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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work.

My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she would set up a coffeeshop at home and charge her mother and I for drinks. I think this says something about how much she saw the inside of coffeeshops while I was programming there.

The main obstacle to still using the play-better-until-it's-real path, is that we don't have a good way for kids to see what adults are doing, in most jobs. Otherwise, their natural instincts are still to "play" at doing what they see the adults doing.

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Yeah I'm pretty sure that Christopher Alexander makes this point in one of his books, maybe A Pattern Language

He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life.

Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city.

And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configuration of space diminishes people and relationships. They don't see their parents enough and they don't learn from them.

Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc.

That work/suburb split definitely describes how I grew up, so I remember that point very distinctly. You are supposed to jump through hoops for 12 years, and then apply to a place where you jump through 4 more years of hoops, etc. But you are confused about how the world actually works. It's not a good way of teaching people to be adaptable to the world.

As a teacher, this resonates. For many, the knowledge and skills development in school is too abstract.

An aside: Is ‘take your child to work day’ even a thing anymore?

I have been in a couple of companies where they have had the "bring your child to work day" concept. Though it happens very rarely (maybe 1-2 times per year) I doubt that it has any impact.

It is for the parents and for the company, not for the kids. And, as it happened to a colleague of mine, it can be a sad day for those who cannot bring their kids to work on that day (e.g., disabilities, death). I would get rid of those days, stat.

I work at Google which (before COVID, of course) had a take your kid to work day every year. But it always seemed strangely structured. They would set up a bunch of separate activities for kids to do and the parents would go hang out there and do those with them.

It ended up looking at lot more like "take your kid to the office" to me, which sort of defeated the point. But I don't know if there's a good solution when the work adults do is just staring at a screen.

I think about this a lot with my screen-based hobbies too. I'd love to share them with the kids more, but they are just totally opaque. The kids seeing me really can't tell the difference between "filing taxes", "programming", "watching YouTube", "making music", etc.

Knowledge work really doesn't align well with how kids naturally learn.

Pair programming?

I used to work at ASOS in London where they had a 'bring your parents to work' day. At the time (2015ish) more than half the staff were under 30yo.

Mum got a tour of the office, did workshops with the CEO and other leaders. It was pretty cool.

> Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc.

Furthermore, you could argue that not paying attention to more abstract lessons is actually way more rational of a decision than sitting straight and taking notes. The human brain is expensive to run, and our ancestors didn't survive by squandering calories to process worthless information.

In contrast, as any parent can attest, when kids see something that has clear real-world benefits for them (e.g. Minecraft), they'll jump in with unequaled gusto and learn everything they possibly can.

So much right. Children do pay attention and many times get glued to the thing they see we adults really value. Since for most of the families formal education is not the thing their world revolves around (except people in university jobs/professors), children don't gel as well with the books, as they do with other things we value (for example, our phones or TV).

That's an intriguing point. I always thought children of professors/teachers would be better in school because their parents would push them (gently!) in that direction (and because they are probably genetically inclined to be good learners...), but this type of indirect watching of their parents and what they value must have quite a big impact as well (also in that the parents are natural role models). My parents had quite a hands-off approach (they're not teachers, as you might have guessed ;)) and I subsequently didn't care much about my grades or certain school subjects that I found uninteresting.

You just sparked the thought in my head about how much has the pandemic changed this?

With myself working from home and my kids being virtual that they have been to see what my day to day is like.

I think they realize that I have too many meetings and how much it stops me from getting real/deep work done..

I feel fortunate in that regard, in that I work from home and we homeschool our children[0]. Not only do they have a chance to see how adults work, but I they also get more opportunities to see how adults interact with each other in general. I also get a chance to be more a part of their childhood, which is a nice plus.

[0] Don't worry, they socialize with plenty of other people

I think in coming decades, homeschool might be the more sought after education for families that are able to afford it (which will be sad for public schools). It makes sense to allow kids more leeway in what they study and apply, especially with how available knowledge is on the internet (eg. Khan Academy and Wikipedia). Literally just playing Wikipedia races to get from one topic to another is probably more productive than some history or science classes.

I do wonder though how you managed to get enough socialization time with other people. Scheduling that seems like a massive pain unless there are also a lot of other families homeschooling nearby and in the same age group.

My daughter has also homeschooled, but by now there are lots of part-time options. She goes to school once a week, gets assigned a lot of homework, and works on that the rest of the week. It gives her some socialization, and also practice at time management (not leaving everything until the last day).

I think homeschooling is a lot easier than it was 20 years ago, in regards getting enough opportunities for socialization. Pandemics, now, they still are an obstacle...

Even as someone who had a reasonably good public school experience, I see no reason to be sad for them. Even accounting for inflation, funding for public schools continues to go up while quality stays flat or declines.

