of knowledge just isn't possible. As for his statement "we’re living in a world where we outsource knowledge and skills to the Internet": who put the information on the Internet in the first place?
Thirdly, the importance of creativity. Yes, creativity is incredibly important. But again, creativity without skill is dead. And what does skill require? That's right, practice. Lot's of it. Before you can be truly creative, you've got to be persistent. Before schools can profitably teach creativity, they need to teach persistence and skills.
And last: relationships. Well, the fact that relationships are vital is a bit of a no-brainer. They always have been. But when the author says "I don’t need to know how to [do stuff] but I do need to know the very best people who can", that's just rubbish. Because if everybody had that attitude, nobody would know how to do anything at all! You don't need to be the best, and you don't need to know how to do everything - but you sure as heck need to know how to do something!
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
When I say "Alexa, what's the weather today?" I'm coding.
For as long as there is some desire to command a machine and stringing those commands together, there will be code.
Having worked (albeit briefly) on similar systems in the past, no, really, you aren't.
I can't dream about performing surgery on someone. If someone had taught me everything I needed to know to be a decent surgeon, and then introduced me to some important people hiring surgeons, and told me to go "dream"...
then I would be a surgeon.
If they told me to dream first, I probably wouldn't.
Millenials are the convenient whipping boy for this. As a much-maligned group (e.g. [1]) many adjectives are attached e.g. Entitled, narcissistic, lazy.
This is of course a generalization that leads to the inevitable fallacious defense of disprooof by counterexample but honestly this cliche isn't without cause in my experience.
The education system focuses a little too much on creativity and not at all on developing skills or any kind of rote learning. I remember seeing an English documentary about students who got As in GCSE French that couldn't conjugate avoir (to have). As a side not the British government tackled the grade inflation problem by creating the A* grade above an A because too many people were getting As.
There's been a ton of research showing how it's damaging to tell people they're inherently special rather than complementing they're effort ("you're smart" vs "you worked really hard on that") e.g. [2].
So I really don't think that overall the ability to dream is a problem. Just look at how many think they're going to be movie stars, music successes and startup billionaires despite the chance of success in any of these being incepredibly low.
How is this not dreaming run amok?
[1] http://time.com/247/millennials-the-me-me-me-generation/
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/the-s-...
The education system does a terrible job of teaching people how to be creative. Educators don't even understand creativity, how can they teach it? Creativity in school is usually a code-word for "this work won't be graded for content".
Rote learning has been shown time and time again to be the least effective, least engaging, most dispiriting form of learning. You want someone to learn something? Let them choose from some projects where the thing you want them to learn is required to complete it. That works much better, but unfortunately it's not so convenient for teachers. There's a reason people pick up languages quickly from immersion learning, and frequently not at all from traditional language classes.
Ultimately, effective dreaming isn't about imagining yourself being at the goal post, i.e. being a millionaire or actor. That form of dream is like a mental opiate that actually saps your motivation. Effective dreaming involves imagining yourself overcoming challenges and taking action to move towards your goal. That sort of dreaming actually motivates people to act.
To heap some anecdotes on the pile, every really sharp autodidact I've ever met or read about takes a functional, project-first approach to learning. I've never met anyone exceptional that focused on rote memorization. I did meet one good mathematician who would go cover to cover solving problems out of advanced textbooks, but he viewed them as fun puzzles like you might view sudoku.
Then for something like software engineering, I can imagine that a "project-first approach" as you call it may work well.
Once software engineering is eliminated, pretty much all jobs are eliminated, and all bets are off.
Also known as "recursive self-improvement", "intelligence explosion", or "AI going FOOM".
Almost all structure is organized into log n tree structures to manage complexity. There's limited room at the top. All advice that focuses driving towards these limited spots seem ill conceived to me. The overall goal should be to improve the overall wealth of each node. But when everyone is trying and training to be a leader, you end up with 99% rejects with strengths that actually hamper them to be productive because now they think they're too good for everything else.
Great many of modern children live in an insulated world void of consequences.
For example, the anti-bullying campaigns went way too far. Way too far. Kids are stupid but still have to learn to solve their problems and they have to have the space to make mistakes.
>You get bad marks if you don't memorise arbitrary completely useless facts well enough.
Sure. But you still have to learn to deal with it. It's not enough to say public education sucks so you can just tune out.
E: “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.”
I: “Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?”
E: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/01/einstein-imagination...
Pretty arrogant to think of steering generations around. They still shouldn't trust anyone over 30.
> at the expense of human lives.
I think you mean to imply that children will become mindless coding machines, but would you not agree that coding can help to expand your view of the world, just as learning a language or beginning to paint?
As the article implies:
> Each and every one of us is born curious and creative,
everyone has the ability to form connections in their mind. Is coding as a facilitator to our curiosity? Maybe it is only a matter of nurturing a coding experience that complements that curiosity.
Yes and no. Basically, learning how to get along with others is a skill you need to learn and practice just like coding. If you don't have the opportunities or take the time to practice, you won't learn it.
In a good environment, you have enough contact with other people that "soft skills" seem to come automatically. But if you spend a significant portion of your developmental years isolated (for whatever reason), social skills are anything but natural.
There's no point in arguing whether left brain or right brain is best brain.
Both approaches are half-brained ;)