What shall I teach my son?

ThrowawayR2

> " ...Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good. " Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout. > " Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. " That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics. As for the original question, " If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea. ", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

ballmerpoint

> My favorite suggestions of Postman’s are: > Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet > The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be > The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.

SoftTalker

> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful” That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."

bonsai_spool

I feel the word 'son' carries a lot of heft here - if it were 'what will I teach my child' the expectation of passing on an economically-viable craft would feel less urgent. But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal? If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?

ksd482

> That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what. Partially agreed. Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point. It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point. The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built. So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.

Amorymeltzer

>become a good person >become a good citizen >make the world better That's basically the whole game right there. Or as Hillel might say, the rest is commentary.

dijit

My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver. My grandfather and uncle were mechanics... I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic. If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation. We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions. Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?

jacquesm

To be adaptive. That's going to be the most valuable skill going forward, to be able to adapt to any and all circumstances that may come your way because it is going to be a rough ride for at least the next decade and possibly much longer than that. I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.

fasterik

I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas ). Arguably, the most important skills going forward are the ability to think independently and critically, to adapt to new circumstances, to formulate one's thoughts in a coherent and convincing manner, and to understand things in a broader historical perspective.

lolakutty

Survive..and how to be happy with less.

dsign

> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet. What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well. > We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids. We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.

singpolyma3

So long as the primary purpose of school is to babysit children while their parents "work" it can never be supplanted by anything educational.

tagami

Questions are more powerful than answers. My kids are 29 & 31 now. I'd suggest that they master how to ask well formed questions. Also, "The medium is the message" is from Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964)

lateralux

Make a fire Make bread Make music

asciimov

Teach your children about the things you love. Partially because children often don’t fall far from the tree, and mostly so they can learn how to enjoy something.

yellowapple

> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition. I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.

dumpHero2

School only worked for me because it forced structure onto my learning. Live lectures rarely engaged me, math and physics aside. So traditional teaching wasn't the draw. What mattered were the guardrails: quarterly exams, a peer group to measure myself against, and a pace that forced me to push past initial boredom until a subject clicked. Without clear goalposts, external accountability, and support, self paced learning feels like running in a desert. You just end up going in circles. That’s exactly why MOOCs never worked for me, nor for thousands of others.

throw7

"as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us" That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.

burgreblast

> and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s? Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore. 5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there. Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling. Institutions are meh. My bet is on individuals.

jaronilan

Teach them to backflip. Nothing will replace the body they are born in.