What Leo Babauta Has Learned about Learning

Leo Babauta is an author and proprietor of Zenhabits, and other websites. He helps his wife homeschool his children in San Francisco, and describes his current views on learning:

When teachers succeeded in getting me to learn, it was only because they made something seem so interesting that I started to care about it. But then I learned on my own, either in class while ignoring everyone else, or more likely after class in the library or at home.

That’s because someone walking you through the steps of learning something doesn’t work — you aren’t learning when you’re just listening to someone tell you how something works. You’re learning when you try to do that something — putting it into action. That’s when the real learning begins and the superficial learning ends — when you try something and fail, and adjust and try again, and solve countless little problems as you do so.

The best teachers know this, and so they inspire, and help you to put the learning into action. As an adult, I’ve learned a lot on my own. The stuff I’ve just read, I’ve mostly forgotten. But the stuff I’ve put into action by playing with it, by practicing, by creating and sharing with others — that stuff has stuck with me. I truly learned it.

How to Learn (or Teach)

The teacher’s job, really, is to fascinate the student. Fascination is the key to learning. Then help the student put the fascination into action.

It follows then, that if you’re teaching yourself, your job is exactly the same.

Here’s how to learn:

• Get fascinated. As a teacher, you should fascinate the student by rediscovering with her all the things that originally fascinated you about the topic. If you can’t get fascinated, you won’t care enough to really learn something. You’ll just go through the motions. How do you get fascinated? Often doing something with or for other people helps to motivate me to look more deeply into something, and reading about other people who have been successful/legendary at it also fascinates me.
• Pour yourself into it. I will read every website and book I can get my hands on. Google and the library are my first stops. They’re free. The used bookstore will be next. There are always an amazing amount of online resources to learn anything. If there isn’t, create one.
• Do it, in small steps. Actually doing whatever you want to do will be scary. You can learn as much Spanish vocabulary as you like, but until you start having conversations, you won’t really know it. You can read as much about chess as you like, but you have to put the problems into action, and play games. You can read about how to program, but you won’t know it until you actually code. Start with small, non-scary steps, with as little risk as possible, focusing on fun, easy skills.
• Play. Learning isn’t work. It’s fun. If you’re learning because you think you should, not because you’re having fun with it, you will not really stick with it for long, or you’ll hate it and not care about it. So make it play. Make games out of it. Sing and dance while you do it. Show off your new skills to people, with a smile on your face. Do it with others. I believe most learning is done on your own, but doing it with others makes it fun. I like to work out with my friends and with Eva. I like to bake bread for my family. I like to play chess with my kids. That motivates me to learn, because I want to do well when I do it with others.
• Feel free to move around. I will dive into something for a couple weeks, and then move on to something else. That’s OK. That’s how passion for a topic often works. Sometimes it will last for a long time, sometimes it’s a short intense burst. You can’t control it. Allow yourself to wander if that’s where things lead you.
• Test yourself. You can learn a lot of information quickly by studying something, testing yourself, studying again to fill in the holes in your knowledge, testing again, and repeating until you have it by heart. That’s not always the most fun way to learn, but it can work well. Alternatively, you can learn by playing, and when you play, allow that to be your test.
• Disagree. Don’t just agree that everything you’re reading or hearing from others on a topic is correct, even if they are foremost experts. First, experts are often wrong, and it’s not until they are challenged that new knowledge is found. Second, even if they are right and you are wrong by disagreeing, you learn by disagreeing. By disagreeing, you have already not only considered what you’ve been given, but formulated an alternative theory. Then you have to try to test to see which is right, and even if you find that the first information or theory was right and you were wrong, now you know that much better than if you just agreed. I’m not saying to disagree with everything, but the more you do, the better you’ll learn. Don’t disagree in a disagreeable way, and don’t hold onto your theories too tightly and be defensive about them.
• Teach it. There is no better way to cement your knowledge than to teach it to others. It’s OK if you don’t really know it that well — as long as you’re honest about that when you’re teaching it to someone. For example, I’m a beginner at chess, but I will learn something about it and teach it to my kids — they know I’m not a tournament contender, let alone a master, and yet I’m still teaching them something they don’t know. And when I do, I begin to really understand it, because to teach you have to take what you’ve absorbed, reflect upon it, find a way to organize it so that you can communicate it to someone else clearly enough for them to understand it, see their mistakes and help correct them, see where the holes in your knowledge are, and more.
• Reflect on your learning by blogging. You soak up a ton of information and patterns, and you can put that into action, but when you sit down and reflect on what you’ve learned, and try to share that with others (as I’m doing right now), you force yourself to think deeply, to synthesize the knowledge and to organize it, much as you do when you teach it to others. Blogging is a great tool for reflection and sharing what you’ve learned, even if you don’t hope to make a living at it. And it’s free.

