The Boy Who Could Change the World (33 page)

A Unified Theory of Magazines

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/unifiedmagazines

September 28, 2006

Age 19

For as long as I've been building web apps, it's been apparent that most successful websites are
communities
—not just interactive pages, but places where groups of like-minded people can congregate and do things together. Our knowledge of how to make and cultivate communities is still at a very early stage, but most agree on their importance.

A magazine, we may imagine, is like a one-way website. It doesn't really allow the readers to talk back (with the small exception of the letters page), it doesn't even have any sort of interactivity. But I still think communities are the key for magazines; the difference is that magazines
export
communities.

In other words, instead of providing a place for a group of like-minded people to come together, magazines provide a sampling of what a group of like-minded people might say in such an instance so that you can pretend you're part of them. Go down the list and you'll see.

The magazines of Condé Nast, for example, export “lifestyles.” Most readers probably aren't the “hip scene” the magazines supposedly cover, but by reading these things they learn what to wear and what to buy and what these people are talking about. Even their highbrow magazines, like the
New Yorker
, serve the same purpose, only this time it's books instead of clothes.

The late, great
Lingua Franca
exported the university.
Academephiles
, sitting at home, probably taking care of the kids, read it so they could imagine themselves part of the life of the mind. Similarly,
the new
SEED
magazine is trying to export the culture of science, so people who aren't themselves scientists can get a piece of the lab coat life.

Alumni magazines similarly export college life, so that graying former college students can relive some of their old glory days, reading pieces about library renovations as they recall having sex in the stacks. And house organs export a particular kind of politics, telling you what a party or organization's take is on the issues of the day, giving you a sense of the party line.

Run down the list and in pretty much every case you scratch a magazine, you find an exported community. Magazines that want to succeed will have to find one of their own.

On Intellectual Dishonesty

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/intellectualdishonesty

December 14, 2011

Age 24

Dishonesty has two parts: 1) saying something that is untrue, and 2) saying it with the intent to mislead the other person. You can have each without the other: you can be genuinely mistaken and thereby say something false without intending to mislead, and you can intentionally mislead someone without ever saying anything that's untrue. (The second is generally considered deceit, but not dishonesty.)

However, you can be intellectually dishonest without doing
either
of these things. Imagine that you're conducting an experiment and most of the time it comes out exactly the way you expect but one time it goes wrong (you probably just screwed up the measurements). Telling someone about your work, you say: “Oh, it works just the way I expected—seven times it came out exactly right.”

This isn't untrue and it isn't intentionally misleading—you really do believe it works the way you expected. But it is intellectually dishonest: intellectual honesty requires bending over backwards to provide any evidence that you might be wrong,
even if you're convinced that you are right
.

This is an impractical standard to apply to everyday life. A prospective employer asks you in a job interview if you can get to work on time. You say “Yes,” not “I think so, but one time in 2003 the power went out and so my alarm didn't go off and I overslept.” I don't think anyone considers this dishonesty; indeed, if you were intellectually honest all the time, people would think you were pretty weird.

Science has a higher standard. It's not just between you and your
employer; it's a claim to posterity. And you might be wrong, but what if you're not around for posterity to call you up and ask you to show your work? That's why intellectual honesty requires you show your work in advance, so that others can see if you're missing something.

The Smalltalk Question

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/smalltalkq

August 16, 2006

Age 19

One of the minor puzzles of American life is what question to ask people at parties and suchly to get to know them.

“How ya doin'?” is of course mere formality; only the most troubled would answer honestly for anything but the positive.

“What do you do?” is somewhat offensive. First, it really means “What occupation do you hold?” and thus implies you do little outside your occupation. Second, it implies that one's occupation is the most salient fact about them. Third, it rarely leads to further useful inquiry. For only a handful of occupations, you will be able to say something somewhat relevant, but even this will no doubt be slightly annoying or offensive. (“Oh yeah, I always thought about studying history.”)

“Where are you from?” is even less fruitful.

“What's your major?” (in the case of college students) turns sour when, as is tragically all too often the case, students feel no real passion for their major.

“What book have you read recently?” will cause the majority of Americans who don't read to flail, while at best only getting an off-the-cuff garbled summary of a random book.

“What's something cool you've learned recently?” puts the person on the spot and inevitably leads to hemming and hawing and then something not all that cool.

