Lions in cages

The other day a family member of mine said that we shouldn't be teaching our daughter so much at home like we do, otherwise she will be bored at school and not fit in with the other kids. They seemed to be under the impression that when we teach our daughter we have some kind of classroom routine where we make her do things like, his parents did to them. People of course make assumptions based on their own experience and project it onto others as if no one can do different to what happened to or than what they did.

What is interesting is even at this early stage people see a child who is advanced (in their opinion) as some kind of potential problem child in the future because they aren't going to fit in with all the other kids, they aren't going to be average. Our daughter is advanced in her language skills and enjoys the games we play that support it but it was never our intention to focus on language development, she chose it.

The person that criticized our parenting style said that it is us who puts these things in front of her. I agree. We are products of our environment and I do not think that it is any surprise that our daughter developed enjoying language and music because since she was born we have sung to her, read and told stories and spoken to her in much the same way we would speak to an adult. She has been surrounded her entire life by quality language in both Finnish and English (she is dual mother tongue) so as children do, she replicates and mirrors her surroundings.

Children are sponges and soak so much information in, no matter what that information is. For example, the day I started kindergarten was the first time I was called the N-word and I can't imagine many parents explicitly teaching it to their children and explaining usage and context but, there it was from a group of 4 year olds who didn't know each other previously. Specific language is by nurture, not nature.

This is why I am concerned by surrounding young children with so much engineered and designed content made specifically for them. Do we really know what music helps them develop a good ear or understanding or, are we just offering them musical crack? The games designed is like giving a ball to a lion and then expecting it to learn how to hunt and survive in the wild. Sure, it gets exercise but is it the kind of exercise that encourages it to be in its best form?

Children aren't lions in lifelong cages though, they are going to be released into the wild and will have to fend for themselves. If their entire childhood experience is one of technical engineering designed to cater to their every need, what happens when their needs aren't met?

I am not one of those people who has a lot of faith in centralized education systems and it is dropping even further as they are satisfying the future needs of students less and less each day. I hope my daughter is bored at school. I hope that she is so bored that she realizes how ridiculous the celebration of average and preparation to be employees in jobs that won't exist in 20 years that institutional education largely is, that she will find out what she actually wants to do with her life.

There is nothing wrong with being bored unless the expectation is that someone has to provide entertainment. That is how I see much of what is going on with children these days, they are being provided entertainment under the guise that it has lifelong skill value and gives them a competitive edge when in fact, all are getting the same and, there is very little space for imagination to develop. Rather than let kids be bored enough that they go out and play and learn to hunt for themselves, we hand them a device to take their mind off the boredom - as long as they are out of our way so we can do the same.

We aren't creating strong, expressive, creative, talented humans, we are engineering caged lions who have nothing to do unless a ball is thrown into their enclosure. We are designing consumers who can't think for themselves, the words they have are quotes from movies and their humor is a meme taken from the internet. For those who are children now, this is all most of them have ever been surrounded with, technology that replaces the need for having a personality to connect with others.

We don't teach our daughter anything although she learns a lot. We have pencils and paper on the table. There are small piles of books around our apartment. A box of Lego. Most importantly though is, we give her space to explore her surroundings, we answer her questions with questions so she thinks it through, we let her help with the household chores, we talk with her constantly, hug her often, discuss all manner of topics she is interested in and explain to the best of our ability how various things work.

She is very, very curious. There is no time to be bored when there is always something interesting to discover and, for the creative of mind, there is discovery to be made in the most mundane of surroundings. Unfortunately, kids are too attached to their screens to see the world around them these days and they may never know what they are missing but, know they will feel that something is missing. They just likely won't have the personal tools to discover what it may be.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]