How I got into MIT when I was 14
laura-whatawonderfulworld.blogspot.com
laura-whatawonderfulworld.blogspot.com
As unlikely as it seems to someone who has been through conventional schooling, what actually happens in these cases is the child's natural curiosity is not squashed by rote work. As a result they drive their own learning, motivated by the natural curiosity of all humans. It is hypothesized that punishment and boring tasks are needed to squash this natural state, and some like educational reformer John Galt [edit: sorry, I meant John Gatto; freudian slip there] even claim that doing so is the purpose of conventional modern classroom schooling which was established in the late 19th century to create an underclass of unquestioning factory workers who can obey directions from authority figures.
Regardless of how this all happens, unschoolers tend to be the most interesting and well educated people around. This idea is very threatening to most people, so reactions are often hostile when they are encountered and it is frequently claimed that each achieving unschooler is an aberration.
seems to me like school is the great melting pot of our society,
now that I'm out of school it seems like I live a very Bowling Alone (http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commun...) existence, I interact with people at work, and family, it seems like that is the exent of my non superficial interactions
maybe I'm paticularly introverted, but I wouldn't home/unschool my daughter simply because I don't want her social universe to be that small
also schooling is one of the few shared experiences in our society
Having had chicken pox is an experience most of the population also shares. Now I contracted the virus as a baby when my brother brought it home from kindergarten. Can't say as I remember it at all as I was barely out of the womb, but I apparently got so few pox marks that I got shingles as a 20-year-old college senior, and oh what fun that was. Has our son had Chicken Pox? No, as we opted to get him the vaccine. I hope he doesn't feel we wronged him by depriving him of a typical childhood experience.
When our son was 5 and homeschooled, he was playing in the ocean while his traditionally educated cousins were in school. My brother asked me, "When are you going to let him out into the real world?"
My response was something like this:
"If you think your children are in the real world because they are in a traditional school, I think you are deluding yourself. Do you have to ask permission to urinate? No, and neither do most people in the real world, but your children do. Ditto getting a drink of water. Are your children starving? No? Well, that is the real world for many children (as of 2010, the the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization puts the figure at over 13% of the world population is undernourished, but I didn't have an iPhone to look this up on the beach back in 1996). Have your children been sexually molested? Perhaps you'd like to set them up for that experience as it's one many have had."
I gave some other examples of what "the real world" is for other people in the world and ended with:
"I believe we can make our own worlds to a good degree, and feel it irresponsible not to realize that and choose what world you'd like for yourself and your loved ones and to work toward living in that world."
So, I can see how things might work out with even less direction, but it seems like most people would miss out on some of the basics. I mean is it really an issue to say, here is the 5th grade history textbook you should probably read at some time in the next 6 months? Or even go to enough Shakespeare's plays that the language stops seeming strange and you can fall down laughing watching ask you like it?
O, and thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions.
By the time I left high school I didn't (as far as I know) have any required testing. I took the SATs/ACTs/SAT IIs the same as any other student.
Wherever possible I applied using a college's home school form, and I wrote supplemental essays wherever possible explaining why I left my high school (especially important since I had awful grades at the time I left). I received an academic scholarship from the school I ultimately chose to attend, I assume because of my SAT/ACT scores.
I left my high school because I was extremely unhappy with it during my sophomore year. No option besides teaching myself things ever occurred to me.
We home education, but it isn't full on unschool here either. There will be definite gaps, but the general assumption that I have made is filling those gaps won't be a terrific struggle. It is always interesting to us to hear first hand accounts.
"Unschooling is a range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum."
I consider our son to have been homeschooled for K-4th grade as we were using a private school's curriculum at home and he was having tests graded by a teacher hired by the private school and paid by us. He went on field trips and did a bunch of other things (played with Legos, studied electricity and geography, etc.) with other homeschoolers and played with both homeschooled and traditionally schooled children. One day when he was 6 and in 4th grade, he was reading a college engineering book (friends of the family had given him when he was five, why I am not sure) when I came to him and said it was "time for school" and to come to the kitchen (where we typically "did school"). He looked up at me and responded, "Why should I stop doing what I am doing here, which is actually helping me to learn something new, to go in the kitchen a fill out a bunch of worksheets on things I've long since known?" Foolishly, I answered, "Because we paid good money for this program. But if you want to go it on your own once you finish the fourth grade curriculum, we can give that a try." I should have just ended homeschooling with a private school curriculum right then and there, but I am not as quick a learner as our son.
