Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

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motohagiography

Leadership and management are like riding a bike in that you can teach children to do it, but if you never learned, it's likely you never will. Management training programs for regular teenagers are common in the fast food industry, and it's a differentiating life skill. I think giving that to exceptional 8-12yr olds is more valuable than exploring their creativity in an isolated class away from their peers. Few people ever get bored of leadership. The net return on teaching advanced individual problem solving compared to teaching smart kids to scale their skills with leadership has a massive delta.

This is probably something you couldn't do in the public system, and you would need separate schools, and arguably this is what private schools already do. Policy wise, this is equivalent to vouchers, which are immensely controversial for the same reasons gifted education is, because they stream people into opportunity - or lack thereof, when they are still just kids. You're never going to teach kids enough to overthrow you, but if you don't, what are you really educating them to become?

> Management training programs for regular teenagers are common in the fast food industry, and it's a differentiating life skill

This may be different depending on where you grew up, but in my memory, the top students were too busy with sports and band to get McLeadership training as a high schooler. At least the marching band nominally had section leader positions, but the reality was more so that the adults in the room made all the decisions and section leadership roles were purely titular for purposes of helping the scholarship applications in the college search.

This is quite interesting to me. How would you train children for leadership? And are there any successful training methods for adults? In the military, perhaps?

A two or three standard deviation intelligence kid can likely understand and benefit from the leadership training that someone 5-8 years older than they are gets. Camp counsellor training, mcdonalds restaurant management training, sports coach and instructor training, military cadet officer training, all programs designed for mean level intelligence people. You just need to give younger smarter kids access to them, and much earlier.

Even just instead of merely teaching kids how to do something, teach them how to teach it while they are learning it. Like, "To do this interesting thing, we need to solve these problems to get there. Here's how to ski, or divide large numbers, we're going to space out the repetitions so your brain will become hungry for it, and when you are showing other people, you can use this method to help them understand faster. Smooth is fast, lazy is clever, etc."

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