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The whole point of non-coercive education is to allow children to pursue what they actually want to do, not what some adults believe they should do. It is just

The whole point of non-coercive education is to allow children to pursue what they actually want to do, not what some adults believe they should do. It is just as counterproductive to force a child to learn computer programming when they want to be playing outside as it is to force them to play outside when they want to be programming computers!

Avamander 9y ago
> The whole point of non-coercive education is to allow children to pursue what they actually want to do. In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless when you "just want to be a programmer", they all give the possibility of finding new ways of thinking or improve some parts of the brain. In the context of cursive for example, I think acquiring better motor skills means that a programmer could type faster thus making that faster-typing programmer a bit better than other programmers. If I were given the choice to do what I wanted to do I would suck at what I would want to do. For example I don't like math much, but if I weren't forced to "just" do it I wouldn't understand way too many basic concepts in for example programming. Though I do agree with the idea of mentors guiding students, I remember reading a paper about it being super effective compared to regular classroom teaching, I really wish I would have had that chance back when I was younger.
- njarboe 9y ago
  Back before mass public education (100 years ago?) these mentors were called parents, relatives, and friends of the former. Maybe, as we no longer need to train people to get places on time and be a cog in an industrial factory, we can return to this method of education. Then move on to an apprenticeship when one is old enough.
  - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
    I'm choosing to not enroll my future children in the education system or capitalism, for that matter, for exactly this reason. My kids' teachers will be there community, with myself and my partner as facilitators. It's time to get back to learning how to learn together.
    - IndigeniousWind 9y ago
      This comment also got my interest. What exactly will you do to educate your child? What do you mean by not enrolling them in capitalism? Will your primary focus be on programming skills for them?
      - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
        I'll educate them myself. I'm currently looking to design a lesson plan built around songs with lyrics encoding the lessons. I'd also like to design the interior of my home to help them develop intuive visualizations of concepts. Not enrolling them means educating them about how humanity: • goes through cultural phases, sometimes cyclically • is currently in a transitional phase between creating legal systems that don't recognize the freedom to choose any strategy to meet a fundamental need for life (eg. the freedom from money) and creating legal systems that do. • changes through culture, so what we do with our lives can be considered a voting system • is going from a point in time where programming ourselves on the individual level is done intuitively without explicitly defining the mathematics of doing so to a point where we can use category theory of the brain & mind to explicitly define models we're using to program ourselves • is going through a period where we don't see how we can cooperate without laws to a period where we can start defining culture-driven, decentralized ways of life • periods are identifies by the messages within their culture and the actions those messages lead to and stem from • old periods use shame, blame, criticism, judgment, anger, scarcity, control, and other forms of denying needs in their actions/messages • can make up and choose whatever messages to believe, on an individual and collective level • can learn through our example • can learn to accept that helping someone materially can be repaid emotionally/physically/mentally/spiritually/socially, so material possessions aren't necessary • is comprised of individuals who experience a world they're modeling based on what they sense and perceive, so anytime they say anything, it's to a person in their head and not the real person, so nothing is personal The primary focus will be on self-programming skills and studying how human needs naturally emerge from a basic definition of life (http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-meaning-of-life http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-mean...). I'm packaging all this as a religion of absurdity devoted to helping the world through hacking the self. It's a choose-your-own-religion religion. The reason for making it into a religion is because that's what happens when we radically decentralize: everyone governs themselves how they like, including what beliefs they choose and laws that follow. I'm be curious to see how it stands up against current religious legal theory in the US, as well as around the world. If I teach my kids this stuff and we talk about the needs they're meeting or trying to meet through their actions, we can diagram it all out and reason about things in a clearer way. Or at least that's the hypothesis I'm testing through experimenting on my kids in this way.
  - Avamander 9y ago
    I think parents, relatives and friends of the former still act as mentors, but it just isn't very likely every family has that support network. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I do think we need to train people to get places on time and be a cog, there has always been and will be societal pressure to be a cog that fits with others. I think once automation gets to the point it can replace teachers (having at least the same quality) we're going to see what humans can truly achieve given the best education possible.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  > In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless... There's a difference between challenging a child and loading that child up with busy work. My "college prep" school was mostly busy work; I spent more time on schoolwork in high school than college. For example, exposure to history is important, but do you really need to push all the smart kids to the dry, dense history books? Do all the smart kids need to take only advanced classes in foriegn languages? I stumbled on anything that required wrote memorization. By my senior year I started taking the "dumb" courses for fun. Ironically, I learned more in those courses than "college prep" because there was less busy work. The best lesson from the advanced courses is when to run away from someone wasting my time on their ego trip. Part of challenging a child is finding the right challenges.
watwut 9y ago
If we did not had two months of mandatory programming as part of high school curriculum and then push to optional course by teacher, I would never become programmer. I would not know that I can be good at it nor that it is feasible career. But also, I would push my kid both to go outside/to sport and to socialize if they seemed to spend too much time inside or in isolated all the time. You cant learn social skills without practice and your body need physical movement to be healthy. And many kids act badly if they don't have it (they might not be fully aware of causes and consequences, but they do behave better when they had movement). It is great when kid knows what it wants, but that does not mean that it is reasonable to limit education to that single one thing.