Anyway, after 4th grade, he learned using all sorts of activities and books, and unschooling was the most delightful part of my career as a homeschool teacher/parent (as really my son was more the teacher than I; he had started correcting my spelling and offering me more precise words for my business letters when he was only two). He went to Shakespearean plays since he was three or four, I think (we had a very smart entrepreneurial friend who owned a tech company by day and ran a Shakespearean group by night and weekend, and he still doing both today). And while I admit I feel history was his worst subject, he was still far better at it than most American adults, as supported by his score on the Culturescope test (where he scored higher at age 7 than most high school seniors) and his being a top student at age 11 and 12 in his university's Honors College upper level history and culture courses.
I don't see unschooling as meaning the parents can't provide any direction to the child's education, or use any textbooks, though I also don't think textbooks are necessary for learning in general (the only exception perhaps - and this is only a perhaps - being upper level math).
There are so very few profoundly gifted kids and hearing all these anecdotes from a parent is a rare treat.
Clearly for highly intelligent children, unschooling - going their own way academically, is something that works very well. There's also the traditional child prodigy approach of pushing them even harder, and it seems in those cases the kids are never heard from again, perhaps they crack.
Some people ask if unschooling can work well with students that are just normal and aren't highly intelligent. I've seen where it works well in that case as well (or at least as well as traditional schooling). But, obviously for a special needs child with disabilities such as Downs Syndrome, it would not work as they need much more intense interaction just to learn how to live on their own in society. Or say for Helen Keller, what saved her from madness was intense personal tutoring and not just being left to her self. Presumably there is a dividing line in their between disabled and normal where unschooling becomes more suitable. Since unschooling is not a big thing in the modern era, there's few if any studies on results looking into these issues, only anecdotal data and what we know from meeting unschooling students.
I didn't mean to suggest going one's own way is the same as being left alone, though it can be if the child is ready for that. I hadn't attempted to respond to some of the comments here by others asking how unschooling works since it's not just one single thing or defined approach.
Anyway I wanted to clarify that, so you don't waste time answering the wrong question. I'm certainly interested in your further views on the topic.
How I interpreted your own story was that after 4th grade your son was able to choose his own path and you were available to facilitate and assist in acquiring needed materials and arranging requested meetings with scientists, going on trips, and what not. His choosing his own path and curriculum as it were is what I saw that you were presenting as consistent with an unschooling philosophy.
I'm not even sure I would call what we did after 4th grade "choosing a curriculum", which would mean to me having things more laid out (a syllabus and such) than I think we had. I just pulled his portfolio down for a period of time when he was 6 to 7, and it has things like this in it:
1) A letter he wrote to Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, Inc. noting that when he was reading their book "101 More Read Aloud Classics", the book went from page 96 to page 126 (only he described this much more cutely than I am here) and therefore was "missing 16 (or 32, depending on the way you look at it) pages" and he asked if he could have those pages, either in a separate 32-page book or in another complete book (and he received a new hardbound copy, even though his original was paperback, only 10 days later).
2) A list of books read (with start and finish dates)
3) Photos of things like his planning a lemonade stand with a girl, standing next to a Domino creation, riding a bike, using a continuity checker while fixing a hairdryer, taking a tap dance class, playing in a few handchime choir performances, getting an organ lesson (informal at the handchime choir director's home), visiting the Library of Congress and an airport museum, playing racquetball and ping pong, visiting Montpelier and Monticello, painting, working with an adult friend on a circuit for a robot costume, accepting s Multiple Scerlosis Read-a-thon top fundraiser award, singing at a Halloween campfire, attending a physics of flight class at the zoo, studying the steam engine at a railroad museum, visiting the FDR and Jefferson memorials, attending a university physics program, attending a van Gogh exhibit,visiting Savannah, etc.
4. His subtest and composite scores on achievement and aptitude testing at the end of 6th grade (where he hit the ceiling of 9th grade equivalency on reading, vocabulary, math problem solving, spelling, usage, capitalization and punctuation, science, and social students and scored a general aptitude in the 99th percentile (despite being years younger than a typical 6th grade graduate).
