Young children would rather explore than get rewards

Maybe not in an immediate sense, but working hard ostensibly makes it more likely to get promoted to a position with a higher salary, while slacking ostensibly makes it more likely to get demoted or fired.

Of course, I say "ostensibly" because the real world doesn't really work like that, with hard workers getting shafted and lazy pricks schmoozing and politicking their way into the very positions those hard workers should've gotten. It'd be disheartening, but it happens to be a decent treatment for my impostor syndrome: everyone else is an impostor, too, so might as well just play along.

Drive is great. Leverage it heavily as a manager.

But when it comes to kids, the problems I see are that (a) cognitively speaking, children are not tiny adults; and (b) if you want them to be successful and happy adults, you need to give kids the ability to work through mountains of "I Need To Do This Even Though It Sucks"

Cognitive development is an amazing process to watch -- you can see as brains grow and develop a wide variety of skills we take for granted.

But what that means is that you can't treat a six-year-old as an adult.

Their thinking is likely highly egocentric, because they have not yet developed the ability to realize that "my feelings and wants" are different from "other peoples' feelings and wants".

In their world, when they like Pokemon, they literally believe that everybody in the world feels the same way about Pokemon that they do. They just haven't yet gained the ability to handle that concept.

So, up to age eleven or so, you need to put enough structure around children to deal with their cognitive development path. Rules that are consistently enforced are critical (it's also good if those rules, in fact, make sense), with a gradual loosening of constraints as the child grows the ability to handle greater responsibilities.

This path continues from eleven -- when, cognitively, your child is now a functioning adult -- onwards towards the age of majority.

You still need to provide structure, but with enough freedom and ability to bend-or-change the rules such that the child can learn how to make their own decisions. Your goal is ramp them towards the full set of adult responsibilities, as quickly as they are able to handle it.

The problem with a lot of "traditional" education is that it failed to do the latter in a lot of ways -- rigid structure until age of majority, and then bam!, you're an adult, good luck.

This is compounded by how much regulation and how little slack there is in society. In the 70s, teenagers commonly brought rifles to school (because they were on the shooting team, or going hunting afterwards). Nowadays, kids are getting expelled for accidentally forgetting a tiny, micro-sized pocketknife.

The problem with "modern" education is that there is no expectation that you will ever assume responsibility. If you've dealt with a lot of recent graduates, you probably know what I mean. They have been denied much of the experience required for them to mature as adults, all in the name of keeping them "safe".

Including being "safe" from boredom. Which relates to giving kids the ability to get through mountains of drudgery.

That skill is so critical.

And I didn't really master it until I was an adult, much to my disadvantage.

If Elon Musk and every one of his employees were to vanish tomorrow, I'd be sad. SpaceX is cool. But my life would go on.

If the organization that handles sewage for my city were to vanish tomorrow, I would soon be, quite literally, in a world of shit.

I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy. Mastery, perhaps? Purpose, absolutely.

And I doubt most kids grow up dreaming of being a waste engineer.

It's a hard job, and it demands grit. But that job makes modern life possible, and I don't see us setting up kids to be able to tackle both kinds of challenges.

If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it.

If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat.

One of the things that differentiates humans from beasts is that we have at least some sense of higher purpose and many of us derive considerable fulfilment from that.

For the most part, most of our education is necessary - and the ability to focus, to plan, to think beyond just a few steps, to control one's desires and emotions, to concentrate and balance one's life energies - this requires education and maturity.

Yes, it can be stifling in some ways, that's ok, we want our doctors and accountants (mostly) to be small-c conservatives. Others can write Operas.

But none of it comes without a formal journey at least in some capacity.

It's a neat experiment but I think it's hard to determine the results. The novelty of exploration in that context just might not be 'novelty' from the adults perspective. Try trading rewards for truly novel things, like, jumping out of planes, I wonder what the result would be.