As for socialization, we have a large homeschool community near us. The community has regularly scheduled gatherings, and provides a way for families to work together on teaching various subjects. Other organizations like community sports, 4H, etc. are also good options.

However, it should be noted that socialization won't be (and shouldn't be) exactly like the socialization one receives in public school. The social reality of public school is very strange and not at all like the social reality of the adult world. Homeschooling provides an opportunity to shape the child's social reality to prepare them better for the adult world.

I believe Jane Jacobs also discusses the same point in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

I fail to see how living in a city changes this substantially. The white collar knowledge work that's driving the economy of modern cities is not something kids there see much of either.

Guys, education design IS social design. It's the number one biggest feature of social design. Homeschooling is expensive. The cheapest is no school, kids stay home and hang out in the neighborhood unsupervised while parents are busy. Integrating them into workplaces is expensive, I'd argue the most expensive of all. It's a neat concept, but let's acknowledge that it is a luxury not everyone can afford.

I really like this post, especially the point about visibility of job details for children. We don't talk about it enough. We don't draw connections between play skills and career paths. By the time I was making study decisions that would start to dictate my job opportunities, I had no idea what options were out there. A couple of work experience placements isn't enough.

One of my jobs is in tourism photography. For some projects, I just go on holiday with my kids, speculatively take photos/videos and then sell them to tourism authorities. It works well. My 6 and 8 year olds came to me at some point and asked, "Is your job to make people want to go on holiday?" Pretty much, yep. And so they have an incentive to help (more effective I am, more holidays we go on) and they see what goes into it - getting up for sunrises, capturing moments, editing, sharing the shots, etc. It's a serious contrast to my other job(s) where they'd guess computers are involved but wouldn't know what goes on - my fault, because I've never stopped to explain it.

There's a working theory that you could do this with anything. A cool story to read is the Polgar family. His daughters became some of the best chess players of their time.

>Polgár and his wife considered various possible subjects in which to drill their children, "including mathematics and foreign languages," but they settled on chess. "We could do the same thing with any subject, if you start early, spend lots of time and give great love to that one subject," Klara later explained. "But we chose chess. Chess is very objective and easy to measure."[3] His eldest daughter Susan described chess as having been her own choice: "Yes, he could have put us in any field, but it was I who chose chess as a four-year-old... I liked the chessmen; they were toys for me." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

wow, I always thought he had adopted his children. But he didn't, they were his own. It's written that he thought about adopting boys later in life but didn't. Still, I'm shocked that I remember this so wrong. Thanks for posting.

Judit Polgár is to this day the greatest woman chess player of all time. She retired but is still the coach of Hungary's national team.

I had no idea that she still holds such a distinction, thanks for pointing that out! I'm always in awe of their accomplishments.

Very interesting. However, there is also the other camp that says let children stay children as long as possible. I wonder if that's conflicting with your line of thought.

PS: This is one of the best discussion I have ever read on HN. This article is inspiring in many ways.

book is called "the world until yesterday"

Yeah, I found this weird: "We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work". It's not clear to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long) route from that to architecture or engineering. "

There is not really a route from such playing to engineering except for the general kinds of reasoning involved. It's a cute idea, but does not seem very useful.

I disagree. I'd say there is a pretty direct route. The kid is trying to construct a building. They face great many object-level challenges: what materials to use, where to get them, how to connect them, how to make the structure stable, how to reduce work, etc. Behind each challenge is a field of study for the kid to dabble in, in order to overcome the problem.

"Real" architecture and civil engineering, as done by adult professionals, deals with exact same challenges (and then some more). The work is more complex, you need to explore relevant fields of study much deeper (and professional education gives you just that, in a structured way), but it's fundamentally the same thing, just in hard mode.

I disagree with your disagreement!

Anyone who has built a personal project and a real-world professionally engineered project knows that the actual tasks involved are wildly different. What you think the correct solution is becomes a tertiary consideration. You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. Designing a treehouse for fun and designing a professional solution to a list of sometimes contradictory constraints and optimizations scratch some very different itches.

One is very clearly play and one is very clearly work.

I mean, that's also true of hacking game mods as a kid vs. actual programming for money as an adult. But many professional programmers got their start by just playing around with computers as a kid.

Right, the business and politics parts are orthogonal to the engineering or programming parts. They are general facts of life you can't escape regardless of your vocation.

> You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others.

You mean, like, parents? :).

I don't see the difference. The considerations you listed can sometimes dominate the object-level work, but they're also mostly generic skills for all creative white collar jobs. The core that distinguishes an architect from an aviation engineer or a graphic designer - this is the treehouse stuff.

Have you ever built a treehouse? It is both architecture and engineering.

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