5. A list of examples of questions others posed that he knew the answers for, such as: an electrical engineer giving him a truth table to solve and his solving it correctly even though the engineer at first had the wrong answer himself; in a "Physiology of Speed" lecture given at a science museum that was attended almost exclusively by adults, the college professor asked, "What are endorphins?" and our son was the only one in the room to raise a hand (he had read about endorphins on his own somewhere); in a "Physics of Flight" class, where he was the youngest student, he answered "Who are the Mongolfier brothers?" (he said he had learned this from the software program "Museum Madness", a program he used when he was just two or three); when taking a Degas tour at an art museum, he answered so many questions with such clarity and insight that the tour guide and some parents on the tour felt certain he was planning to be an artist; while eating out at a restaurant, I noticed a picture on the wall of a man carving a statue and it coming to life and asked who the sculpture in the picture was and he answered, "Pygmalion"; at Physics is Phun, he helped solve an equation to find the speed of light using metric measurements, and in doing so, used scientific notation and converted nanoseconds to seconds, among other things.
6. Examples of other ways his mind was strong, such as how he continued to play things on the piano that he often had only heard once prior, and could pick up instruments he didn't usually play and start playing real tunes on them instantly (something that came in handy years later at the Media Lab when a graduate student invented an instrument that he thought would only make nonsense but interesting sounds when used to draw, but our son picked it up and showed the fellow student how it could be used to draw/play a real tune), and how when he was told to jump and risk breaking your legs if in a fire while in a second floor bedroom, he noted that this wouldn't be an issue when he was an adult as his home would have ladders that would automatically shoot out from upper floors when the fire alarm was set off.
7. Samples of some calendar (page-a-day) questions he knew right off, like one asked Fermat's theorem and he stated it perfectly (he had read it in one of his father's books).
8. List of classical myths, poems, stories, and speeches read.
9. Topics covered in grammar and literature.
10. Misc. other ways English was "taught" (seeing two Shakespearean plays at the Folger Library, keeping a journal, writing thank you notes, playing games like "The Play's the Thing", attending a writer's workshop, going to performances at theaters in the area, etc.
11. His making three-colored graphs (one made a flower image) on his new graphing calculator (he had to ask politely on and off for two years to get a graphing calculator), and other topics in math such as probability (figuring out median, mode, median, and range), special triangles, etc.
12. Topics discussed in science, such as internal combustion engines, Anton van Loeuwenhoek, Gregor Mendel, curved reflectors, acids/bases/chemical reactions, experiments with different rocks, adolescence and puberty (and it was good we covered this early as he went through it early; he also took the topic in college when he was 11), and a whole lot more.
13. Topics in geography (24 are listed), world civilization (25 items listed), and American civilization (18 items listed)
14. Health education (fire prevention fair at mall, AIDS, newspaper articles on zinc lozenges and cigars, etc.
15. Topics in art (25 listed).
16. Topics in music (things like Scott Joplin, shapes of melodies, how melody works with chords, attending a Peter and the Wolf performance,etc.
17. Spanish class at the elementary school and Italian class at the community college.
18. Good manners worksheet (one I typed up myself where he had to check off if it was a "Do" or a "Don't" (things like asking when a guest at someone else's home if they prefer you to leave your shoes on or take them off, and get this oldie..."rewind videotapes after watching them"!).
19. A letter to a local paper's editor that resulted in his being offered a position as a writer for the paper (not that this was his intent at all when he wrote).
20. The copy of an essay he wrote that won him $300 in U.S. Savings bonds in a national essay contest.
21. Lots of other stuff (I just scratched the surface there).
So it wasn't like we never used any textbooks (we used a few at times where we felt it made sense), but we didn't do much planning in advance, doesn't seem to me, so much as sort of went with the flow of what seemed interesting to delve into at any given time.
I related to my spouse your story about tapping on your stomach and getting the same number of taps back; she was amazed and loved it.
Worse by what measure? It depends what you want to do with yourself to some extent I think.
For example, I've a young friend who's a very gifted artist and has a lot of encouragement in that direction (from her graphic designer mother); however, I consider her to be a bit behind in the 'hard' subjects. Her ancient history is pretty good and she knows Greek mythology better than anyone I know.
