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A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah
- contingencies 4y agoCool kid. Imagine what he could have done with supportive teachers if not burdened by poverty.
- bequanna 4y agoDid you read the article? His parents were immensely supportive. I can’t imagine any other situation where a parent would essentially dedicate their life to support their child’s development.
- contingencies 4y agoI read the article. In my reading it implied the whole family were disabled, the parents housebound, and that for half of his life the kid was effectively permanently engaged in self-directed business-linked study outside of the house.
- bequanna 4y agoWas there any indication that this kid would have been happier or “better off” in any other situation? It sounds like he thrived in the specific set of conditions that he was raised in. Would that be true if he had grown up middle class and went to a traditional public school and force-fed common core nonsense?
- JeremyNT 4y agoI mean, my daughter goes to public school, leading a mostly "cookie cutter" existence, and several of her peers who she interacts with there have memberships in a swimming pool of some sort or another. Given that we wanted her to be able to swim with them, we paid a professional to give her swimming lessons. She's now 11, but any time in the last ~5 years, tipping over in a canoe or kayak would not have been fatal for her (even without a life vest).
- chiefalchemist 4y agoI imagine he'd be cookie like all the other cookies; as in cut by a cookie cutter that limits the majority of all the other minds cranked out of the formal K - 12 mill.
- contingencies 4y ago"supportive teachers" != regular K12 teachers
- chiefalchemist 4y agoI know a number of teachers. All of them want to do the best job possible. Unfortunately, a good number of them are in systems that don't support them as well as they should. That said, I'd take it a step further and say the (USA) culture doesn't do enough to support the systems and the teachers. What goes in, trickles down, and comes out the other end. With the power structure, teachers have some, but others have far more. That's where the accountability (read: blame) needs to go. Blaming the powerless is a fool's errand. That is, for example, we can sign off billions to foreign countries, and at home our teachers are going out of pocket for supplies. Huh? I'm not suggesting that we don't help others. I am insisting that if we can do that, we can certainly do better for teachers, and other similar high-value (to the future) professions.
- contingencies 4y agoI did not mean to blame teachers themselves and also believe there are systemic and cultural challenges. Not just in the US but globally. This is not surprising given the way in which education and media are often politicized, the use of access to tertiary education as an effective class battleground, and the scale and scope of recent technology impact on our culture.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoWe agree. I simply wanted to add some context / depth, because as you mentioned, the media is so good at over-simplification. And that too often skews the ability to have a full informed conversation.
- lkrubner 4y agoThis story is especially clear and dramatic (and well documented) but I've often thought this happens in every generation: the people who lead (businesses and nations) when they are in their 40s and 50s are often people who boldly go out and discover the world while they are in their teens and 20s, and so they take on a bit more risk than the average citizen, and this includes physical risk (whether in travel or informal athletics), and so, "at the margins" as an economist would say, a certain percentage of them are dead before they reach the age of 30. So, for every generation, a few of the most brilliant lights are missing by the time the generation reaches its 40s and 50s. The people who do become leaders are, to an extent, the ones who simply got lucky -- many of them have some stories to tell about times they took a risk and were surprised to live. For obvious reasons, we don't hear the stories from the folks who took a risk and did not survive. (One of my favorite anecdotes on this subject: One of the best entrepreneurs I know went down to Mexico and hitchhiked all over when she was 18 years old. And every family that picked her up told her that what she was doing was very dangerous and that she was very lucky to be picked up by that family, instead of someone more dangerous. But at the time she was very innocent. 20 years later I ran into her and I was like "You know what you did was crazy?" and she was like "Now that I think about it, I'm amazed that I survived.")
- bombcar 4y ago20 years ago Mexico was much different than it is now; 30 years even more so.
- rkuykendall-com 4y ago30 years ago in central Texas we visited northern Mexico many, many times a year. 20 years ago we thought it was funny other people were starting to be scared to do so. 15 years ago we stopped going. We haven't been back since. It's so weird that, from a central Texas perspective, we used to be a short drive from visiting another COUNTRY, which is now effectively a blank space on the map of the world around us. Ski west in New Mexico, eat easy in New Orleans, Hike north in Colorado. South? Here be dragons. Maybe the next 30 years will be the same story in the opposite direction, but I don't know. I haven't seen anything to give me hope of that.
