What shall I teach my son?

Spend meaningful, loving time together, and out in the world, as much of the small scale natural world as you can. Listen to their questions, answer when you can, learn the answers together when you can't.

If they are accustomed to hiking and camping, especially wild camping, they will learn much from you and will ask for more.

If you shop together at markets, they will start to develop a more complete relationship with their food supply and with the people working it.

Empathy and kindness and resilience will develop in those experiences.

Later, when they are closer to school age, be as honest with them as you can about the different personalities they will encounter, the conformist teachers and students, the rebels, the do gooders, the no goods, etc., and comfort them that their people may be there right away or may not be there for decades.

Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list. Things like encouraging curiosity, agency and freedom to pursue things that I showed interest in even if it meant spending many weekends and many eurodollars on me that they would no doubt have found ways to spend otherwise come to mind first, along with general values about society and how (not) to treat people.

Edit: there are "hard skills" they taught me, but they are more along the lines of "we want you to be a self sufficient human being capable of dealing with life" (cooking, cleaning, how to budget and think about money,...) and less about increasing my value as a participant in the labor market

My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...

I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.

If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.

We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.

Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?

I would counter that education, at least in the USA, does not adequately prepare one for life, the real world, and effectively finding employment.

What ACTUALLY mattered in my life turned out to be:

1. Who you know, and by proxy, what kind of a person you are

2. The value of "just showing up", every day

3. How important personal relationships/networking are, and just how SMALL the world is for how vast its size

Knowledge and skills are things you can sort of just pick up as you go along, but being given any kind of opportunity in the first place is not quite so easy.

Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout.

> "Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. "

That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics.

As for the original question, "If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Remember that while still being unborn the child will get acquainted with you voice and time if voice. Once born he will observe you and how you conduct yourself from very early on; how you treat others, how you swear, how you treat your wife, and nowadays your device pickup habits too.

> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet

> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be

> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us

These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.

https://github.com/RCSnyder/open-frontier-curriculum

When my kids were small we were either at the Perot museum or the Dallas World Aquarium every Saturday morning (giving mom a break). We had family memberships to both of those places and we used it to the fullest. Going to the same places over and over seems boring but I think it really helped them digest what they were seeing and messing with. I feel like a new experience every day is enriching but also overwhelming, especially for really small kids.

I always joked with them "get good at learning and you don't have to get good at anything else". I feel like they've done a pretty solid job at that and can learn/develop their own interests at will. My youngest taught himself guitar, he's really good too, and knows a handful of RATM songs which isn't the easiest music.

Both have gravitated to STEM and attend the magnet HS's in Dasllas ISD ( Townview TAG and Townview SEM ). My oldest is interested in petroleum engineering (i don't really know why, he just is) but my youngest spends all his free time and before school time with his creative writing teacher who he loves. Time will tell with him i guess.

I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.

Could people learn by themselves? – possibly.

Do they? – generally not.

Having agents changes nothing

Access to information isn't the same thing as competency or skill. Giving someone access to google does not make them educated. Have they met people?

One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.

The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.

Stafford Beer wrote that the purpose of a system is not its declared intent but what it does - what it manifests, causes or how it behaves (1979, 2001). Higher education has a lofty purpose, but the system manifests as a Defence Contractor among other things like teaching one’s kids. “We’d prefer not spoken aloud” is probably true.

Partially agreed.

Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.

It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.

The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.

So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.

Without clear goalposts, external accountability, and support, self paced learning feels like running in a desert. You just end up going in circles. That’s exactly why MOOCs never worked for me, nor for thousands of others.

When I was ~10, I tried to get my TRS-80 (yikes I'm old) to display something like the star wars death star on its primitive graphics. I got pretty far, thanks to the trig examples in the manual. But I was flummoxed that my degree measurements yielded crazy sin/cos results. I felt crushed. Some years later I learned about radians. I often think back how my life trajectory might have been different had I known something simple: how to break problems down.

Kids get addicted to video games and TV. I think you should just set those into Spanish and Chinese. Tell them "play all the video games you want so long as the games are in Spanish or Chinese, you're learning a language".

DIY, homesteading, animal husbandry, electronics repairs, survival skills, cooking, whatever that cannot be easily automated.