I'd go for a mixture of home-/un-schooling if it weren't for lack of resources at home. If it were possible I'd also send my lad to school a couple of days a week too - so some school days; some homeschool and some open, student led education.
I think not. Exceptional people will be exceptional no matter what...
Social class is a similar scenario. Only about 10% of the eminent people came from a middle-class childhood (which in America, is represented by way more than 10%, often I think more like 50% of the population). About 30% of the eminent people in M.H.'s study had parents who were farmers, poor immigrants, or blue collar workers, but the parents didn't identify with their lower-class position and had high aspirations for their children to move up in the world. Then about 34% had fathers who held an intellectual occupation (professor, writer, orchestra conductor, or research scientist). The remaining quarter were brought up with parents who were lawyers, physicians, or wealthy businessmen (and the general population has way fewer such people, as people here likely realize). A quote on page 172 in the book reads:
"Clearly it helps to be born in a family where intellectual behavior is practiced, or in a family that values education as an avenue of mobility - but not in a family that is comfortably middle-class."
Here is seems the author has concluded that there can be no intellectual behavior practiced or value of education as an avenue of mobility in a family that is comfortably middle-class, for which I would disagree. But I do believe having the contacts that the upper class tend to have and the drive to have more than one has grown up with or to better the world or such are factors that contribute to how exceptional one becomes or is noticed as having become.
Another quote, this time from page 173:
"It is quite strange how little effect school-even high school-seems to have had on the lives of creative people. Often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls."
Choose your walls wisely. Or choose to stay outside of walls.
Not being hostile at all, I'm genuinely interested -- trying to figure out myself what's the right thing to do for two little boys of my own.
I launched a startup almost three years ago, when I was 18. It's doing very well.
I'm lucky that I happened to get into programming. It's cheap, (relatively) easy to learn on one's own, and it also helped me to learn bits of other fields. I honestly don't know how I would have turned out if I had gotten into something else, so this might be a testament to programming rather than to unschooling.
In particular, I can see a real possibility that an unschooled child with a heavy computer focus and a lack of parental guidance could very easily lock in on computers and neglect potentially "boring" but incredibly helpful topics. I'm thinking largely of the humanities here; you can get away without understanding, say, chemistry [1], but it seems difficult (in my circles, at least) to be taken seriously without a decent command of English--a skill that I think is refined largely from reading, because I've never met someone who could speak and write well who didn't enjoy reading--and it seems like it'd be difficult to really understand the world around you without a decent grasp of history. In neither case does Wikipedia really cover it; I think that a level of internalization of such things is necessary (it becomes harder to evaluate political statements without at least a high-level understanding of where they come from, which has driven my own recent forays into economics and sociology).
For similar over-focusing reasons, I'm generally but not completely skeptical of the "don't go to college" argument sometimes espoused here on HN; the focus on matters of immediacy--the get-a-job skills--strikes me as a good way of turning out someone with a few strong skills in a few areas and a generally fuzzy understanding of topics unrelated to their focus area. I am, however, even less fond of the idea of "max out your subject matter, take the bare minimum outside your degree area"--I have a hunch that a self-directed person is more likely to stumble into well-roundedness than somebody whose academic drive is constrained to do-your-job topics.
[1] - Not to say chemistry's a useless subject by any means, I actually draw on it sometimes in my day-to-day life. But knowledge of the hard sciences, physics possibly excepted, are a little less impactful overall.
It's really circumstantial. What works for someone may not work at all for someone else. So, there cannot be a fair comparison, so to speak.
I'm not clueless about the world around me, but I'm not as well-rounded as I would like to be. However, I'm not sure I would have fared better if I had gone to an American public high school.
I think it's interesting because in school, I absolutely refused to do homework unless it was absolutely necessary to pass the class. Instead of being a straight-A student, I often got B's and C's, and even an F a couple times.
I was also in a special 'gifted' class in elementary school that took me out of regular classes once a week and taught us other things. (One of which was programming, which is where my career went!) We still had to do all our normal class work, and since we missed 20% of the in-class lectures, that meant a lot of catch-up each week, which was a lot more interesting than sitting in class and listening.
