6 ms·

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a g

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work. My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she would set up a coffeeshop at home and charge her mother and I for drinks. I think this says something about how much she saw the inside of coffeeshops while I was programming there. The main obstacle to still using the play-better-until-it's-real path, is that we don't have a good way for kids to see what adults are doing, in most jobs. Otherwise, their natural instincts are still to "play" at doing what they see the adults doing.

andreyk 5y ago
Yeah, I found this weird: "We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work". It's not clear to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long) route from that to architecture or engineering. " There is not really a route from such playing to engineering except for the general kinds of reasoning involved. It's a cute idea, but does not seem very useful.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I disagree. I'd say there is a pretty direct route. The kid is trying to construct a building. They face great many object-level challenges: what materials to use, where to get them, how to connect them, how to make the structure stable, how to reduce work, etc. Behind each challenge is a field of study for the kid to dabble in, in order to overcome the problem. "Real" architecture and civil engineering, as done by adult professionals, deals with exact same challenges (and then some more). The work is more complex, you need to explore relevant fields of study much deeper (and professional education gives you just that, in a structured way), but it's fundamentally the same thing, just in hard mode.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    I disagree with your disagreement! Anyone who has built a personal project and a real-world professionally engineered project knows that the actual tasks involved are wildly different. What you think the correct solution is becomes a tertiary consideration. You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. Designing a treehouse for fun and designing a professional solution to a list of sometimes contradictory constraints and optimizations scratch some very different itches. One is very clearly play and one is very clearly work.
    - grahamburger 5y ago
      I mean, that's also true of hacking game mods as a kid vs. actual programming for money as an adult. But many professional programmers got their start by just playing around with computers as a kid.
      - jimbokun 5y ago
        Right, the business and politics parts are orthogonal to the engineering or programming parts. They are general facts of life you can't escape regardless of your vocation.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. You mean, like, parents? :). I don't see the difference. The considerations you listed can sometimes dominate the object-level work, but they're also mostly generic skills for all creative white collar jobs. The core that distinguishes an architect from an aviation engineer or a graphic designer - this is the treehouse stuff.
- tasuki 5y ago
  Have you ever built a treehouse? It is both architecture and engineering.
chubot 5y ago
Yeah I'm pretty sure that Christopher Alexander makes this point in one of his books, maybe A Pattern Language He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life. Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city. And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configuration of space diminishes people and relationships. They don't see their parents enough and they don't learn from them. Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc. That work/suburb split definitely describes how I grew up, so I remember that point very distinctly. You are supposed to jump through hoops for 12 years, and then apply to a place where you jump through 4 more years of hoops, etc. But you are confused about how the world actually works. It's not a good way of teaching people to be adaptable to the world.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  As a teacher, this resonates. For many, the knowledge and skills development in school is too abstract. An aside: Is ‘take your child to work day’ even a thing anymore?
  - humanlion87 5y ago
    I have been in a couple of companies where they have had the "bring your child to work day" concept. Though it happens very rarely (maybe 1-2 times per year) I doubt that it has any impact.
    - borroka 5y ago
      It is for the parents and for the company, not for the kids. And, as it happened to a colleague of mine, it can be a sad day for those who cannot bring their kids to work on that day (e.g., disabilities, death). I would get rid of those days, stat.
  - munificent 5y ago
    I work at Google which (before COVID, of course) had a take your kid to work day every year. But it always seemed strangely structured. They would set up a bunch of separate activities for kids to do and the parents would go hang out there and do those with them. It ended up looking at lot more like "take your kid to the office" to me, which sort of defeated the point. But I don't know if there's a good solution when the work adults do is just staring at a screen. I think about this a lot with my screen-based hobbies too. I'd love to share them with the kids more, but they are just totally opaque. The kids seeing me really can't tell the difference between "filing taxes", "programming", "watching YouTube", "making music", etc. Knowledge work really doesn't align well with how kids naturally learn.
prawn 5y ago
I really like this post, especially the point about visibility of job details for children. We don't talk about it enough. We don't draw connections between play skills and career paths. By the time I was making study decisions that would start to dictate my job opportunities, I had no idea what options were out there. A couple of work experience placements isn't enough. One of my jobs is in tourism photography. For some projects, I just go on holiday with my kids, speculatively take photos/videos and then sell them to tourism authorities. It works well. My 6 and 8 year olds came to me at some point and asked, "Is your job to make people want to go on holiday?" Pretty much, yep. And so they have an incentive to help (more effective I am, more holidays we go on) and they see what goes into it - getting up for sunrises, capturing moments, editing, sharing the shots, etc. It's a serious contrast to my other job(s) where they'd guess computers are involved but wouldn't know what goes on - my fault, because I've never stopped to explain it.
fearthetelomere 5y ago
There's a working theory that you could do this with anything. A cool story to read is the Polgar family. His daughters became some of the best chess players of their time. >Polgár and his wife considered various possible subjects in which to drill their children, "including mathematics and foreign languages," but they settled on chess. "We could do the same thing with any subject, if you start early, spend lots of time and give great love to that one subject," Klara later explained. "But we chose chess. Chess is very objective and easy to measure."[3] His eldest daughter Susan described chess as having been her own choice: "Yes, he could have put us in any field, but it was I who chose chess as a four-year-old... I liked the chessmen; they were toys for me." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
- Tarsul 5y ago
  wow, I always thought he had adopted his children. But he didn't, they were his own. It's written that he thought about adopting boys later in life but didn't. Still, I'm shocked that I remember this so wrong. Thanks for posting.
- astrange 5y ago
  Judit Polgár is to this day the greatest woman chess player of all time. She retired but is still the coach of Hungary's national team.
  - fearthetelomere 5y ago
    I had no idea that she still holds such a distinction, thanks for pointing that out! I'm always in awe of their accomplishments.
shoto_io 5y ago
Very interesting. However, there is also the other camp that says let children stay children as long as possible. I wonder if that's conflicting with your line of thought. PS: This is one of the best discussion I have ever read on HN. This article is inspiring in many ways.
kapilkale 5y ago
book is called "the world until yesterday"

