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The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

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Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#91

Post by joshuamcginnis »

vanderZwan wrote: post #68
whataretensors wrote: post #15

Look at reward signals. Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like - no positive rewards signals just negative arbitrary ones. I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" I had to do all this other stuff that non-coders deemed important. Meanwhile there was no "safe base" for me or anyone else who grew up poor. But at least now I can also now see sc…

> Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like Wait, what? How the heck does Marx come into this? Do you have any idea what the history of education is? Assembly-line education is a product of the Prussian military , Marx has nothing to do with that.

I don't want to speak for OP, but I think his point in referencing Marx is that our education system revolves around the collective and that the values and needs of the individual have been lost.

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#92

Post by yoz-y »

adamnemecek wrote: post #80
yoz-y wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you determine which kid to steer towards what? Nobody will like all of the fundamentals but that is just how things are. For me the biggest determinant factor for whether I liked a subject or not was the quality of the teacher. However "make teachers better at teaching" is not really a scalable solution.

They pick themselves? You don’t really need teachers.

I believe that much of the unemployment problem for people with higher education diplomas is because people have to choose their career around 14-18 years old and fail to do the right choice. I do not think that pushing this to an earlier age is a good idea.

I have also worked with people who came from the modern "sans-teachers" schools. They were terrible. My impression is that such education reinforces pre-concieved notions of the students, and if they are bad they will just turn worse.

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#93

Post by vanderZwan »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #91
vanderZwan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like Wait, what? How the heck does Marx come into this? Do you have any idea what the history of education is? Assembly-line education is a product of the Prussian military , Marx has nothing to do with that.

I don't want to speak for OP, but I think his point in referencing Marx is that our education system revolves around the collective and that the values and needs of the individual have been lost.

Well then the educational system certainly has failed OP when it comes to history lessons.

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#94

Post by lisper »

whataretensors wrote: post #15

Look at reward signals. Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like - no positive rewards signals just negative arbitrary ones. I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" I had to do all this other stuff that non-coders deemed important. Meanwhile there was no "safe base" for me or anyone else who grew up poor. But at least now I can also now see sc…

> every company doesn't know the exact amount of money they will make this year, but every employee has a good idea

Do I understand you correctly that you consider this to be Marxism? It's not. It's the free market re-allocating risk and reward. Maybe you should consider the possibility that there are worthwhile things to be learned in disciplines other than programming. You should maybe ask yourself: if your scam detector is producing false positives, how would you know?

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#95

Post by boomboomsubban »

whataretensors wrote: post #69
andrepd wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" Well so was I (Turbo Pascal on DOS ftw), and thanks god responsible adults didn't let me sit in front of the PC all day, and made me learn languages, history, literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, etc. I'm also straining to see how the adjective "Marxist" found its way on your rant. I fail to see the applicability.

In regards to reward signals it seems similar when collapsed. No ownership. No way to succeed through creativity. No way to escape a degraded too-large-to-fail system. Maybe there's a better word for it?

>No ownership. No way to succeed through creativity. No way to escape a degraded too-large-to-fail system

Sounds like the kind of soul crushing job school is preparing most children for.

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#96

Post by dragonwriter »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #91
vanderZwan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like Wait, what? How the heck does Marx come into this? Do you have any idea what the history of education is? Assembly-line education is a product of the Prussian military , Marx has nothing to do with that.

I don't want to speak for OP, but I think his point in referencing Marx is that our education system revolves around the collective and that the values and needs of the individual have been lost.

It's stupid to reference Marx in that context; institutions focussed on common centralized interest predate Marx by approximately the entire age of civilization on Earth.

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#97

Post by nickysielicki »

andrepd wrote: post #54
whataretensors wrote: post #15

Look at reward signals. Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like - no positive rewards signals just negative arbitrary ones. I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" I had to do all this other stuff that non-coders deemed important. Meanwhile there was no "safe base" for me or anyone else who grew up poor. But at least now I can also now see sc…

> I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" Well so was I (Turbo Pascal on DOS ftw), and thanks god responsible adults didn't let me sit in front of the PC all day, and made me learn languages, history, literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, etc. I'm also straining to see how the adjective "Marxist" found its way on your rant. I fail to see the applicability.