- klyrs 4y agoThis is some real inspiration porn. The kid sounds amazing, and it's tragic that he died so young. I have family that practices unschooling, and in their case, that means fundamentalist indoctrination, no math, no history, near illiteracy, no saleable skills or motivation to get a job or do anything independently. And I just know that they're going to send this to my mom as evidence that they're doing the right thing.
- xani_ 4y agoPoor kid, the family are basically gimping his start in life by a decade... it's outright abuse
- klyrs 4y agoWhat a peculiar word to use. And, I actually disagree in this specific case. This kid is a statistical outlier to a degree I'm unwilling to even guess at. It's the kids around and below average who are hurt the most by a lack of structured education.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoI think requiring standardized tests of homeschooled kids is a pretty good compromise… The standardized tests are ridiculously easy to ace if you're smart, and they'd catch kids who aren't learning reading or basic arithmetic
- asperous 4y agoAt least in Oregon this is already a thing https://www.oregon.gov/ode/learning-options/HomeSchool/Pages/default.aspx https://www.oregon.gov/ode/learning-options/HomeSchool/Pages...
- quantified 4y agoExcept that even what you're testing them on may not be really the most useful or applicable stuff. Any such testing would need to take into account what they actually have been doing and learning. Since the point of much learning is to be able to do, looking at accomplishment is super important. And a productive evaluation of people like the subject here might be challenging to system educators with a vested interest in our factory schooling.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago> Outside, the sky over Escalante Valley, Utah, is blinding blue and cloudless, I don't enjoy articles that preamble about the lack of clouds in the sky. Here's the meat: > Kevin drowned in a kayaking accident at a friend’s birthday party. At 14, he had just published his autobiography. He was making plans to expand his 350-acre farm to buy up surrounding farms to convert to regenerative agriculture. He was saving money to build a house for his parents and another for his autistic older brother. He was polishing a movie script and a series of children’s books teaching business literacy for kids. He was looking for a celebrity to endorse his line of luxury toiletries made from the milk of his goat herd. He was breeding heritage turkeys. He was writing guest essays for notable bloggers higher up the political food chain. And, in his spare time, he had the task of grading the road to his farm using the John Deere tractor he bought new for himself for his 11th birthday. and > A friend once remarked, “You guys aren’t even raising him; you’re just kind of the audience watching him raise himself.”
- yaomtc 4y agoThe lack of clouds was relevant. The next few words you left out: > promising no rain as it has for nearly a year The area was experiencing a drought. > And then, after 14 months without rain, the well that supplied their house went dry. For nine months the Coopers hauled water by the barrel for their household needs.
- lucb1e 4y agoSounds like those words could have stood on its own without the fluff about what the present weather is like at the time of writing.
- LastTrain 4y agoIt’s a human interest story not a shipping manifest.
- PedroBatista 4y agoCue the Simpsons meme gif “Old man yells at the lack of clouds”
- teekert 4y ago“Don’t ever take ‘can’t’ as the answer unless you’ve verified that it is against the law or against the powers of physics,” Kevin wrote in his memoir. What a human. Such a great balance of a healthy brain and the confidence to trust it.
- Tossrock 4y agoInterestingly, this sounds like a paraphrase of an Elon/SpaceX quote, something like "if you want to win an argument, you better have Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein on your side."
- LegitShady 4y agouber/airbnb: "and the law bit doesn't really count either, if you 'lobby' the right people"
- rlt 4y agoSome laws are unjust, protect rent-seeking incumbents, etc.
- moffkalast 4y agoKid sounded like an ultra capitalistic incarnation of Von Neumann. I suppose growing up dirt poor does that to a person.
- comology 4y ago
- fzeroracer 4y agoThe people celebrating this story seem weird to me because this looks more like a nightmare. It's having your entire childhood traded away in order to function in a system that's responsible for making your entire family poor. I know some people look at it as the whole 'self-made capitalist can do anything' sort of ideal but to me I see the failures of multiple systems.