andreyk 5y ago

Yeah, I found this weird: "We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work". It's not clear to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long) route from that to architecture or engineering. " There is not really a route from such playing to engineering except for the general kinds of reasoning involved. It's a cute idea, but does not seem very useful.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
I disagree. I'd say there is a pretty direct route. The kid is trying to construct a building. They face great many object-level challenges: what materials to use, where to get them, how to connect them, how to make the structure stable, how to reduce work, etc. Behind each challenge is a field of study for the kid to dabble in, in order to overcome the problem. "Real" architecture and civil engineering, as done by adult professionals, deals with exact same challenges (and then some more). The work is more complex, you need to explore relevant fields of study much deeper (and professional education gives you just that, in a structured way), but it's fundamentally the same thing, just in hard mode.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  I disagree with your disagreement! Anyone who has built a personal project and a real-world professionally engineered project knows that the actual tasks involved are wildly different. What you think the correct solution is becomes a tertiary consideration. You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. Designing a treehouse for fun and designing a professional solution to a list of sometimes contradictory constraints and optimizations scratch some very different itches. One is very clearly play and one is very clearly work.
  - grahamburger 5y ago
    I mean, that's also true of hacking game mods as a kid vs. actual programming for money as an adult. But many professional programmers got their start by just playing around with computers as a kid.
    - jimbokun 5y ago
      Right, the business and politics parts are orthogonal to the engineering or programming parts. They are general facts of life you can't escape regardless of your vocation.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. You mean, like, parents? :). I don't see the difference. The considerations you listed can sometimes dominate the object-level work, but they're also mostly generic skills for all creative white collar jobs. The core that distinguishes an architect from an aviation engineer or a graphic designer - this is the treehouse stuff.
tasuki 5y ago
Have you ever built a treehouse? It is both architecture and engineering.

