Stream
Young children do not have the mental model to understand affordance of a toy. Hence products for kids are almost never used the way they are intended to be used. Toys should be designed to be all enabling, and provide multiple level of abstraction for kids with varying abilities.
Case study: Anjali with book and stacking toy
A good chunk of a doctor’s work includes repeating similar procedures on slightly different patients - I don’t think this is any more complex than the work of an architect. The current pipeline to becoming a doctor is unnecessarily competitive. And it seems to me that this is deliberately created for economic benefits. Putting so many people through a rat race just to retain artificial prestige seems like a huge waste of human talent.
Our tendency to conform as adults is largely shaped by the the rigidity of our social circles when we are younger. As kids, we are exposed to a finite set of people and this group of people remain relatively unchange. This makes being able to fit in extremely crucial, which consequently stunts individuality and originality. Giving kids the mean to find their people (in a safe way) seems crucial.
It seems to me that an understanding of our physical surroundings and its mechanisms is a necessary precuresor to the understanding of more abstract concepts.
Here’s a possible hypothesis:
We live in a physical world, we are able to manipulate physcial objects, and watched other people do the same. We collect data points and develope an intuitive understanding of physical concepts. Which then becomes an interface to more abstract concepts. A example of this would be using blocks to learn counting. Blocks are physical. Numbers are abstract.
I wonder how much our fine-motor ability comes in our way of understanding more abstract knowledge. If we are able to fundamentally change the way we interact with this world, and somehow allow us to directly interface with abstract concepts without advance physical devleopment. Then perhaps we could speed up the rate of learning.
We are adversed to failure, boredom and messes. It becomes seocnd nature for us to protect our kids from these experiences.
It seems difficult to introduce interactive machine assisted learning to young children (2-3), because they have yet to develope a standardized method for communication (communication comes hand in hand with emotion identification and regulation). If any tech is introduced, it will most likely be some form of SaS that interface with the teachers. Examples could be streamlining logistics and creating personalized learning plans.
Early educators are special because their knowledge is very specific to what they practice. This is unlike someone who studies say Physics, who can then become an engineer, a researcher or a physics teacher.
The bulk of the human resouces in education should be devoted towards early education.
Early ed is not simply childcare. I think the struggle of early years educators is identifying what young children need and figuring out which method is effective in assisting their needs. What does preschool teacher training entail?
Personal hunch right now is that innovation in early childhood education is not super dire, at least compared to the later years. We do have a few tried and tested models that are working (ie. reggio emilia, forest school, montessori, mixed ability classrooms, project based), and these models tend to optimize for overall human flourishing thanks to the lack of standardized testing in early years.
What could be useful:
- a list of children’s congitive development needs and guidelines to assist children in their needs - It’s important that early educators not just understand what to do, but also the scientific reasons behind their actions.
Public education system should not encourage children to optimize for limited resource. When the improvement of one self is at the detriment of someone else, we will never be able to achieve collective excellence. We tend to mistake sarcity as prestrige, this skews our judgement and distracts us from working on what’s truly meaningful to us. Instead, we should create a system where children can optimize for unlimited resource like kindness and skill mastery.
Kindness should not just be externally measuerd, they should also be measured through self-reflection.
In general, children should be encouraged to regularly evaluate themselves. Establishing good self-understanding of one’s ability - how much do I truly understand something - requires calibration. And a strong understanding of self is fundamental to our ability to call out our own bullshit.
I wonder how “work” and “life” should interact. Right now, there’s common consensus that there should be a clear separation between work and life. This separation applies broadly to all dimensions (ie. physical location, time, mental). I wonder how much of this habit is shaped by our young years where there is a clear separation between ‘school’ and ’life’. I wonder how instiling curiosity and blurring this boundary will change our relationship with ‘work’ later on.