- comology 4y agoI took off my rose tinted glasses after getting to this part of the narrative: “Then Kevin discovered the wealth of information in county property and tax records, including the concept of “lawyers’ liens.” A lawyer who is owed money from a client can put a lien on the client’s property to get paid when the land is sold, just like a tax lien. And lawyers’ liens can be bought and sold. Kevin found one such lien languishing in the Iron County property records and bought it for half the value from the lawyer who had forgotten it was there. Kevin doubled his money when the property sold within a few weeks.” The hand waved details of this purchase and sale illuminated the authors intentional bias for me.
- joshenders 4y agoYou’re not wrong but both things can be true at once.
- lo_zamoyski 4y agoI often find nebulous discussions around "systems" tiresome, not because there aren't better or worse systems, not because we can't make improvements, but because very often it results in a waste of time and energy spent on grievance and kvetching and wanting the stars to align perfectly instead of making the best of your situation.
- synergy20 4y agoA truly sad story.
- bagels 4y agoArticle did mention? "But on a hot day last June, at nearby Newcastle Reservoir, Kevin drowned in a kayaking accident at a friend’s birthday party." Article is worth reading. I think the title is pretty accurate, assuming the details are true.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoIt's believable but then again had a distinct too good to be true fairytale feel. I hate to sound jaded but I keep waiting for a shoe to drop about it's accuracy or even validity.
- thomassmith65 4y agoassuming the details are true Consider the child's remarkable accomplishments, remarkable family situation, unusually young death, flakey sources (yes, including Weiss)... It's less likely the story is true than that it's a GoFundMe scam.
- fock 4y agoSo, as a European I read: mormon paper (Deseret...) hails parents who made their child work their farm. Because reading things like: > His spelling and grammar lagged behind grade level. He consistently misspelled the word “business,” and stumbled over the pronunciation of simple words. doesn't really spell hidden genius of the 21st century but probably describes millions of peasants in Europe during the middle-ages. Family died of the plague, so son got a businessman at age 9. It happened a lot, but they were just some other serf and didn't have ideologists (recall the NYT-author who resigned because "woke") who celebrate going fullspeed back to the middle ages.
- bequanna 4y agoSo in your view, it sounds like being able to perfectly diagram a sentence is more important than understanding tax law?
- fock 4y agoWell, to understand tax law, you need to understand language quite well (see another post these days on the frontpage...) - which usually comes with some skills in applying it. It smells a bit fishy, if you claim a person can do the first, but not the latter.
- bequanna 4y agoWait, you’re claiming that someone needs to be able to diagram a sentence or spell perfectly to understand tax law? That’s ridiculous.
- fock 4y agoI don't know, but I guess that the intricacies of tax law are written down. And to study that (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/112b https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/112b here?) you need to be able to be quite proficient at reading. And usually proficiency at efficient reading of laws translates to an ok command over speaking/writing as well (which apparently is not the case here)... if you read weird words a 100 times, I expect a moderately intelligent person to remember how to spell them...
- jessaustin 4y agoParents, teach your kids to swim. If you know children whose parents can't do this, insist on doing it for them.
- blacksqr 4y agoNot only couldn't swim, wasn't wearing a life jacket.
- Maursault 4y agoIs it really possible no one instructed them to wear life jackets? Or is it more likely he typically wanted to prove everyone wrong? Obedience is taught to instill discipline. Sounds like Kevin already had plenty of discipline, yet apparently self-taught himself to never listen to anyone. Sounds like a combination of both Daedalus and Icarus.
- Tao3300 4y agoI'm guessing its like bike helmets. I never see kids wearing bike helmets. It's not cool.
- ip26 4y agoThe trick with helmets is when the risk takers are wearing them. Then wearing a helmet can become a signal you ride hard. I think that’s a good part of why helmets took over skiing in Colorado but not California. In Colorado, the extreme skiers wore them, and the rest followed.