chubot 5y ago

Yeah I'm pretty sure that Christopher Alexander makes this point in one of his books, maybe A Pattern Language He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life. Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city. And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configuration of space diminishes people and relationships. They don't see their parents enough and they don't learn from them. Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc. That work/suburb split definitely describes how I grew up, so I remember that point very distinctly. You are supposed to jump through hoops for 12 years, and then apply to a place where you jump through 4 more years of hoops, etc. But you are confused about how the world actually works. It's not a good way of teaching people to be adaptable to the world.

germinalphrase 5y ago
As a teacher, this resonates. For many, the knowledge and skills development in school is too abstract. An aside: Is ‘take your child to work day’ even a thing anymore?
- humanlion87 5y ago
  I have been in a couple of companies where they have had the "bring your child to work day" concept. Though it happens very rarely (maybe 1-2 times per year) I doubt that it has any impact.
  - borroka 5y ago
    It is for the parents and for the company, not for the kids. And, as it happened to a colleague of mine, it can be a sad day for those who cannot bring their kids to work on that day (e.g., disabilities, death). I would get rid of those days, stat.
- munificent 5y ago
  I work at Google which (before COVID, of course) had a take your kid to work day every year. But it always seemed strangely structured. They would set up a bunch of separate activities for kids to do and the parents would go hang out there and do those with them. It ended up looking at lot more like "take your kid to the office" to me, which sort of defeated the point. But I don't know if there's a good solution when the work adults do is just staring at a screen. I think about this a lot with my screen-based hobbies too. I'd love to share them with the kids more, but they are just totally opaque. The kids seeing me really can't tell the difference between "filing taxes", "programming", "watching YouTube", "making music", etc. Knowledge work really doesn't align well with how kids naturally learn.

prawn 5y ago

I really like this post, especially the point about visibility of job details for children. We don't talk about it enough. We don't draw connections between play skills and career paths. By the time I was making study decisions that would start to dictate my job opportunities, I had no idea what options were out there. A couple of work experience placements isn't enough. One of my jobs is in tourism photography. For some projects, I just go on holiday with my kids, speculatively take photos/videos and then sell them to tourism authorities. It works well. My 6 and 8 year olds came to me at some point and asked, "Is your job to make people want to go on holiday?" Pretty much, yep. And so they have an incentive to help (more effective I am, more holidays we go on) and they see what goes into it - getting up for sunrises, capturing moments, editing, sharing the shots, etc. It's a serious contrast to my other job(s) where they'd guess computers are involved but wouldn't know what goes on - my fault, because I've never stopped to explain it.

fearthetelomere 5y ago

There's a working theory that you could do this with anything. A cool story to read is the Polgar family. His daughters became some of the best chess players of their time. >Polgár and his wife considered various possible subjects in which to drill their children, "including mathematics and foreign languages," but they settled on chess. "We could do the same thing with any subject, if you start early, spend lots of time and give great love to that one subject," Klara later explained. "But we chose chess. Chess is very objective and easy to measure."[3] His eldest daughter Susan described chess as having been her own choice: "Yes, he could have put us in any field, but it was I who chose chess as a four-year-old... I liked the chessmen; they were toys for me." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

Tarsul 5y ago
wow, I always thought he had adopted his children. But he didn't, they were his own. It's written that he thought about adopting boys later in life but didn't. Still, I'm shocked that I remember this so wrong. Thanks for posting.
astrange 5y ago
Judit Polgár is to this day the greatest woman chess player of all time. She retired but is still the coach of Hungary's national team.
- fearthetelomere 5y ago
  I had no idea that she still holds such a distinction, thanks for pointing that out! I'm always in awe of their accomplishments.

shoto_io 5y ago

Very interesting. However, there is also the other camp that says let children stay children as long as possible. I wonder if that's conflicting with your line of thought. PS: This is one of the best discussion I have ever read on HN. This article is inspiring in many ways.

kapilkale 5y ago

book is called "the world until yesterday"