I have a feeling, after reading your post, that those things are related to my continued love of learning. I also have a feeling that unschooling would have been even better for me, but at least I didn't get burnt out young.
What if a child is not interested at all in an important skill, at some point wouldn't you have to force them to work on it? E.g., Algebra.
He never applied for a GED. At age 8, he took the SAT to see if he could qualify for a CTY engineering summer course that could also give Johns Hopkins college credit (for an extra price), and his scores not only qualified him for that course and all the other CTY courses, but had the state U close to us interested in him. They asked to meet with him as soon as they saw his scores, and handed him an application when he met with them, which he filled out and mailed as soon as he got back home, and within a week, his admission was in our mailbox. This was not at all what I expected when we approved of his taking the SAT so young, nor anything I was particularly comfortable with happening (and we did hold him off till he turned 9, at least), but he had been asking to attend college math and engineering courses since he was 6, and had we to do things over again, I actually think we'd have been better off letting him start college at 6, bizarre that I know that sounds.
We never had the issue with our son not being interested in learning an important skill. Instead, we had the issue of his wanting to learn skills before we were feeling it was worth his learning them. For example, he wanted to learn calculus when he was 7. I typically bought him whatever books he wanted, but this was one where I drew the line. But then he became the top fundraiser in the state for a Multiple Sclerosis read-a-thon (his third year in a row doing so) and one of the prizes was a $50 Borders gift certificate and he used that to buy himself a calculus book. When he took calculus at the university at age 9 (as that is the level the college placement test put him at, must to we parents' shock), he was one of the top students in his class of over 160 students, and he had never even taken anything past algebra I formally before taking that calculus class. But his lack of having had geometry/algebraII/trig/precalc prior to college did not cause him problems in math down the road; he earned one of his bachelor's degree in math at age 13, and took a mix of five college upper level and graduate level courses one semester in modern algebra and number theory, math analysis II, and three other math subjects plus an upper level CS while doing a paid internship off campus and still got a 4.0 that semester (he also did fine in graduate-level math courses at MIT and Harvard). And math is probably the area where most think a linear progression is key, but for some, it actually doesn't appear to be.
It is a web, and to better understand the prospects for ventures like SENS, or immunotherapy startups, one has to have at least some grasp of how all these people are connected and how the money likes to flow through this web - it is a whole parallel world to that which Hacker News usually represents/reflects, but one that is very similar in many ways.
It is a balkanized community online - much the same as most. Hacker News is an unusual thing in that respect.
So you'll find some of the research community, mixed in with tech journalists, advocates, and other interested parties, posting to the Gerontology Research Group mailing list.
You'll find a mix of activists and researchers of a different type posting to the SENS Foundation forums.
There's some side-discussions at the long-running Extropy-chat list, but less so these days.
And the standard fragments of the community in LiveJournal, the other social networks, a range of Yahoo groups and Google groups like New_Cryonet. The loose network of occasional and regular bloggers. And no doubt a range of other watering holes and mailing lists I'm unaware of.
Again, Hacker News is an oddity in the general scheme of things for a community of any size.
Once my wife and I decided, we were 'all in' as it were and put the angst of 'what if' behind us. It turned out to be the right choice for our kids, they thrived, and while it certainly had an economic impact, its hard to say of the three choices, private school + two parents working, public school + two parents working, or homeschool + one parent working what the opportunity cost was or would turn out to be, the opportunity to engage kids in learning for learning's sake is priceless.
I have a boy. He's almost 2. It pleases me greatly when I see that natural curiosity sparkle in his eyes. In fact, there's not much I wouldn't give up to ensure that spark never dies.
However, I also see the large small, the giggles and laughter that comes so naturally when he's interacting with people, young and old. I'm not sure I could live with myself if I somehow deterred his possible happiness in my quest to preserve his childlike curiosity.
Our son also giggled and laughed when interacting with people, young and old, and continued to do so all the way up till he moved away to graduate school at 14. He still laughs plenty, but not as often as he did before he moved away, and I am not sure the reason for that (though I do wonder if he'd be happier had he never gone the formal education route or stayed at home longer), but am happy he at least has plenty of laughter in him.
