Briefly

I know people who spend more than $200 every month with their television provider. At the end of every day, the people of those families disappear into separate rooms to enter different worlds of television, movies and gaming. They tell me their lives would be boring otherwise. I can’t tell them they’re wrong, but I do know the things that mean the most to me are more analog than digital. Lucy and I just got back from walking through the peaceful downtown of the sleepy suburb where we live. She loves sniffing everything and watching the sights and sounds. Traffic is endlessly fascinating to her. And I get to walk and think about life — about problems and goals and working all sorts of things out. Lucy isn’t concerned with the same things I am, but she’s a great listener. The things that bring us joy and meaning don’t have to cost money. I suspect it’s far better for mental health than more typical modern entertainment. Now if I just had a wife and some children to come along for the walks, things would be even better. There’s a lot of peace to be found in simple joys which are completely free.

Most adults are so busy trying to force little children to act like miniature adults that they don’t allow kids the healthy development they need. Researcher Erika Christakis says this is because most adults don’t seem to understand the importance of being little. Christakis is a former faculty member of the Yale Child Study Center, and she says today’s parents are so eager to “invest in the future” for their children that they completely lose sight of the fact that being “little” — and doing child-like things — will give their children better outcomes than their “adultification” of childhood. Children desperately need more unstructured play and more unstructured time in general with adults who are willing to allow them to be little investigators rather than sponges for stuffing with dry facts. The very things which most affluent parents believe are helping their children get ahead are setting them up for failure instead.

What if your daughter were about to start kindergarten and you went to the affluent school where she was about to go and discovered that the school was teaching nonsense? That’s exactly what happened to an education consultant in Colorado who recently visited his daughter’s new school. Everybody was nice, but when the kindergarten teacher talked about their methods of teaching reading, he cringed. She was using “progressive” methods that were debunked decades ago. He’s learning that most schools use similar techniques that don’t work, simply because schools of education are committed to ideas and techniques based on ideology instead of cognitive science. So why do so many people entrust their children’s future to these well-meaning but incompetent people? It’s one of the most underreported scandals of modern learning. Read his summary of what he’s found here and then check out the radio documentary to which he refers where you can find out more.