Also teach them weapon handling, surveying, map reading, ham radio.

Now they're realizing that all "work" is tech related, and younger one is actually taking comp sci.

They will know it's wrong to be right.

It's the only way they'll ever get paid.

I will teach them to lie."

— Mobius Band Twilight

No, I don't agree with it. But on my most cynical days… I do enjoy the song.

Did the author get their programming skill from their parents? I feel it's a quite weird question.

Let’s take the likely situation where, AI can do Math, code, biology etc better than most humans ever can and increasingly needs minimal oversight or direction.

The only valuable skills then are social soft skills. This is not that foreign of a concept to humanity, many an aristocracy in times of peace have lived exactly like this, sometimes for generations in a row, Game of Thrones characters like Tyrion, Varys, Littlefinger are all this.

We actually live in a rare time in history, where you could learn some technical skills and advance regardless of your social skills (though even here having good social skills is a huge plus). That will go away. This will feel apocalyptic to the introverted nerd, but probably exciting for other types of people.

Some AI futurists of the permanent underclass meme, believe access to capital before AI gets good enough will be the only differentiator. I doubt that, it will be helpful for sure, but even if you have millions, you’re still going to need friends, a wife, a society etc. The money will diffuse out, marriage being the largest wealth diffusion event in a persons life. In this world, Marriage would arguably be the most important path to social mobility, for men and women alike. This is already true in many countries that haven’t fully entered modernity, it was also true for old western aristocracies.

So finally to answer the posts question, “What shall I teach my son”, well teach him to go and find a place in school. Successfully navigating the high school hierarchy, will be the best predictor of him doing well in society.

>become a good citizen

>make the world better

That's basically the whole game right there. Or as Hillel might say, the rest is commentary.

My siblings, also non-fiction readers, both learned to read before they went to school.

I point-blank refused: I was confident I could learn to read, and with the now-long-lost confidence of a summer child, at the age of less than four, I said "no, that is what school is for".

When I got there, I was reading well above my level within the first couple of weeks.

I assume that as well as my parents showing what reading was, I had seen my brother reading, and he had read to me and had shown me what learning to read looked like.

The point of this disjointed anecdote is: be engaged, be inquisitive, show yourself learning and exploring; if you are shown a puzzle, approach it as if you don't know it. Furrow your brow comically, make mock mistakes, show your working. Enlist others to play these learning game.

You don't have to worry about teaching your son anything except that learning is great, and if possible that all sorts of adults have all sorts of things they can teach.

Once your kid is at school, then you can fill in the gaps; then you can be the extra teacher who engages with the subject matter (which as an adult you will have long forgotten and really can approach with fresh eyes).

It's your job to help make a learner, not to be a teacher.

That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."

America is in piss poor 25th place in PISA ranking in Mathematics. Never rely on public school to be anything, but free daycare. Teachers (Education majors) are regularly self-selected from the bottom of the barrel SAT score students, so dont ever rely on teachers to do anything.

Teach your kid everything you want them to know.

That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.

Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore.

5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there.

Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling.

Institutions are meh. My bet is on individuals.

I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.

It is repeatedly astonishing how exceptional Americans feel. HN always educate how self - centred American as I dont find here the illiterate and the uneducated but university graduates from the best universites.

For instance on democratic side from Switzerland and Taiwan my country (Germany) can learn more. And how to have a good life, France or Italy or Sweden (list is not finished) are better role models but even then, Germany has its own unique culture which I am currently happy to live in.

“Teach them to create more happiness than they destroy, for others as much as themselves. For we are a finite planet, with nowhere else to go, and thus we all have an obligation to make this sole home the best and happiest place it can be.”

It’s to not bet that tomorrow’s solution might solve today’s problems, but to fix them as they arise. It’s cleaning up your own messes rather than relying on others to clean up after you. It’s not self-sufficiency, but planetary sufficiency, and navigating the impossibly complex systems that influence and impact those outcomes.

Let the children choose their specifics, and connect them with educators and mentors who will nurture their unique learning styles and growth patterns to full blossom. Otherwise, teach them that there is a finite amount of happiness on this planet, and we must do our best to ensure there’s always enough to go around for everyone.