_Zenhabits

Leo's emphasis appears to be more on didactic learning and minimal skills learning. And in general, Leo is right that one has to teach oneself, rather than to be taught by a teacher. If you recall, Doctor Arthur Robinson said much the same thing about his own experiences homeschooling his 6 children as a single parent.

If one wants to assist in creating dangerous children, of course, one will need to dive more deeply into more complex skills learning. For that, a certain amount of master : apprentice learning may be required, since many things that should be learned cannot be obtained from textbooks, the internet, learning videos, or wandering and blundering around on one's own. Some things have to be learned from someone else who put in the hard work and hard knocks to learn that special, rare knowledge -- whatever it might be.

Dangerous children will learn core skills at a relatively early age, then push that special knowledge beyond what they were taught. This will require special types of teacher : student arrangements which are not typical of today's conventional factory style, cookie cutter government education.

But learning should be fun, for it to become self-sustaining. It should begin very early in life, and it should last as long as life. And for it to be effective, it needs to be very, very dangerous.

Dangerous Child: Critical and Sensitive Periods of Plasticity

The term "neural plasticity" means the ability of the brain to reshape itself. Critical periods of brain plasticity are times when particular circuits and intercircuits of the brain are particularly prepared for experiences which will assist the genetically encoded development of those circuits.

The brain tends to develop from posterior to anterior. From the occipital lobe in infancy to the prefrontal lobes in late adolescence and early adulthood, brain circuits mature and myelinate according to a particular sequence which is genetically encoded -- but can be altered somewhat by experience.

If a newborn's eyelids are sewn shut so that he cannot see from the time of birth, his occipital lobes will eventually be used for other types of processing rather than seeing. If only one eye is unable to see, the other eye's visual input will move into the brain territory which would have been used for the "dark eye's" input.

More about what is known scientifically about critical periods, with an emphasis on the visual system:

From polyglots to virtuosi, human performance reflects the neural circuits that are laid down by early experience. Although learning is possible throughout life, there is no doubt that those who start younger fare better, and that plasticity is enhanced during specific windows of opportunity. An understanding of the neural basis of such CRITICAL or SENSITIVE PERIODS of brain development would inform not only classroom and educational policy, but also drug design, clinical therapy and strategies for improved learning into adulthood. Although which might be the critical periods for higher cognitive functions such as language, music or emotional control is the subject of popular debate, such sweeping questions fail to acknowledge the sequential nature of a multistage process that involves many brain regions. _Critical Periods in Local Cortical Circuits (PDF)

Critical Periods in Language Acquisition (PDF)

Much of the knowledge about critical and sensitive developmental periods of plasticity was learned from animal research. Here is an intriguing study demonstrating the restoration of critical period plasticity in the auditory cortex of rats (PDF).

The concept of "critical periods" is quite controversial. Perhaps one reason for the controversy is that many scientists do not want to consider that very young children may have special needs which are not easily met except by persons who are heavily invested in that child. Many child psychologists are women who in fact were unable to take time away from their careers to spend intense time with a child who may have been passing through several critical periods. Subconsciously, such a scientist might wish to minimise any blame to herself for pursuing her career -- even if the only person who might possibly point a finger is herself.

But careful research in animals has clearly demonstrated that animals raised in an environmentally complex -- stimulus rich -- environment, experience superior neural and brain support structure development than animals raised in a stimulus poor environment. It is not likely that the developing brains of human infants are an exception to this tendency to thrive on the richness of stimuli in the environment.

We are accustomed to hearing -- in regard to aging and memory -- "use it or lose it!" But that maxim is likely to apply in a much deeper manner to the developmental time windows in the young brain.

But there is a problem, in that very few neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, or child and adolescent developmental specialists actually understand how the mature brain works, much less how the working brain came to be the way it is through various developmental periods.

It is easily possible for an interested and intelligent parent to know far more about the natural development of the child than most "experts", through observation, careful reading, and trial and error. And if a parent wants his child to develop into a "dangerous child," the parent will need to work hard to understand the process -- preferably before the child reaches each critical period.

It may seem a bit unprofessional to think of a child's developing brain in these terms, but in many ways a child's developing brain is much like a fine gourmet dish, or a carefully prepared perfume. The sequence of assembly is crucial, as is the skillful touch applied to each step, each finely textured layer.

