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Comment by scientician | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has been through many forms of 'gifted' and 'enriched' and 'special' education, these articles always sadden me. Does anyone truly believe that optimizing children for their economic output really leads to a good life for their country?

Here's a radical idea: let them have childhoods!

I strongly support letting kids be free to develop and think for themselves. If a 'gifted' child can succeed despite being imprisoned in a school for many years, imagine how much they could grow and contribute if they were free?

For anyone with children, or who cares about the future of western democracy, please look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

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I'll bite - yes, I think it leads to both a good life for them and benefit for country.

I don't know what your gifted education programs were like, but I never recall feeling like I missed out on my childhood. Occasionally I would take different classes to some of my friends (but with others), and that was about it.

Far from keeping people from being free to develop and think for themselves, most of the gifted classes I took actively encouraged that, with open-ended problem solving and free-form classes often led by student interest.

But children need to be reined in, they don't have the reasoning skills or understanding of adults; the one time I was allowed to fully control my own syllabus it led almost directly to me losing the ability to speak Cantonese, which I'd been fluent in up to that point. As a kid who'd spoken it all his life, I simply didn't believe all of the people who told me I'd forget it without practice. Because I was a child.

I don't know exactly how free-form Sudbury Schools are, but I'd have extreme reservations about sending my children to one.

So the lesson you learned wasn't that you had the power to choose what you learned and how to do so responsibly?

Did you instead learn these things?:

• exercising that power could lead to you losing a skill

• doing so is bad

• you don't have the power to choose your own course corrections when you notice a skill waning

Based on your suggestion that children need to be controlled, I think your experience was limited and too short.

I grant I learned all of those things, but I think pretty well everyone learns those things by adulthood, and I don't think my forgetting a language especially honed my understanding of those points.

I don't even know if you're arguing in good faith, because your second dot point isn't really a thing that even a child needs to learn.

I'll also thank you not to suggest that our differences of opinion are due to your superior understanding of my upbringing.

I agree...I think those are things we're culturally taught, typically implicitly and not explicitly.

And I don't assume to have an understanding of your upbringing. That's why I was posing it all as questions. The points I made are things I think can potentially hinder learning and are commonplace in society.

You ultimately have to want the skill. The gp would have noticed his skill gradually waning, not suddenly when it had gone, yet as a kid he didn't care for it.

How would you notice a skill waning if you aren't using it at the time?

You're right, I don't know what actual skill I had in mind there (one are you are no longer trained in but still use). I meant to say, even when a kid is wise to the danger of not taking lessons, they don't know what subjects are best for them or how many different ones must be pursued.

I think the key is to teach them a way to integrate whatever they learn into a joyful life that strives to contribute to all other life.

Teach them to tap into intuition, ask (not demand) for help when support is needed, and learn how to learn.

My early life was miserable for the exact reason that people wanted me to "have a childhood" and held me back from what I really wanted to do. I didn't work as a programmer until I was 16.

I do agree that "gifted" programs are mostly a waste, given that schoolteachers are unlikely to have any useful advice for any given students' area of interest.

The whole point of non-coercive education is to allow children to pursue what they actually want to do, not what some adults believe they should do. It is just as counterproductive to force a child to learn computer programming when they want to be playing outside as it is to force them to play outside when they want to be programming computers!

> The whole point of non-coercive education is to allow children to pursue what they actually want to do.

In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless when you "just want to be a programmer", they all give the possibility of finding new ways of thinking or improve some parts of the brain. In the context of cursive for example, I think acquiring better motor skills means that a programmer could type faster thus making that faster-typing programmer a bit better than other programmers.

If I were given the choice to do what I wanted to do I would suck at what I would want to do. For example I don't like math much, but if I weren't forced to "just" do it I wouldn't understand way too many basic concepts in for example programming.

Though I do agree with the idea of mentors guiding students, I remember reading a paper about it being super effective compared to regular classroom teaching, I really wish I would have had that chance back when I was younger.

Back before mass public education (100 years ago?) these mentors were called parents, relatives, and friends of the former. Maybe, as we no longer need to train people to get places on time and be a cog in an industrial factory, we can return to this method of education. Then move on to an apprenticeship when one is old enough.

I think parents, relatives and friends of the former still act as mentors, but it just isn't very likely every family has that support network. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I do think we need to train people to get places on time and be a cog, there has always been and will be societal pressure to be a cog that fits with others. I think once automation gets to the point it can replace teachers (having at least the same quality) we're going to see what humans can truly achieve given the best education possible.

I'm choosing to not enroll my future children in the education system or capitalism, for that matter, for exactly this reason.

My kids' teachers will be there community, with myself and my partner as facilitators. It's time to get back to learning how to learn together.

When you make a policy of about avoiding the education system and then you use “there community,” it kind of weakens your point.

And capitalism? You aren’t going to enroll them in capitalism? How’s that work? You’re not going to let them buy things or work for money?

Before you try to “facilitate” education for your future children, it might be a good idea to facilitate your own education first.

Thanks for pointing out the autocorrect issue.

I'm going to explain to them there are other ways of meeting human needs, like developing a supportive community among people who all help each other. I'll also minimize the things we use money for, as well as the ways we bring money in. There are already groups online geared toward this goal, such as Buy Nothing groups. This is how capitalism will start to be phased out and how I intend on doing my part.

I'll also teach them to realize sometimes forgetting to proofread is not an indication of being uneducated.

This comment also got my interest. What exactly will you do to educate your child? What do you mean by not enrolling them in capitalism? Will your primary focus be on programming skills for them?

