I think we should be more transparent with kids
Yesterday, my 7-year-old ask my wife why she needs to go to school when you can look up everything on Google. The answer was "what if you don't have a computer?" The problem is, that isn't the real reason! The real reason is too abstract.
Ever since the 70s, kids have been asking why they have to learn math when it all can be done on a calculator; I'm pretty sure I was among them. The reason I was presented with were things like "what if the battery runs flat?" or "what if you don't have a calculator?" Again, not the real reason!
The real reason is that learning these things just makes brains think better. The explanation that my wife gave was even worse than the calculator deprecation: in my line of work, I don't get very far without a computer that has Internet. Now one thing Google was able to do was tell me how much money Pablo Escobar had at the height of his wealth and then what the population of Colombia was in the 1980s. Now what Google couldn't tell me was that Escobar could have given away 1000$ to each and every Colombian and still be a billionaire! But because I went to school, I was able to figure that out from what Google was able to tell me.
So I think we should try to find truthful ways in which we can explain to them why education is so important in ways that are not too abstract for them. Maybe they wouldn't find 20c narcos so concrete though.
(School also helped me to think critically, which is why further Google searches revealed that 1000$ may have been too optimistic. He would have been safer giving 500$ to everyone.)
Ever since the 70s, kids have been asking why they have to learn math when it all can be done on a calculator; I'm pretty sure I was among them. The reason I was presented with were things like "what if the battery runs flat?" or "what if you don't have a calculator?" Again, not the real reason!
The real reason is that learning these things just makes brains think better. The explanation that my wife gave was even worse than the calculator deprecation: in my line of work, I don't get very far without a computer that has Internet. Now one thing Google was able to do was tell me how much money Pablo Escobar had at the height of his wealth and then what the population of Colombia was in the 1980s. Now what Google couldn't tell me was that Escobar could have given away 1000$ to each and every Colombian and still be a billionaire! But because I went to school, I was able to figure that out from what Google was able to tell me.
So I think we should try to find truthful ways in which we can explain to them why education is so important in ways that are not too abstract for them. Maybe they wouldn't find 20c narcos so concrete though.
(School also helped me to think critically, which is why further Google searches revealed that 1000$ may have been too optimistic. He would have been safer giving 500$ to everyone.)
51-55, M