Of course, the developing brain is undergoing many active processes simultaneously, and is not a passive recipient of "the master's touch." Brains are capable of turning out rather well in spite of what seem like a large number of stupid mistakes on the part of caregivers, parents, teachers, and society. But that is no excuse for being sloppy or negligent.

We will look at critical periods more, and at the related concept of "rites of passage."

12 Formative Years in a Child's Life

Lotte Time Lapse: Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45. from Frans Hofmeester on Vimeo.

Video Source Whether a child grows to be a dangerous child or just a ditzy party girl (or worse) depends largely upon the choices to which she is exposed during her formative years. Very few children will lie dormant all those years. Give them the opportunities to learn about the world and their unique interests in the world, and set them up to run with the knowledge and skills they will acquire.

The brain is a hungry hunter. The growing, developing brain is a particularly hungry hunter which is capable of feeding upon a wide range of conceptual fodder. The mind grows up to resemble the things it ingests, digests, and incorporates into the mental machinery.

12 years is plenty of time for a child to begin to become very dangerous -- in many good ways. Don't waste that time.

Foundations for Maths Must be Built Long Before School

The educational-industrial complex of the US is successful at one thing: Creating generations of psychological neotenates. The entire approach to education as taken by government schools is self-serving and self-perpetuating -- more concerned over the system itself, than for the welfare and progress of learning children.

It is wrong for parents to surrender the education of their children to corrupt bureaucratic institutions. But it is also wrong for the educational-industrial complex to pretend that it is safe for parents to abdicate this responsibility.

Let's take maths in particular. Educational researchers have decided that students must be switched onto maths, to reverse the disastrous trends in maths failure that have become so commonplace. Other educational researchers have decided that maths teachers must be better trained, in order to reverse the disastrous failures in maths education.

But the truth is that if the mental foundations for maths are not constructed long before school curricula finally get around to needing them, it is probably too late for most students. This means that parents must expose their children to the patterns and mechanisms of real world forces and events, rather than leaving the education of the child up to television, video games, teachers, peers, and popular culture.

Mathematics is not about numbers, primarily. Mathematics is about patterns -- both static and dynamic, and sometimes chaotic. Number sense should be developed early, utilising game forms. But number sense is just a preliminary foundation for pattern sense, and relational sense. Learning these more complex forms of maths foundational skills requires exposure, which is not likely to occur accidentally.

The most optimal ways of learning these foundational conceptual skills have not been devised yet. Educational researchers are decades away from even understanding the need for them. Researchers into neurodevelopment and developmental psychology are likewise too often barking up the wrong tree, following the leads of the organisations which supply research grants.

It looks as if the rest of us have a lot of work to do to compensate for the incompetence and distractedness of "the experts."

Mastery of Music: Building One's Own

Master craftsmen are protective of the tools of their trade. They are often the proudest of the tools which they have made themselves. Tools that you have made, modified, and maintained yourself -- and tweaked just the way you like it -- can teach you more about a craft than almost anything else.

Very few graduates of government educational systems ever learn to master a craft. Practical skills and competencies have come to be viewed as inferior to politically correct knowledge du jour, and trendy didactic concepts of the day which are most highly valued by teachers and professors. In other words, most children are sent to schools for hours a day, years on end, and finish with little more than obsolete and erroneous "facts" -- and dozens of squandered opportunities to utilise limited windows of learning and development.

If you send your child to government schools, you had best face the fact that your work is cut out for you. If you are to compensate for the cruel failures and designed obsolescence which is built into the mass-production cookie-cutter system of government schooling which passes for "education" these days, you will need to put in a lot of time and effort to make sure your child does not become just another psychological neotenate. A perpetual adolescent of matchless incompetence, suited for nothing more than a basement existence playing video games, drinking beer, and secretly building a porn collection.

One of the best arts to teach a child -- a skill that keeps paying dividends through the years -- is the art of music, music-making, and building his own musical instruments. If the child learns to make a variety of musical instruments when young -- and is encouraged to experiment with variations on construction themes -- he is likely to get an early feeling of mastery in making interesting things.

The simplest musical instruments are the basic percussion instruments: sticks, rattles, table tops, simple drums, etc. But the art of handmade and homemade musical instrument making spans a wide range of skills and complexities, and is worth becoming acquainted with even if one is not assisting a child in learning skills mastery.

