How Do I Teach These Kids?!

Help create systems instead of goals, and show kids that they can keep exploring, finding linkages in hidden spaces. “Teach kids freedom, and that they have agency.”

It’s an oft-cited fact that the modern education system was created during the Industrial Revolution to prepare children to grow up to work in factories. “Factory schools,” as they were called, sprang up in Prussia in the 19th Century and quickly spread throughout the industrialized world, to teach kids to be “punctual, docile, and sober.”

Expose your kids to a lot of things early, and then help them go as deep as they’re able to go on the things that excite them the most. It doesn’t matter what those things are; cultivating curiosity and depth is the point.  

Giving kids the agency to follow their own curiosity seems right for a lot of obvious reasons: it will make them happier, intrinsic motivation will fuel them to learn more, it keeps the youthful flame burning instead of extinguishing it with routine...But it’s also important for a less obvious reason, one that will be even more important as things ... See more