Idea: 121
Friday, 01 May 2015
By. Scott Porter
Aristotle
Peter Thiel asks: “What do you believe that very few people agree with you on?”
We believe that…
— Learning how to learn, or meta-learning, is the most important skill of all
— Unfortunately, most people never learn this skill, even as adults, much to their disadvantage
— 10 year olds are capable of mastering meta-learning, to their life-long advantage
Why is it that our best and brightest so rarely teach young children? There’s something enchanting about the way they portray Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in the X-Men movies. The second film ends with Professor X giving a lecture on T. H. White’s The Once and Future King — my favorite novel. That scene captures the imagination precisely because it would never happen in real life.
From an economic point of view: elementary school teachers are not well compensated, so extremely talented individuals — like Professor X — pursue other fields. People respond to incentives. From the point of view of curriculum: extremely talented individuals don’t have time to teach knowledge, but they do have time to teach wisdom. Knowledge is vast, whereas wisdom is dense.
Look what happens when you invest in young children! You conquer the world. Literally. Phillip of Macedon hired a tutor for his son, Alexander. That tutor’s name was Aristotle.
Teach children:
— the difference between knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and unknown knowns (forgotten knowns, the curse of knowledge)
— how to become sophisticated in your ignorance
— how to interview other people, mine them for insights, draw them out with questions
— how to ask yourself questions… how to cultivate curiosity…
— how to do your own research… scope your own scientific method…
— how to build thought structures, frameworks, models… and how to break them… and how to rebuild them
— and more…
? How do you “hijack” existing distribution channels?
? For example, would schools offer this as class, rather than as an alternative to the whole system?
? How do you scale this beyond one class, while maintaining the local connection?
