
Why should you teach self-knowledge to your children?
Imagine you are 17…
In Brazil (under normal conditions, middle-class family) that is the moment to change your life completely.
What do I mean by that?
It is the delightful moment to take a national exam and decide the area you’ll probably actuate for the rest of your life.
50-year-old people cannot understand the exact same circumstance. They possibly think it is just a matter of time, a matter of making mistakes in order to learn.
Imagine you are 17…
How much self-knowledge do you have?
The educative process teaches us how to adhere to generic and automatic behaviors, for 17 years.
A kid goes to school with an indigested objective to become a well-paid professional. Along with the support of his parents and an entire social structure that prioritize his insertion into a crowd that wants the exact same future.
When we take into account economic efficiency, this process — regular and family education — is not efficient. There are irretrievable costs of time.
The first one is studying without objectives. What the hell am I doing here if I don’t know what to do with that?
It is evident that the learning outcome is positively correlated with objectives and the simple objective to guarantee a good grade in a national exam, to study the uncertain, is insufficient to deplete all learning capacities of a kid.
Further, without self-knowledge, this kid will need more time posteriorly, due to a necessity to try the uncertain.
Make mistakes, try again, make mistakes…

How much is one experience worth?
Last semester, I’ve had an experience. I decided to step out of my comfort zone, and travel far away from Brazil.
I lived in Sweden for 6 months.
Amazing! Good trips, beautiful places, nice people.
However, the main benefit I received from this experience is far from being a European habit, an astonishing sight-seeing or whatever.
It was self-knowledge. An internal, endogenous thing.
My intention was to change my view of the world, visit nice places, make new friends from other countries, and so on. But I received more than that, I changed my view about myself. I needed to change my study methods, be exactly what I am, start applying the Pareto Principle to find what exactly brings happiness for me, define my personality, and think about an area I should choose to work, one area I could do my best, just because I feel pleasure for it.
I was just filling the vicious circle: experiences → self-knowledge → experiences.
Experiences cover unlimited alternatives, even in the block you live.
When you start it, you probably will specialize your experiences, based on your self-knowledge.
It is like a “vicious” spiral. You’ll follow the spiral and get specialized until you create a new spiral. This spiral will be created when you develop new preferences.
So, self-knowledge taught me how my mind works. I learned how to learn, and that is the key-point kids should be introduced.
Most of the things I learn is by reading, self-learning.
You, your children, probably have a different engine.
However, we don’t understand that when we are kids.
Should I feel upset because I cannot understand the classes in my high school? Of course not, you probably have different learning methods.
Should I feel upset because I cannot get good grades in school? Of course not, you probably have other skills than getting good grades. Or maybe you don’t have a clear objective about what you want to achieve (positive correlation between information and objectives).
However, that is not the problem. The problem is when I think about potential creative minds, leaders, and kids that could change the world being faded by a generalizing structure.
Actually, what is the objective of formal education? Avoid costs of transactions (Ronald Coase).
It makes sense! Especially before university. But when you are 17 and have a good self-knowledge level, what is the extent of these costs of transactions? We live in the Information Age. For me, the university is just a powerful instrument for networking.
Again, I should emphasize the process of learning how to learn. That is the essence of self-knowledge.
Further, the entire structure teaches us which areas give us money; that we need to ensure our material needs, and then we’ll be happy.
How much an obsession for material things masks unhappiness and frustration?
I could mention some Marxist theorists because they have a partial truth when talking about the obsession for material things. Although I’m a liberal (in the classical sense), I can recognize it. The only difference is that I think this obsession is made by us, we are not chained by it.
We are free to change it. By the way, the self-knowledge movement is rising.
We should change our lives in the sense we need to enjoy the path, not the arrival. As an example, I think we should not spend 40 years doing what we do not like, in order to receive a good retirement in the future.
When we are young, we have different choices to make and the results are completely different from each other.

Some people find their right area immediately; other people find it after a long time — a transition time — and other, most of the people, merely accept their routine and search for happiness in their free time. They become frustrated professionals.
The question is: the life of a frustrated professional begins in the childhood.
Parents and leaders of educational systems, you can help the process. You can avoid a happy life being a mere matter of randomness.