And most importantly of all, never let someone else convince you that you or your passions are irrelevant or replaceable. Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.

The US has somewhat stepped out (been forced out of the arbiter role, frankly, much to everyone's delight) and this was supposedly going to be bad for the US since "everybody else will step in and get the goodwill the US gives up" ... and it's pretty clear now that in reality nobody stepped in and the animus to step in is at an all-time low and dropping further. It has to get a lot worse before we'll even consider (spending the money) to make it better again.

And, no worries! The EU will save us! Or so they claim ... what they mean is they will use economic sanctions to fix things! (They're "free", as don't require budget allocations and so no political conflicts, and very useful for political corruption). Except of course free is between quotes because there is a reason every economist hates them: they are in fact more expensive than just about anything else. But no budget line item!

Oh, in negotiation theory I'm of the opinion that economic sanctions cause wars rather than solve them. Wars are started because one party feels they can improve their economic situation through physical conquest. Add sanctions and there's two options: give in to sanctions (which means you have lost the war, and so have to give up anything the sanctioning side wants, or they'll just sanction you again), or win the war (which will give the opposing side no choice but to give up sanctions, since there's nothing to be gained anymore, and the sanctions will hurt them too). Obviously this means it's not just dictators that will react to sanctions with aggression, everybody will. There's even the problem that they may generate the worst possible outcome. Situation: 2 parties are at war. Someone imposes economic sanctions "to help", but sanctions inevitably also hurt others. Shortly afterwards 5 parties are at war. Oh, and historically economic sanctions have caused far more wars than they have solved, and have in fact dragged more countries into wars they initially didn't participate in.

So that's what the world has decided to do (not the US, in fact I would argue the US was the party that had the least to do with this decision, because the US absolutely didn't choose to lose it's overwhelming economic and military advantage, everyone else very slowly took it away without taking over security. Deciding, in fact, again and again and again, to let security slip further. This was not "a slippery slope", but governments worldwide taking vote after vote after vote to never do anything about an aggressor, time and time again. But, of course, this is not how it will be presented in the press)

Anyway back to why doctor would be good:

1) lots of them will be necessary since obviously lots of countries will be free to wage war on one another without having to face the US as well and so ... they will wage war on one another

You know, what the UN GA, and the "non-aligned movement" have worked for, for decades now. I feel like someone should walk into that meeting, smile like doctor Strange did at the end of that movie, and point out the obvious to these delegates that finally got what they wanted for decades: "Congratulations! You just got everything you ever wanted. You're NOT going to like it!"

2) the rest of the world will get more and more entangled with specific conflicts (Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, no doubt dozens of conflicts that probably have already started but they're not on the news constantly yet ...) and will feel the necessity to "interfere", which will bring loads of countries into one war or another

This will be especially true since those countries that have started small wars are where our raw materials are mined (you know, what we absolutely positively cannot do without).

3) doctors don't have to fight, even an army in a desperate situation would be mad to send doctors to the front

4) not only do they not have to fight, BOTH sides actively avoid attacking doctors. Even hamas has shown consideration for Jewish medical facilities in their attacks.

5) oh and doctors are both an absolute necessity and the ultimate luxury in one neat package, so doctors do well during economic disaster periods AND during periods where things go well

6) it's actually hard to be a doctor, so there won't be excessive competition and your kid will actually learn a lot

7) anything a doctor does is good. It a very morally unambiguous profession, and lots of people will be forced to make questionable choices in the next decades ... and doctors have the moral luxury that they simply will do their best to minimize the impact of those decisions on actual living humans. That impact will be horrible, obviously, but a doctor can actually help

Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.

That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.

Another thing that would be helpful would be coming from wealth where you could attend an elite prep school like the Pine Crest School, tuition roughly $45,000/yr which is close to the entire median yearly take-home salary for an individual in Florida, which is of course the author's background.

Honestly, I am so tired of reading AI articles from people with very low stakes that basically end with stuff like "Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet". Dude I fucking would love that to be the case, in the meantime I'll be figuring out how to put food on the table and help my kids find a place to live.

But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal?

If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?

What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.

> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.

We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.