I propose instead that one ask “What have you been thinking about lately?” First, the question is extremely open-ended. The answer could be a book, a movie, a relationship, a class, a job, a hobby,
etc. Even better, it will be whichever of these is most interesting at the moment. Second, it sends the message that thinking, and thinking about thinking, is a fundamental human activity, and thus encourages it. Third, it's easiest to answer, since by its nature it's asking about what's already on the person's mind. Fourth, it's likely to lead to productive dialog, as you can discuss the topic together and hopefully make progress. Fifth, the answer is quite likely to be novel. Unlike books and occupations, people's thoughts seem to be endlessly varied. Sixth, it helps capture a person's essence. A job can be forced by circumstance and parentage, but our thoughts are all our own. I can think of little better way to quickly gauge what a person is really like.

“What have you been working on lately?” can be seen, in this context, to be clearly inferior, although similar.

So, what
have
you been thinking about lately?

UNSCHOOL

W
hen I first met Aaron and he told me that Grace Llewellyn's
The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education
had been a big influence on him, I laughed in recognition. Chances are you haven't heard of the book, but trust me, it's a cult classic in certain circles. Over the years I've met countless curious, energetic, and always slightly rebellious young people who were emboldened to forge their own unique educational path after reading it.

Unlike Aaron, who discovered the book on his own, I got a copy from my parents. I was raised an “unschooler,” which means I grew up without classes or coursework or grades. I was raised, in other words, according to the free-form child-centered pedagogy that so inspired Aaron. Part of what I find so captivating about Aaron's writing on education is his exuberance at discovering a philosophy of learning that aligns with his instincts and experiences. Aaron was nothing if not a compulsively curious and hardworking person, yet, as these pages make viscerally clear, he felt profoundly stifled in school. He laments the ways time is wasted, important topics are trivialized, and teachers are forced by the administration to fixate on testing instead of teaching for its own sake, which means that students become correspondingly blinkered, obsessed with passing or failing instead of getting truly absorbed in the subject at hand.

Online, Aaron found a community that pointed to the possibility of another way of doing things. Far-flung Internet users helped him master the art of computer programming, offering feedback and assistance and encouraging his love of coding—of knowledge—instead of enforcing rote memorization and instilling fear of failure, as a more orthodox student-teacher relationship might. Fear is a big theme of Aaron's writing on education, as is boredom, and for him the two go together. Like most prominent unschooling advocates, Aaron believes human beings are naturally curious; the problem is that
conventional schooling stamps this inherent inquisitiveness out of us. Students are so afraid of getting answers wrong, so terrified of seeing a big F written in red pen, that they retreat into apathy, hedging their bets to finish the required assignments instead of taking the risks true engagement requires. Fear of humiliation, in other words, squelches experimentation. And as Aaron argues, this suits the powers that be just fine, because contemporary schooling is more about instilling discipline than imparting information, let alone wisdom. Fear tends to toe the line, while curiosity interrogates and crosses it.

It's this bigger story, about how our educational system evolved hand in hand with the rise of industrial capitalism, that Aaron begins to tell here. Though only a fragment of what he envisioned as a larger project, the essays that follow are a welcome and thought-provoking contribution to a long-standing and ongoing debate about learning, freedom, pedagogy, economics, and the public good. What's more, these pieces provide a valuable window on the learning process, an illustration of Aaron's fundamental argument about curiosity engaged. We witness Aaron maturing, transforming from a teenage student struggling in school to a young adult and independent scholar studying the academic system from the outside, asking why it evolved the way it did and whether it could be another way. What a gift to see such a keen and conscientious mind at work, striving to understand a world he cared so much about.

—Astra Taylor

School

Spring 2011

Age 24

Given as a lecture at the Safra Center at Harvard University
.

From their very first moments on Earth, babies get bored.

Babies get so bored, in fact, that this is the basis of all modern baby research. Show a baby three dots (...) and they'll stare at it intently for a while, before getting bored and looking away. Vary the position of the dots (.
^.
.) and they'll look at it for a bit, then get bored again. But add another dot (....) and they'll go back to intent staring. The scientists are thrilled: babies can count! But they overlook something even more important: babies get bored.

In another study, babies were given a special pillow so that by adjusting their head they could control the movement of a mobile. Not only did these infants quickly learn how to move the mobile, this discovery was followed by what the researchers called “vigorous smiling and cooing.”
^*
*
As a later study observed, “Even casual observations of infants reveals their delight in making events occur.”
^†
†
In other words, infants aren't just playing around because they're bored—from birth, they know the pleasure of figuring things out.