Do some research, Pay close attention to who the unhappy 5 to 18 year olds are. As far as mental health visits, traditionally schooled people have FAR more than home educated people, and while I grant that homeschooled people might for whatever reasons be less likely to go in for mental health help, I doubt that explains the big picture as many people who become mental health patients didn't choose that path/go voluntarily. There are also far fewer prisoners who were homeschooled than traditionally educated (fewer than the general population of homeschooled people, which I realize is a very small population still itself). And homeschoolers on welfare were unheard of a decade or so ago, when I last read on the topic; not sure if that's still the case. People in the hospital or a clinician's "couch", prison, and welfare lines don't tend to be the jolliest folks around (which isn't to say they never laugh, of course).
I do however fail to see how it's possible for kids to develop the same type of social lessons in a closed environment. I believe even events such as bullying and popularity contests aid in the development of a child. This is especially true if they are exposed to team settings (competitive team sports) at an early age.
I've been considered to be pretty smart since I was born and when I was younger I devoured all knowledge around me. But the problem was that I didn't have parents that knew a lot of physics, biology, chemistry or whatever, nor any other people in my environment. They somewhat supported me but there was just so much they could do. I quickly went through all books in the library about interesting subjects (not a lot). And that was it. My parents didn't want to buy me any books or give me access to any more information, something for which I still resent them to this day. The internet wasn't nearly as big as it was today.
And of course the school system tried to break me too. I did biology, maths, physics, English etc... with ease but I almost failed my last year in high school because I was unable to discover the meaning of certain poems. I got literally sent to the police for peeking around in the school network (no editing grades, cheating exams or anything even remotely malicious).
I still ponder sometimes where I would have been had I had a mentor or more supportive parents.
If you speak to all of the fellows you'll see that a lot are just startup guys and girls working all kinds of projects. No correlation in previous experiences or contacts. Anyone that can show why they deserve to be there has an equal chance of getting in.
Some require this security and mentorship more than others but those that do it will allow them to learn and succeed faster. A number of them may not have realised their full potential.
It's a tough one, it could be unfair to read a bio or look at the overall fellowship and just presume each of the fellows are in the same situation and making an opinion on the fellowship before we see how far they go and study each fellow individually.
Many will get a lot out of it, which is the important part. Others may not have needed it but it will allow them to do what they want.
We tend to leave anything complicated out of our stories because it's just easier to understand. It's hard to judge anyone or a collection of people on these brief stories. Look at startups like Pinterest which waited two years before 'Overnight success'.
I feel out of place in the bay area a lot of times because I grew up in a small shitty town in New Mexico. Thinking back, I didn't know anyone with a college degree growing up besides a few of my teachers. My parents social circle was grocery store workers and oil field workers. Once I hit algebra in the 6th grade I was on my own. I probably could (should) have started college at 16 or so, but I wouldn't have really known how to manage that on my own.
This girl, if anything, confirms what Peter Thiel ignores:
College is a resource. If I had access to these resources this girl had, I could probably be in a similar position, but I didn't so that's why I went to college.
20 (who grew up with social, intellectual, economic and/or academic capital) under 20 doesn't have the same ring to it, I suppose.
Anyways, here's my perspective from someone who realized this even while growing up in a suburb in the Bay Area. My parents are blue collar workers (we've lived very comfortably through their hard work however), and so are a good portion of the folks in their social circle, but my city is largely made up of upper middle class and wealthy professionals, mostly tech workers. When I hit junior high/high school, I was taking the advanced classes with the kids of those professionals. I was among the more talented kids in my class, but in my senior year of high school I was working a drive-thru, while one friend had an internship at an architectural firm, getting an awesome chance to learn from a talented and successful architect (the friend's intended profession), and he wasn't the only one doing something like that over the summer. So one difference was that the other parents had connections that mine did not, and were able to give their kids a kind of exposure to the world that I didn't have. Even though the Bay Area has a wealth of resources for those interested in technology, I didn't know what existed, and nor did my parents. Nor did I know that I should have been asking around to dig these up.
The girl that this post is about is undoubtedly gifted and deserves to be recognized as one of the 20 under 20. Even if I did grow up with social, intellectual, economic and/or academic capital, I probably wouldn't have achieved that. But these sorts of differences do make me wonder about how many more geniuses could launch world-changing careers if all students had access to the resources this girl did, as well as being taught how to make the most of them.