- etempleton 4y agoSwimming is perhaps one of the most important skills anyone can learn regardless of where you live. At some point in your life you will probably fall into water too deep to stand. Don’t let yourself be at the mercy of someone saving you or sheer dumb luck. Also, if you can’t swim, don’t be embarrassed! A lot of people can’t and honestly no one is judging you because you can’t swim. Go to your local pool and see if they offer adult classes and if not see if there is someone willing to teach you.
- soared 4y agoI mean, do we believe any of this? An 8 year old isn’t running a business and selling to restaurants in a different state. No business would purchase from an 8 year, no business would ship goods from an 8 year old, no bank gives a loan to a 9 year old. The list goes on and on. Incredibly sad that a child has died, but this reads as pure fantasy.
- paulcole 4y agoMy brother was stealing property (boats, go-karts, ATVs) and selling it to (mostly) legitimate businesses (run by adults) by the time he was 12. By the time he was 15ish he had a landscaping business with residential and commercial customers. Things are different when it’s real rural. Sure you can’t get a bank loan without an adult involved, but cash is cash. And if you need something for your business and a kid brings it to you, who’s going to look a gift horse in the mouth?
- effingwewt 4y agoYea, we grew up pretty rural and we sold rabbits, goats, even horses as kids. We also traded them for equipment like ATVs, guns, or whatever we needed. OP has never left the city and so just assumes his life is all life. Even his statement 'do we' just assumes we all believe as he does. Cole also probably did what many young business owners do and put it in his parent's names. Much of this is common place for country folk coming up, this kid just took it to extremes in all the best ways. Finding lawyer's liens and trading work for property was brilliant- had OP paid attention he'd have had the answers to his doubts. I know others said it was inspiration porn but I was just incredibly sad we lost such a bright star. Edit- He-> Cole for clarity
- xwdv 4y agoI'm willing to believe he did accomplish all these things, because the things he did aren't really intellectually complex. It is more of a matter of having social intelligence and patience, and perhaps arithmetic knowledge. A sufficiently motivated child with enough intelligence could accomplish them, especially if he had not much else to occupy his time.
- EZ-Cheeze 4y ago[dead]
- egypturnash 4y agoI feel like there is a huge elephant in the room here of how shitty Utah’s support system evidently is. No money to assist his disabled parents and his autistic brother. This whole family was living in desperate, grinding poverty, and that gave this kid a super strong urge to try and get out of it instead of having a childhood.
- TrispusAttucks 4y agoI disagree with this sentiment. You wish to take away the very condition which made him uniquely special. He seems like he was enjoying his childhood. Adversity breeds character and this kid had more than character than some entire classrooms.
- fzeroracer 4y agoI lost a significant number of my teeth as a teenager because I grew up in poverty and decided that what little money I had was better put towards my career rather than fixing dental issues. Do you think this is a positive example of how adversity breeds character?
- vaidhy 4y agoYes.. When you are struggling to put food on the table, you are not enjoying childhood.. Adversity breaks more people than building character. Which is why, we insist that kids have good food, good environment to grow up in etc. It is not right that 1000 kids suffer for one to build a character (as you may call it). You can build character in better environments too.
- RalfWausE 4y agoHard times creates great men, great men creates good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times...
- rospaya 4y agoNothing romantic about poverty and misery.
- aerovistae 4y agoOkay so, I have to say, at first this was a pretty feel-bad story for me. I then noticed a tidbit of information in another article about it that somehow made me feel different: Cole Summers didn't know how to swim. He was out on the water in a kayak, with no life jacket, with only an autistic child for company - and didn't know how to swim. Somehow it stopped feeling like a tragic accident and more like carelessness and stupidity, and I just didn't feel as bad. I'm sorry it happened, and my heart goes out to his family, but this was avoidable. Somehow among all the crazy stuff he learned and accomplished at such a young age, basic common sense seems to have been dodged.
- rendall 4y agoIt's hard to hear about any 14 year old boy dying, particularly one with such promise. To salve our feelings, to make sense of it, it might feel important to grasp some detail that makes it not so tragic. Resist doing that. It was a tragic accident.