And honestly, it makes sense that babies want to figure things out. The world is confusing! It's filled with strange sights and sounds and smells, a new world of taste and touch. The only way to make sense of any of it is to work at it as best you can, looking at all the new things you see and trying desperately to figure them all out.

Give a six-month-old a new toy and they will “systematically examine [it] with every sense they have at their command (including taste, of course),” write a leading team of baby researchers. “By a year or so, they will systematically vary the actions they perform on an object: they might tap a new toy car gently against the floor, listening to the sound it makes, then try banging it loudly, and then try banging it against the soft sofa. By eighteen months, if you show them an object with some unexpected property, like a can with a mooing noise, they will systematically test to see if it will do other unexpected things.”
^*
*

They apply such dedication to everything in their world. Soon they begin to learn faces—to distinguish between their mom and other people—and what those faces mean. They learn baby physics—when a car rolls behind a screen they know exactly when to look for it to come out the other side—and get surprised when it comes out faster or slower than it should. They listen to what people say—the baby talk we all naturally lapse into around little kids helps them detect vowels—and learn to imitate those noises for themselves. In short, little kids are curiosity machines.

In one experiment, the researchers put a toy slightly out of reach and then gave the babies a rake they could use to get the toy. At first the kids reach for it, then they look at their parents pleadingly to get it for them, but then they quickly set about figuring it out for themselves—and eventually realize they can use the rake to do so. Their faces light up with that joy of discovery. They reach out, fumble, but eventually get the toy and pull it to them.

But that's not enough—it's not just about getting the toy. “[They] forget all about the toy after a trial or two. They often deliberately put the toy back far out of reach and experiment with using the rake to draw it toward them. The toy itself isn't nearly as interesting as the fact that the rake moves it closer.”

“It's not just that we human beings
can
do this; we
need
to do it,” the researchers write. “We seem to have a kind of explanatory drive, like our drive for food or sex. When we're presented with a puzzle, a mystery, a hint of a pattern, something that doesn't quite make
sense, we work until we find a solution. In fact, we intentionally set ourselves such problems, even the quite trivial ones that divert us from the horror of airplane travel, like crossword puzzles, video games, or detective stories. As scientists, we may stay up all night in the grip of a problem, even forgetting to eat, and it seems rather unlikely that our paltry salaries are the sole motivation.”

Think back to the “secure home base” experiments [ . . . ]. When put in a strange situation, the toddlers are terrified—they cling to their mothers for support. But soon enough, their curiosity gets the better of them. They begin, at first tentatively but soon with abandon, to explore the rest of the room. The explanatory drive is so powerful it can even overcome fear.

And it doesn't go away as they get older. In one experiment with kids ages 4 to 10, the kids were given a variety of problems to work on—some easy, some hard. Obviously the kids didn't work on problems that were too hard for them, but they also didn't pick the problems that were too easy. They sought out the problems that were just right for them—providing a little bit of a challenge, but not so much that they were impossible. Unless they were rewarded, that is—when they were given rewards for solving puzzles, they headed straight back for the easy ones.
^*
*

Anyone who's been around preschoolers knows they don't need to be motivated to learn. “Rarely does one hear parents complain that their pre-schooler is ‘unmotivated,'” notes one child psychologist.
^†
†
Instead, the parenting books are filled with just the opposite complaint: all their preschoolers do is ask them why, why, why. “Why are we getting into the car?” “Why are we going to the grocery store?” “Why is all the food kept at the grocery store?” “Why do people use money to buy things?”
^{‡
‡}

It's almost kind of annoying, really. So we ship them off to school.

It is difficult for most to recall what school was really like. If we did well, we focus on the positive memories and do our best to ignore
the rest. If we did poorly, we try to block out the memory of the indignities we suffered. It's not a place we're usually eager to revisit. But, for a moment, try to imagine it: torn away from your family, shipped off daily to a strange and uncomfortable place, thrown into a sea of unfamiliar faces, each scared in his or her own way and often taking it out on you.

But what strikes me most when I revisit the classrooms I grew up in is how small they seem now. In my memory, the teachers are giants and the rooms were designed for other giants like them. The desks were big and dangerous contraptions, the blackboards seemed endless, the desks and tables imposing figures.