Avamander 9y ago

> The whole point of non-coercive education is to allow children to pursue what they actually want to do. In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless when you "just want to be a programmer", they all give the possibility of finding new ways of thinking or improve some parts of the brain. In the context of cursive for example, I think acquiring better motor skills means that a programmer could type faster thus making that faster-typing programmer a bit better than other programmers. If I were given the choice to do what I wanted to do I would suck at what I would want to do. For example I don't like math much, but if I weren't forced to "just" do it I wouldn't understand way too many basic concepts in for example programming. Though I do agree with the idea of mentors guiding students, I remember reading a paper about it being super effective compared to regular classroom teaching, I really wish I would have had that chance back when I was younger.

njarboe 9y ago
Back before mass public education (100 years ago?) these mentors were called parents, relatives, and friends of the former. Maybe, as we no longer need to train people to get places on time and be a cog in an industrial factory, we can return to this method of education. Then move on to an apprenticeship when one is old enough.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
  I'm choosing to not enroll my future children in the education system or capitalism, for that matter, for exactly this reason. My kids' teachers will be there community, with myself and my partner as facilitators. It's time to get back to learning how to learn together.
  - IndigeniousWind 9y ago
    This comment also got my interest. What exactly will you do to educate your child? What do you mean by not enrolling them in capitalism? Will your primary focus be on programming skills for them?
    - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
      I'll educate them myself. I'm currently looking to design a lesson plan built around songs with lyrics encoding the lessons. I'd also like to design the interior of my home to help them develop intuive visualizations of concepts. Not enrolling them means educating them about how humanity: • goes through cultural phases, sometimes cyclically • is currently in a transitional phase between creating legal systems that don't recognize the freedom to choose any strategy to meet a fundamental need for life (eg. the freedom from money) and creating legal systems that do. • changes through culture, so what we do with our lives can be considered a voting system • is going from a point in time where programming ourselves on the individual level is done intuitively without explicitly defining the mathematics of doing so to a point where we can use category theory of the brain & mind to explicitly define models we're using to program ourselves • is going through a period where we don't see how we can cooperate without laws to a period where we can start defining culture-driven, decentralized ways of life • periods are identifies by the messages within their culture and the actions those messages lead to and stem from • old periods use shame, blame, criticism, judgment, anger, scarcity, control, and other forms of denying needs in their actions/messages • can make up and choose whatever messages to believe, on an individual and collective level • can learn through our example • can learn to accept that helping someone materially can be repaid emotionally/physically/mentally/spiritually/socially, so material possessions aren't necessary • is comprised of individuals who experience a world they're modeling based on what they sense and perceive, so anytime they say anything, it's to a person in their head and not the real person, so nothing is personal The primary focus will be on self-programming skills and studying how human needs naturally emerge from a basic definition of life (http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-meaning-of-life http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-mean...). I'm packaging all this as a religion of absurdity devoted to helping the world through hacking the self. It's a choose-your-own-religion religion. The reason for making it into a religion is because that's what happens when we radically decentralize: everyone governs themselves how they like, including what beliefs they choose and laws that follow. I'm be curious to see how it stands up against current religious legal theory in the US, as well as around the world. If I teach my kids this stuff and we talk about the needs they're meeting or trying to meet through their actions, we can diagram it all out and reason about things in a clearer way. Or at least that's the hypothesis I'm testing through experimenting on my kids in this way.
- Avamander 9y ago
  I think parents, relatives and friends of the former still act as mentors, but it just isn't very likely every family has that support network. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I do think we need to train people to get places on time and be a cog, there has always been and will be societal pressure to be a cog that fits with others. I think once automation gets to the point it can replace teachers (having at least the same quality) we're going to see what humans can truly achieve given the best education possible.
gwbas1c 9y ago
> In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless... There's a difference between challenging a child and loading that child up with busy work. My "college prep" school was mostly busy work; I spent more time on schoolwork in high school than college. For example, exposure to history is important, but do you really need to push all the smart kids to the dry, dense history books? Do all the smart kids need to take only advanced classes in foriegn languages? I stumbled on anything that required wrote memorization. By my senior year I started taking the "dumb" courses for fun. Ironically, I learned more in those courses than "college prep" because there was less busy work. The best lesson from the advanced courses is when to run away from someone wasting my time on their ego trip. Part of challenging a child is finding the right challenges.

watwut 9y ago

If we did not had two months of mandatory programming as part of high school curriculum and then push to optional course by teacher, I would never become programmer. I would not know that I can be good at it nor that it is feasible career. But also, I would push my kid both to go outside/to sport and to socialize if they seemed to spend too much time inside or in isolated all the time. You cant learn social skills without practice and your body need physical movement to be healthy. And many kids act badly if they don't have it (they might not be fully aware of causes and consequences, but they do behave better when they had movement). It is great when kid knows what it wants, but that does not mean that it is reasonable to limit education to that single one thing.