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Being a parent, I ask myself this question: is it worth it to struggle to get my child to try for better grades? And I don't have a definitive answer. The rea

Being a parent, I ask myself this question: is it worth it to struggle to get my child to try for better grades? And I don't have a definitive answer. The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer. I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce. I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.

zozbot234 6mo ago
Why do you want to force your kid to study? Kids are naturally curious, it's likely that your kid will be curious about something. Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them.
- cyberax 6mo ago
  Because _real_ study is boring. Watching videos on Youtube or playing "educational games" is not studying. You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.
  - zozbot234 6mo ago
    The proper response to that is still not to force your kid to study though. Instead, she should be made aware that in order to consistently do well, she is ultimately expected to gain the ability to force herself and defer the immediate gratification of watching a YouTube video (unless that YouTube video is a boring recorded college lecture that's relevant to her studies, I suppose).
    - cyberax 6mo ago
      Well, and how are you going to do that?
    - crabbone 6mo ago
      This fails with a sizeable portion of adults... and you expect children to somehow understand delayed gratification? To force themselves? Have you ever met an actual child? Just a week ago mine found and devoured a pack of cookies that were meant for supper and then cried at supper that there weren't any cookies left, choking on a hated apple instead. Guess he won't do it again in a week if there's another pack of cookies in the hand's reach? Guess again!
      - zozbot234 6mo ago
        > Just a week ago mine found and devoured a pack of cookies that were meant for supper and then cried at supper that there weren't any cookies left This was famously tested with the Stanford marshmallow experiment. A sizeable fraction of kids - preschool kids, no less - can in fact learn not to eat the marshmallow.
        crabbone 6mo ago
        Can learn? -- I'm sure! Will they learn without any "encouragement"? -- Absolutely not. There are millions of people struggling to get on a diet, to quit smoking, to stop doom-scrolling their choice of social media. Most of them know very well how good it would be to stop doing bad things and start doing something good instead, and yet they don't. Children are worse, overall, because life isn't as harsh for them as it is for adults. An alcoholic who can't quit drinking is risking his marriage, his career, on top of his health, and still pulls out a stashed flask and takes a sip. The worst that can happen to a child is that their parents will yell at him / her? That's a very weak deterrent against doing something that offers instant gratification.
  - RyanOD 6mo ago
    That's right. Real learning is difficult - even for activities we enjoy.
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago
  [dead]
- crabbone 6mo ago
  Children don't do anything beside simple and pleasing activities unless forced to. Studying is hard, not immediately rewarding and boring. No child likes to study, some are just more pliable. > Kids are naturally curious This curiosity extends to simple facts (like "who's the best soccer player: Messi or Ronaldo?") it doesn't help with important subjects that need studying (like, how do you prove Pythagoras' theorem). > Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them. Children simply don't "work" like that. If you let children "figure things out", they'll "figure out" if Messi or Ronaldo are the best soccer player, and they will never even ask why is the sum of squares of the catheti equals the square of hypotenuse. Not only will they never ask that, they'll never figure out there are right triangles. Some discoveries in human knowledge took us many generations to make and some are trivial and easily discoverable. The former is difficult for people to learn. It requires effort that doesn't result in instant gratification. It's boring because often you will have to read the same thing many times over. It's frustrating because even after having read the same thing you still might not understand it. You have to be a masochist to like doing that. Generally, people who do it, don't do it because they like it. They like the side effects (eg. you may like to be paid a professor's salary, and so you'd grind the subject you want to be a professor in). So, it never becomes "natural" to anyone, especially not to the children outside of the very few very simple things one might learn in this way. Left to their own devices, maybe half of all the children would love to become YouTube influencers who make their living by streaming the video games they play. They'd never even consider becoming an accountant or an engineer. They wouldn't even know accountants or engineers exist.

zozbot234 6mo ago

Why do you want to force your kid to study? Kids are naturally curious, it's likely that your kid will be curious about something. Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them.

cyberax 6mo ago
Because _real_ study is boring. Watching videos on Youtube or playing "educational games" is not studying. You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  The proper response to that is still not to force your kid to study though. Instead, she should be made aware that in order to consistently do well, she is ultimately expected to gain the ability to force herself and defer the immediate gratification of watching a YouTube video (unless that YouTube video is a boring recorded college lecture that's relevant to her studies, I suppose).
  - cyberax 6mo ago
    Well, and how are you going to do that?
  - crabbone 6mo ago
    This fails with a sizeable portion of adults... and you expect children to somehow understand delayed gratification? To force themselves? Have you ever met an actual child? Just a week ago mine found and devoured a pack of cookies that were meant for supper and then cried at supper that there weren't any cookies left, choking on a hated apple instead. Guess he won't do it again in a week if there's another pack of cookies in the hand's reach? Guess again!
    - zozbot234 6mo ago
      > Just a week ago mine found and devoured a pack of cookies that were meant for supper and then cried at supper that there weren't any cookies left This was famously tested with the Stanford marshmallow experiment. A sizeable fraction of kids - preschool kids, no less - can in fact learn not to eat the marshmallow.
      - crabbone 6mo ago
        Can learn? -- I'm sure! Will they learn without any "encouragement"? -- Absolutely not. There are millions of people struggling to get on a diet, to quit smoking, to stop doom-scrolling their choice of social media. Most of them know very well how good it would be to stop doing bad things and start doing something good instead, and yet they don't. Children are worse, overall, because life isn't as harsh for them as it is for adults. An alcoholic who can't quit drinking is risking his marriage, his career, on top of his health, and still pulls out a stashed flask and takes a sip. The worst that can happen to a child is that their parents will yell at him / her? That's a very weak deterrent against doing something that offers instant gratification.
- RyanOD 6mo ago
  That's right. Real learning is difficult - even for activities we enjoy.
redsocksfan45 6mo ago
[dead]
crabbone 6mo ago
Children don't do anything beside simple and pleasing activities unless forced to. Studying is hard, not immediately rewarding and boring. No child likes to study, some are just more pliable. > Kids are naturally curious This curiosity extends to simple facts (like "who's the best soccer player: Messi or Ronaldo?") it doesn't help with important subjects that need studying (like, how do you prove Pythagoras' theorem). > Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them. Children simply don't "work" like that. If you let children "figure things out", they'll "figure out" if Messi or Ronaldo are the best soccer player, and they will never even ask why is the sum of squares of the catheti equals the square of hypotenuse. Not only will they never ask that, they'll never figure out there are right triangles. Some discoveries in human knowledge took us many generations to make and some are trivial and easily discoverable. The former is difficult for people to learn. It requires effort that doesn't result in instant gratification. It's boring because often you will have to read the same thing many times over. It's frustrating because even after having read the same thing you still might not understand it. You have to be a masochist to like doing that. Generally, people who do it, don't do it because they like it. They like the side effects (eg. you may like to be paid a professor's salary, and so you'd grind the subject you want to be a professor in). So, it never becomes "natural" to anyone, especially not to the children outside of the very few very simple things one might learn in this way. Left to their own devices, maybe half of all the children would love to become YouTube influencers who make their living by streaming the video games they play. They'd never even consider becoming an accountant or an engineer. They wouldn't even know accountants or engineers exist.