Not many years ago, when I was that age, death and human suffering seemed to be the most fundamental problem to apply myself to solve. In fact, I was obsessed with biotechnology for very much the same reason.
Now, I think death the least of my concerns, for the most important and exhilarating parts of life come independently of the time spent here. For those things, like life, are fleeting, and lingering for an eternity would not bring them back.
So sad. Hoping some hard research on the benefits of home-schooling (and even un-schooling) might end up changing minds, but it seems doubtful it will happen any time soon, at least for my kids here in Germany.
On the other hands if you have parents that can handly it, cant do it its bad too. How about hacking the system and open your own school let the kids pay 100'000 a year, then your kids will be the only ones going :)
Edit: Im from Switzerland an I think we have the same rules.
I don't know about Germany but it's possible that it may be similarly easy to tick the right boxes for the local authorities there too.
I guess my question here is "Why?" I certainly hope her answer is contained in one of her future blog posts because to me ageing is one of those things that would not only be unethical to "cure" and commercialize, but also extremely problematic for the future sustainment of humanity.
Two decades out from under the thumb of the expectations and institutions would seem a just reward for the labor of our elders. How many people work for the chance to travel the world, and then find themselves physically kept from doing so?
In your retirement travels to distant lands, however, it is very likely that you would encounter people who do not view life in those terms. You might discover that they work simply to survive, and perhaps have some kids for whom they try to make life just marginally better. And maybe in 50-60 generations, the ancestors of those hard-working people would be able to enjoy themselves a little more and spend their 60s travelling the world just to see what other places look like. With an anti-ageing drug in the hands of rich westerners, it is very unlikely that that day would come.
You don't have to go far to see that rigorous examination of the world shows overpopulation, "sustainability" concerns on a global scale, and other outgrowths of Malthusianism to be myths and illusions, things that vanish as soon as you start looking into them.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/11/overpopulation-to...
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/08/there-is-no-overp...
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/02/malthusian-vision...
Malthusian ideas were wrong when they first emerged, and have not stopped being wrong at any time since then. They are wrong now - and dangerous, as they lead people to support destructive acts of relinquishment and regulation.
It's a question of whether you want a better life for yourself or for your children.
Prove it to be a net gain, when the negative side of the equation is the death of billions.
You can make anything look good by considering only the positives, or vice versa, but it's no way to make decisions.
Really, "cure aging" is the same as "cure cancer" or "cure diabetes". Disease prevention is just a shortsighted version of curing the problem of aging in general.
I was more referring to the problems associated with commercializing the "anti-aging" drug. Making such a drug in the corporate funded environment of our biotech industry would certainly result in an extreme imbalance of the availability of the drug. So in a world where the balance of food supply, resources, income and power of influence is already impossibly and unfairly askew, it is very likely that the existence of the anti-death drug would be the final nail in the coffin of many impoverished populations. What chance would a smart, young African (who is already faced with overcoming hunger, poverty and lack of health care) have in a world where Americans and Germans, for example, have a near unlimited supply of food, money, influence... and now time.
Funny you mentioning Malthus, he reminds me of Hobbes, very few people have actually read their works but they've been demonized and thrown "they're utterly and completely wrong"-phrases at that you begin to wonder "if Malthus is wrong, why is every discussion about world demographics mentioning him in one way or another?" (the same goes for Hobbes, you just have to replace "world demographics" with "politics" and "geometric population growth" with "we're always one step away from (civil) war").
Or maybe I like Malthus just because my dad had bought his "Essay on the Principle of Population" and I read it when I was 16.
"I idolized Archimedes, Galileo, da Vinci, Faraday, Newton, Maxwell, Tesla, Pasteur, and Darwin. I couldn’t believe they were all dead, and that I would never get to meet them and hear them talk."
You also might remember him in Introduction to Algorithms video lectures, by MIT.
And yes I am envious.
I found it fairly easy to avoid over-focus by seeking out new stuff to learn about. I'm 24, with a bachelor's in CS from a state school, and I went to a pretty normal high school; the works (and in most cases) lives of each of those people listed in your quote are pretty familiar to me, though some more than others, and I could recall offhand enough of substance to at least be able to hold my own in conversation.