- blobbers 4y agoNo, it was blatant stupidity of all the people surrounding him. Life jackets exist for a reason. They save people who can't swim! It's tragic that it is such a stupid preventable death, not an accident. It's like saying someone drove around their whole life without a seatbelt and then died in a car accident at 14. Angry at his stupid parents, or whoever gave him the kayak.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago"Life jackets exist for a reason. They save people who can't swim!" Just wanted to add that they save folks that can swim as well. A lot of folks can swim a little, but not enough to get to shore if they are in the middle of a lake and wouldn't handle a current really well. Heck, even if you swim well, exhaustion is a danger. Life jackets help folks. Period.
- rendall 4y ago
- blobbers 4y agoThis is incredibly frustrating that such a remarkable kid died in such a stupid preventable way. Wear a life jacket. Learn to swim. Reading this again and trying to find some way there was something not preventable and not finding it makes me angrier and angrier. Why the hell are you in a boat without a life preserver if you can't swim. So angry.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DoreenMichele 4y agoI hate this story and I hate most of the comments here. I homeschooled. I know a lot about homeschooling and giftedness and yadda. People who don't know anything about homeschooling and the myriad ways it differs from public school and private school -- it's a little like a bunch of Christians commenting on the life of a Muslim individual, having never studied their religion or culture or a bunch of Europeans in big cities commenting on the life of someone in a rural village in Africa. I wrote a wall of text and deleted it. I just don't know where to begin to try to explain and have it not go sideways.
- jxramos 4y agoI’ve been curious about homeschoolers and their perceptions and interactions with age ranges. I’ve heard criticisms about weird social distortions that manifest from the whole age stratification we find in schools through the grade system. Basically the values and preferences of a given age take on exaggerations among a bunch of peers that don’t get tempered by the opinions and thoughts from older peers and others outside the age cohort. Sounds feasible but real experience of the homeschoolers would be great to hear about.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoI don't know that I really understand what you are trying to say. Simultaneously, I feel like the answer to the question is probably "It's far worse than you think." You take, say, 30 kids who happen live in the same area and are born within a particular year and shove them together in a class and they are all being shaped by the same teacher, the same curriculum, the same school system, their parents may know each other or may not etc. I think you are likely attributing overly much to the children per se and not to the forces shaping a group of children. And I think we have done a lot of harm to how humans think about age differences generally. I feel like as a society we have an excess of baggage concerning dating someone of a different age, as just one example.
- jxramos 4y agoYah I think there’s something to that. There’s this age delta in dating that’s a huge exaggerated deal if someone dates another a year or two older/younger in age cohort schools. There’s almost this disbelief and shock from the peers when they witnessed this narrow age gap being crossed. I used to always attribute the shock to the larger percent differences in age that are calculated in the younger years where a year relative to 10 or 14 is a much larger percentage of one’s age than at 26 or 35 and beyond. Come to think about it yah what was that shock all about and I think I agree that it probably has carried over in weird baggage into the adult age ranges. There’s like a weird mental adjustment upon first finding out about age differences in a given couple from split second shock and disbelief to like “oh yah that’s not that far apart anymore”. The problem with the age cohort model is that all people are assumed to develop at the same rate uniformly. That’s probably not true.
- morelisp 4y agoHas there been any profile of this kid prior to his death? Surely a human interest story about an 11yo buying a tractor or a 9yo running a rabbit farm somewhere?
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoThe kid was 14 and, among other accomplishments: > He was making plans to expand his 350-acre farm to buy up surrounding farms to convert to regenerative agriculture. Kudos to him. Every death is unfortunate, but I understand why the death of someone who shows deep care for people around him, for nature, for the world, is especially saddening.
- Markoff 4y agoTLDR America’s most remarkable kid didn't know how to swim at age 14 and drowned while kayaking not wearing life jacket I dunno, but I find that remarkably stupid, but I guess US has different standards for what's remarkable.
- SyzygistSix 4y agoNo, it is very typically stupid. Exactly the kind of thing young men and boys do often, which is engaging in risky behavior without thinking. Most of the time the result is stupid fun. Unfortunately some are unlucky.
- hsuduebc2 4y agoDamn this is horrible.