I'll educate them myself. I'm currently looking to design a lesson plan built around songs with lyrics encoding the lessons. I'd also like to design the interior of my home to help them develop intuive visualizations of concepts.

Not enrolling them means educating them about how humanity:

• goes through cultural phases, sometimes cyclically

• is currently in a transitional phase between creating legal systems that don't recognize the freedom to choose any strategy to meet a fundamental need for life (eg. the freedom from money) and creating legal systems that do.

• changes through culture, so what we do with our lives can be considered a voting system

• is going from a point in time where programming ourselves on the individual level is done intuitively without explicitly defining the mathematics of doing so to a point where we can use category theory of the brain & mind to explicitly define models we're using to program ourselves

• is going through a period where we don't see how we can cooperate without laws to a period where we can start defining culture-driven, decentralized ways of life

• periods are identifies by the messages within their culture and the actions those messages lead to and stem from

• old periods use shame, blame, criticism, judgment, anger, scarcity, control, and other forms of denying needs in their actions/messages

• can make up and choose whatever messages to believe, on an individual and collective level

• can learn through our example

• can learn to accept that helping someone materially can be repaid emotionally/physically/mentally/spiritually/socially, so material possessions aren't necessary

• is comprised of individuals who experience a world they're modeling based on what they sense and perceive, so anytime they say anything, it's to a person in their head and not the real person, so nothing is personal

The primary focus will be on self-programming skills and studying how human needs naturally emerge from a basic definition of life (http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-mean...).

I'm packaging all this as a religion of absurdity devoted to helping the world through hacking the self. It's a choose-your-own-religion religion. The reason for making it into a religion is because that's what happens when we radically decentralize: everyone governs themselves how they like, including what beliefs they choose and laws that follow. I'm be curious to see how it stands up against current religious legal theory in the US, as well as around the world.

If I teach my kids this stuff and we talk about the needs they're meeting or trying to meet through their actions, we can diagram it all out and reason about things in a clearer way.

Or at least that's the hypothesis I'm testing through experimenting on my kids in this way.

You're making a massive bet on your own ideas being right (and useful): learning what is normally taught has at least been proven out to keep people off the streets. We don't actually have the "freedom from money," so you'd be in a pretty bad position if you had no idea how to get it.

(note: if you have a trust fund set up or something, then I guess it balances out. Just get ready for them to rebel in their teens by becoming neoliberals and putting up posters of Henry Kissinger on their walls.)

You may be right. And while we may not have the freedom from money enshrined in current laws, money is not a human need, so we have an inalienable right to choose whatever strategy we want, as long as it doesn't harm others.

Ultimately, for the time being, we can only seek to minimize how we interact with money until the law catches up with human understanding. It's really hard to dump capitalism altogether and/or overnight, so it's about progressively stepping down/back.

> In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless...

There's a difference between challenging a child and loading that child up with busy work. My "college prep" school was mostly busy work; I spent more time on schoolwork in high school than college.

For example, exposure to history is important, but do you really need to push all the smart kids to the dry, dense history books? Do all the smart kids need to take only advanced classes in foriegn languages? I stumbled on anything that required wrote memorization.

By my senior year I started taking the "dumb" courses for fun. Ironically, I learned more in those courses than "college prep" because there was less busy work.

The best lesson from the advanced courses is when to run away from someone wasting my time on their ego trip.

Part of challenging a child is finding the right challenges.

If we did not had two months of mandatory programming as part of high school curriculum and then push to optional course by teacher, I would never become programmer. I would not know that I can be good at it nor that it is feasible career.

But also, I would push my kid both to go outside/to sport and to socialize if they seemed to spend too much time inside or in isolated all the time. You cant learn social skills without practice and your body need physical movement to be healthy. And many kids act badly if they don't have it (they might not be fully aware of causes and consequences, but they do behave better when they had movement). It is great when kid knows what it wants, but that does not mean that it is reasonable to limit education to that single one thing.

Here's a radical idea: let [gifted kids] have childhoods!

As a child who experienced both "regular" and gifted education, I can say with some certainty that: My "childhood" began when I entered gifted school.

Before that I was bullied, I didn't fit in, I wasn't challenged, and I was unhappy.

It was my personal experience and the experience of many of the students around me at gifted school that this was what we wanted. We were happy and grateful to be around "our kind". Precisely because we could be the kids we wanted to be.

That feeling certainly wasn't universal. It wasn't for everyone. And I will readily grant that schools -- even gifted schools -- are prison-like and could be improved.

But I reject the notion you seem to be arguing that these programs are prima facie harmful (or at best not helpful), as compared to the standard-education alternative.

I definitely did not intend to make any argument supporting the standard alternative. My argument is that the standard model is harmful, and gifted programs are only slightly less harmful.

"The fundamental premises of the school are simple: that all people are curious by nature; that the most efficient, long-lasting, and profound learning takes place when started and pursued by the learner"

No doubt about that. They'll obsess over whatever they enjoy. And the following line that "all people are creative if they are allowed to develop their unique talents" implies that your average person's creative ouput is important or even worthwhile to society.

Hey @scientician, I have been reading about the Sudbury school for a few years now and do research on children's learning in relation to IQ (publications coming soon). Do you have any connections to the school?

Not yet! My long-term plan is to travel around and staff at as many freedom schools as I can, and then bring that model back home to Toronto.

I'm in the process of winding up my commitments now so I can commit all my resources to the journey.

Were you able to include Sudbury data in your research?

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