I think three things in particular helped me. I credit a lot of it to my dad taking away my computers when I screwed up as a kid. It forced me to entertain myself, and a lot of that was going to the library and reading everything I could get my hands on. Another factor was that (against my parents' advice) I explicitly refused to get a B.S. in CS in college. Instead, I took a B.A. so I could get out of the CS building more often. I hung out in the honors college of my school, which was heavily humanities-focused and where the students skewed towards the humanities and towards real engineering degrees (zero other CS students). I had to broaden my horizons just to keep up. The third helpful factor was that I started programming computers when I was about eight years old (I started in on C around 11 or 12), which provided much more to get good at what I do while still leaving a lot of time to follow up on other interests.
(I am skeptical of unschooling largely due to what I see as the predilection of very smart people to hyper-focus--unless a child's parents are sharp and have a broad set of interests, the child seems incredibly likely to become one of these hyperfocused people. I can see it being really valuable and effective if parents have that baseline broad-scope curiosity.)
I am curious about one thing you shared - the choice to get the B.A. rather than the B.S. in CS. Did the B.A. require less coursework in CS, since the choice allowed you more time out of the CS building? Our son's state U didn't even have a B.A. in C.S., only a B.S. option. It was in math that he had a B.A./B.S. option and there, the B.S. required more math courses (and maybe more science courses, too), and his CS advisor urged him to relax and not bother with the B.S. in math since he'd already had a B.S. in C.S. and it would seem more well-rounded to have both a B.A. and a B.S., but our son felt that was B.S. since in fact, he needed no more coursework to get the B.A. and needed two extra math classes for the B.S., so really the B.S. was a "higher level" of education and he didn't care what things looked like to others. He also had finished his first B.S. with a 4.0 GPA in CS and we questioned whether he should really sign up for yet more CS credits when he didn't need them, but he again didn't care about risking the GPA; he only cared about learning, and back then, I don't think auditing much crossed his mind (where in graduate school, he has just sat in some courses because the program wouldn't allow him to load up formally on more credits, where his undergraduate school dean had no issue signing off on a 25-credit semester rather than the typical 12-15 credits).
I feel pretty confident that it's not like all people with a B.S. in C.S. lack a well-rounded education in college. Our son took above and beyond the college's requirements in arts and humanities, social sciences, language/culture (he took German and French courses plus a bunch of culture credits, and had taken some Spanish and Italian before going to college), science (the university only required students take two courses in bio, chem, or physics, and our son took one in bio at 9, two in chem at 9, and also three physics courses), and English (he got freshman English credit from his CLEP score, but since he also was in the Honors College, if he used test credit for freshman English, he had to take an upper level English). In addition to that, he was on a college sports team for a year (won a gold medal in it), was in SGA from sophomore to senior years, and was active in a bunch of other things on campus while also staying active which younger students off campus (was in a handchime choir for those 10 and up, did tap performances with other children, gave magic performances with children ages 5 to 18, etc.) as well as socializing with senior citizens (he volunteered once a week at a local retirement home from ages 7 to 14, when he moved out of state for graduate school, though he did come back at 15 to give a eulogy for one of the residents, as she had requested he do a eulogy for her even since she heard him do one for another resident when he was I think 10). He also spent summers doing 40 hour/week internships at a tech company in another state from ages 9 to 12. Oh, and he did study abroad programs in eleven countries while in college and had been to over 30 countries before he moved away from home at 14, I believe (is up over 40 countries now, I think).
An early start programming no doubt does give one a leg up. Our son began programming at age 5, and by the time he finished college, I think he had dozens of computer languages on his resume, most of which were learned outside of college and not in classes.
As with others in this thread, I'd urge you to research homeschooling more before you make any decisions for your own offspring's education, if you ever go the route of having children (as I realize many smart people opt out of the parenting path, just as I had planned to do before meeting my husband).
(Though I get the impression that there are plenty of kids who are also homeschooled because their parents are determined to "save" them from things like learning about evolution.)
For a zillion reasons, I agree, and would never want to put a child through a family institution without sufficient wealth. Because in the world I live in, kinship and economic institutions are horrifically dysfunctional. Lucky people get to reach their potentials; most certainly don't. They go to schools whose interests are something other than supporting the child's personal interests.
This dissident put it well: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpbGHZuVsw0)