I think it's far more likely that your interest in language, history, philosophy, mathematics, science, etc., stem from the same intellect, motivation, and curiosity that also lead you to program at a young age. Famous Renaissance polymaths did not go through compulsory Prussian-style liberal arts education systems, yet they contributed massively to multiple fields that had relatively little overlap. Were they just exceptionally exceptional; moreso than any exceptionally intelligent and curious person born today?

I've met plenty of one-dimensional people who have gone through a liberal arts education. More importantly, I rarely meet a "well-rounded" person who honestly attributes their entire base of knowledge to their education. At most, they'll say that they were first exposed to the idea through a course, but any sort of depth in any topic comes from intrinsically-motivated learning. That type of learning is undoubtedly held back when you make kids do stupid mind-numbing busy work at the pace of the lowest common denominator for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months out of the year, 12 years straight.

Did you go to private or public schooling?

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#98

Post by carlmcqueen »

zachlatta wrote: post #58
monkmartinez wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect my kids to be "self-driven", in the sense of "productive" when I restrict screen time. They can literally do whatever they want... if that is mope around bored as hell, so be it. If that is digging a hole in the back yard, so be it. If that is getting into a little trouble somewhere down the street, so be it. If they want to read the latest "Diary of a wimpy kid", so be it. The only thing I am after is…

I deeply and thoroughly don't understand this mindset. Whether you like it or not, technology is part of growing up in the 21st century. It's not just an "outlet" or a place to waste time on YouTube, it's interwoven into everything in their lives. Their ability to gather information depends on it. Their social lives depend on it. Just as yours does. If you restrict access, you're pretending like a very crucial part o…

> I know this because I lived it and that's exactly what I did.

Be careful of using yourself as the sample of why or why not people should do something.

I was also given hard time limits of video games, hard times on television and my brother and I balanced it with playing basketball outside, biking around the neighborhood, going to a friends house (social interaction), and finding other things to do.

Never felt restrictive, just the rules.

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#99

Post by baursak »

monkmartinez wrote: post #12
stinkytaco wrote: post #4

There's a certain irony in this. By putting restrictions on kids (no screens, digital downtime, etc), we expect them to become self-driven. This is a great idea in theory, but it also seems pretty likely that a kid will go to their friends house to watch Youtube videos, when I would just as soon have them (and their friends, if necessary) at my house doing that where at least I have some sense of what they are watchi…

I don't expect my kids to be "self-driven", in the sense of "productive" when I restrict screen time. They can literally do whatever they want... if that is mope around bored as hell, so be it. If that is digging a hole in the back yard, so be it. If that is getting into a little trouble somewhere down the street, so be it. If they want to read the latest "Diary of a wimpy kid", so be it. The only thing I am after is…

What do you guys think of this short read? http://www.artbrock.com/blog/those-kids-and-their-darn-gadge...

Re: The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”

#100

Post by munificent »

zachlatta wrote: post #58
monkmartinez wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect my kids to be "self-driven", in the sense of "productive" when I restrict screen time. They can literally do whatever they want... if that is mope around bored as hell, so be it. If that is digging a hole in the back yard, so be it. If that is getting into a little trouble somewhere down the street, so be it. If they want to read the latest "Diary of a wimpy kid", so be it. The only thing I am after is…

I deeply and thoroughly don't understand this mindset. Whether you like it or not, technology is part of growing up in the 21st century. It's not just an "outlet" or a place to waste time on YouTube, it's interwoven into everything in their lives. Their ability to gather information depends on it. Their social lives depend on it. Just as yours does. If you restrict access, you're pretending like a very crucial part o…

I don't think it makes sense to lump all of uses of technology into a single conceptual bucket any more than it's useful to say, "Kids will use things that are made of plastic when they grow up so we shouldn't restrict access to plastic things." Watching unboxing videos on YouTube, posting selfies on Instagram (and getting judged by them), programming a videogame, compulsively clicking notifications and skimming social media feeds, reading articles on Wikipedia, playing some pay-to-Win addiction-optimized phone game, and writing a blog are completely fundamentally different activities.

Restricting "screen time" is the simplest way to reduce access to the harmful things in that list, at the cost of also filtering the nice stuff. A more sophisticated approach is probably to control which apps kids have access to and for how long, but that's a lot harder to pull off effectively.

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