But that was my world: day in and day out, those giants controlled my life, those children were my only companions. And what happened in these classes? I did not get to explore or experiment as I did at home. I did not learn things the way I had learned them the rest of my life—through trial and error, through experience and experiment. No, school was the place for Real Learning and, I was told, Real Learning was Work.

Most classes I was in, most classes I've seen since—even at the most progressive schools—were much the same. The teacher sat at the front of the class and talked while the kids sat in front of them and listened. Occasionally there'd be a picture or a diagram or a worksheet, but for the most part it was simply talk. Think of how many hours you spent sitting at those desks—6 hours a day, 180 days a year, for 12 years—listening to those teachers. That's nearly
thirteen thousand
hours, probably more time than you've spent watching movies or playing sports. How much of it do you remember? I can remember a few snapshots here and there, but as much as I try, I can't even remember a single sentence I was told. All that talking, and I can hardly recall a thing they said.

And I guess that's not a surprise. All those lectures were boring. I'm sure I zoned out for most of them; I'm sure most everybody else did as well. The teachers weren't oblivious to this, of course—that's why they'd call on us, punctuating the long hours of boredom with moments of panic and terror. You'd hear your name being called and, suddenly awake, find the eyes of the teacher and the rest of the class all on you—your whole world, watching to see if you'd screw up.

The radical educator John Holt once asked his class about this:

            
We had been chatting about something or other, and everyone seemed in a relaxed frame of mind, so I said, “You know, there's something I'm curious about, and I wonder if you'd tell me.” They said, “What?” I said, “What do you think, what goes through your mind, when the teacher asks you a question and you don't know the answer?”

                 
It was a bombshell. Instantly a paralyzed silence fell on the room. Everyone stared at me with what I have learned to recognize as a tense expression. For a long time there wasn't a sound. Finally Ben, who is bolder than most, broke the tension, and also answered my question, by saying in a loud voice, “Gulp!”

                 
He spoke for everyone. They all began to clamor, and all said the same thing, that when the teacher asked them a question and they didn't know the answer they were scared half to death. I was flabbergasted—to find this in a school which people think of as progressive, which does its best not to put pressure on little children, which does not give marks in the lower grades, which tries to keep children from feeling that they're in some kind of race.

                 
I asked them why they felt gulpish. They said they were afraid of failing, afraid of being kept back, afraid of being called stupid, afraid of feeling themselves stupid. [. . .] Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time. This is a hard fact of life to deal with. [70f]

And it doesn't let up—even law school students live in fear of the infamous “cold call,” the moment when their professor will expect them to answer an obscure question in front of the whole class. If it has the power to shake these accomplished college grads, imagine how terrifying it must be for powerless, friendless first-graders!

Fear makes you dumb. Your field of vision literally narrows, you start thinking desperately about the problem at hand—not what you
know or what it means, but just whatever you need to say to escape the moment safely. When the teacher asks you a question, there's no time to try to understand what they're really saying or how it fits into some bigger picture. It's not the time to get clarification on some point that's confused you. And it's not the time to make an honest mistake and learn from it. It's about getting the right answer, fast, through whatever means necessary.

Kids develop amazing strategies for dealing with these situations. They mumble, in the hope that the teacher will hear what they want to hear. They hedge, covering all their bases so it's harder to accuse them of being wrong. They study the teacher's face and body language for a clue—quickly correcting themselves if the teacher gives any hint that their answer is wrong. This isn't about learning, this is about survival.

Yet schools seem almost perfectly designed to keep kids scared. Even if kids can survive the embarrassment of being wrong in front of their peers, there are other punishments and rewards to keep them focused on answers instead of understanding. Do poorly on a test or an assignment and you get criticized for your failure. It goes down in the record books and gets reported to your parents, who usually chew you out and punish you further. The tests are presented as a race against the clock—no time to think about the bigger picture!—and when those are done, there's more busywork and drudgery to complete.

And it doesn't even stop when the school day ends, as desperate as you are for that blissful moment. No, you get home only to find that you must do homework, the same old busywork all over again. You never get a moment to pause, to think for yourself. Your entire life is monitored—either by your parents at home or a teacher at school.

There's never time to stop and ask why. Asking why isn't your job. If you think the teacher has it wrong, tough luck. There's no court of appeal. You are wrong, even if you're right. How is anyone supposed to develop self-respect, let alone self-esteem, in that sort of situation?