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Young children would rather explore than get rewards

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Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#41

Post by jariel »

yellowapple wrote: post #29
adrianN wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

> I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intri…

Decent high school grades are not that hard to get. It's not 'strangulation' to have to take 'English, Geography, History and Math'. I wish I had paid more attention in English class, I did not respect how important it was going to be until later in life, for example.

The course load in Eng. or in Grad School - now that can be overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#43

Post by hamandcheese »

donw wrote: post #35
adrianN wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

I think you're both kinda right? 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 ca…

> (a) children are not tiny adults

Adults are merely large children.

Edit: I did read the rest of your comment and generally agree whole heartedly.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#44

Post by OneGuy123 »

Offtopic but regarding the supression of the child from the parent: few people realize how severely the large majority of parents damage their children and supress their innate creativity and drive.

This is also very hard to realize as an adult because it gets unconsiously supressed.

The following books opened my eyes at the fact how dangerous it is for the grown up adult to then keep thinking "yeah, but my parents did the best you could you know?" even though they completely destroyed his innate creativity and freedom.

Alice Miller: The Drama of the Gifted Child

Alice Miller: The Body Never Lies

TLDR version of these books is that a large majority of parents tried to mold them as children and fit them into boxes or supressed their needs and wants as children and never truly listened to them. This then causes uncousious guilt/anxiety/etc... feeling in the person as adult and prevents him from "taking oportunities" etc..

And at the core of the issue is the forced-upon-us belief that we always have to respect our parents, even though we secretely hate them. Saying "yeah but they did something good for me you know" is actually a huge problem that will only keep us from seeing the fact that many in fact do not like/love their parents very much because the parents did not truly listen to them etc...

As long as we try to weight the good vs the bad moments we will relapse into the false indoctrinated compassion/guilt towards our parents, into denial of the cruelties we experienced as a child, all because people say that we should try to "balance the good vs the bad". But this does not work in practice. This balancing process seems to be a reflection of how we tried to cope as children to survive. The adult must reject this balancing process because it only causes confusion without resolving anything. Many people when they break contact from parents feel guilty and think even more about their own parents: the "experts" and her parents have reinforced the indoctrinated belief in this person that "this individual has no right to his own life, feelings and needs." It was this desire of the child to believe that the parents were good that led to these supressions because the child blamed himself. This is why when a therapists says "try to see the good" it will only cause great harm. regression and confusion: since it was this need of the child to "try and see the good" in his parents when there was none that caused these issues in the first place.

So anyone who even slightly suspects that their parents supressed him as a child and denied him freedom of expression etc... will find many answers in those books above.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#45

Post by donw »

hamandcheese wrote: post #43
donw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're both kinda right? 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 ca…

> (a) children are not tiny adults Adults are merely large children. Edit: I did read the rest of your comment and generally agree whole heartedly.

Have edited for clarity, thanks!

And I do know a frighteningly large number of thirty-odd-year old children. :)

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#46

Post by acituan »

atoav wrote: post #40
adrianN wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

As someone who in his (mandatory in my country) social year worked with "difficult" kids: for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find. Of course that isn't easy and requires much more teachers and a bit more flexibility when it comes to which topics to learn, but good education is making every bodies life better and should be IMO much higher valued both in societal and monetary terms.

> for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find

I think this can be generalized to all humans. It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection.

Like you say, what matters is matching the child's potential with what is available in their current environment, and institutional schooling might be a very blunt tool for that. Not only it is necessarily inadequate for every individual kid, it can also occupy too much time and deprive them from the opportunity to experiment and explore to their niche in society in their unstructured free time.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#47

Post by tolbish »

kqr wrote: post #13
discordance wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This describes 'work' life pretty well, with extrinsic motivation being a salary. If that spigot were shut off there certainly would be little desire to do the task for most.

True as that may be, I think the argument that resonated with me is that there is an even more primitive type of motivation than extrinsic: the drive to survive. (Or, more generally, physical and emotional needs.) Under that hypothesis, the salary is there to take physical needs as a motivator off the table. If an employee has to worry about physical needs, there's no room at all for any other concern. Once the salar…

Can you elaborate on point (b)? I don't quite get what you mean. Performance bonuses are designed to stop happening altogether?

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#48

Post by toomanybeersies »

Reading between the lines, as we grow up, we get conditioned to follow instructions, rather than act independently.

For the adults, there's no incentive to maximise how many virtual candies they collect, beyond doing it because they were told it was the aim.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#49

Post by kqr »

donw wrote: post #35
adrianN wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

I think you're both kinda right? 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 ca…

> I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy.

I wouldn't be so sure. I think Deming (and, perhaps more concretely, the Toyota Production System) has showed us that there is a surprising amount of autonomy that can be unlocked even for the most menial roles.

Treating low-level workers with respect, training them well, and listening to what they have to say is a mutually beneficial agreement. They are the people who know what is really going on in the processes they control. They are (or at least should be!) the most informed people in the room when it comes to decisions around those processes.

In exchange for their valuable input, low-level workers should, then, get a piece of autonomy. If they have figured out a way to prevent mistakes, or a more efficient procedure to accomplish their objective, they can do it their way – with the support of management. Of course, if they know they aren't respected or listened to, it will never occur to them even to think about improvements.

Really, it's two sides of the same coin.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#50

Post by tolbish »

op03 wrote: post #7

Academia and Corporations. Academics are dealt with as we do kids i.e. they are protected and allowed to explore. Corporations exploit what has already been explored for reward - without the reward there is nothing protecting them.

Academia was like that before the turn on the century. I don't know too many people in academia who would agree with you now.

Academia is the same cut-throat pursuit for funding as industry, but with fewer options.

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