Dennis Havlena There are a number of individuals on the web who are willing to share their wide experience in the art of homemade musical instrument making. Here are some links that will help you approach a variety of projects:

How to make Highland pipes from PVC pipe

Construct pipe bags from naugahyde/vinyl

Simple bellows for smallpipes & Uillean bagpipes

Build a bagpipe practice goose from a wine-box bladder

Make an extremely quiet chanter for pipe practice, from a tinwhistle _Dennis Havlena

Tinwhistle/Pennywhistle -- This is the instrument i started out with. It's easily constructed out of copper plumbing pipe or any other metal tubing you happen to have. You can build one to play in any key you want, especially those hard-to-find low or "in-between" keys.
Scottish small pipes -- A nice sounding bagpipe that is quiet enough to play indoors and with other instruments. These pipes are pitched in A, and use the same fingering as the Great Highland Bagpipe. The bores are straight and therefore easy to do with hobby-shop brass tubing. This is a challenging project but is eminently satisfying. (Note that the bellows, bag, and blowpipe sections are also applicable to any bellows-blown bagpipe. For example, when combined with David Daye's Famous "Penny-Chanter", you have all the makings for a home-built uilleann pipes practice set!)
Windchimes -- A musical instrument? You be the judge! :) These are fun to build, and very simple once you know how. Again, you can use just about any metal tubing you like.
Links to other instrument/building sites.

_Eric Reiswig

How to build a Les Paul Style Guitar the "HARD" way

How to build a Stratocaster Style Guitar the "HARD" way

How to build an "F" Style Mandolin

How to build an Banjo

_John Fisher

There are instructional websites, videos, and tutorials on instrument-making which range from the extremely simple to the exceedingly complex and sophisticated. For children, it is best to begin with the very basics as soon as the child shows interest or aptitude. Some children will shoot ahead and beg for more. Others may begin to get bored quickly. Such differing reactions should assist you in planning your next move.

When the child finds a project that captivates him, he is taking the early steps toward mastery of at least one small skill. It is good to acquaint the child with the feeling of mastery as early as possible, combined with the feeling of satisfaction in a job well done.

Dangerous Child Basic Skills: Knots

Dangerous children should be introduced to boating, climbing, fishing, and camping no later than the age of 10. But before a child can enjoy those activities, he will need to be able to tie basic knots. Basic search and rescue knots are pictured below, as a good overview of useful knots. Different activities may require other knot skills.

Animated Knots by Grog

The website, Animated Knots by Grog, provides several pages of useful knots by activity, along with animated illustrations of how to tie each knot.

The US Search and Rescue Task Force also has a useful webpage on ropes and knots. This page is useful as a quick reference or basic review, once one has already learned the knot.
This video, "Six Knots You Need to Know," is interesting, but is perhaps most useful as a quick way to get to the knot tying videos on YouTube.

All dangerous children should learn basic first aid and basic rescue techniques by the age of 10. Knot tying is a basic part of rescue skills. The first knot that children tend to learn to tie is the bow knot when tying a shoe. But the bow knot is actually a very poor knot for tying the shoe, since it comes untied so easily by accident, sometimes leading to accidents. A better way of tying one's shoe is by one of the variations of the Ian knot. The sooner the child learns such superior knots, the better off he will be in even the most ordinary situations.

This might be a good time to clarify simple terminology. Some readers assume that a "dangerous child" will be a violent child, and that teaching a child to be dangerous is the same as teaching the child to be violent. But that would be a basic misapprehension of the intent here.

The "Al Fin Dangerous Child (AFDC)" is dangerous mainly to those who want to confine and control him, to abridge his rights in some way that is convenient to them, but unjust to the child. To everyone else, the AFDC is a lifesaver and a fount of useful and creative ideas.

The AFDC is nothing if not skillfully versatile, and generally competent all around. But different skills need to be taught at different stages in development. Many skill require the prior mastery of other skills, to be mastered in their turn. And since each child is different in terms of strengths and interests, teaching a child to be maximally dangerous, in the Al Fin sense, requires some delicate loom work and knot tying in itself. Stay tuned.

Peter Thiel's Avalanche Effect on College Education

Peter Thiel is a successful entrepreneur, visionary, and venture capitalist. One of his recent investments involves sponsoring youth under the age of 20 years old, in the starting of their own enterprises. The young people must forego a college education during the time that they are engaged in their intensive entrepreneurial training and startup experience.

Interestingly, one of Thiel's young hopefuls -- 19 year old Dale J. Stephens -- has embarked on an entrepreneurial campaign in opposition of the phenomenon of excessive college education. The excerpt below is taken from Stephens' article in CNN: College is a waste of time:

I have been awarded a golden ticket to the heart of Silicon Valley: the Thiel Fellowship. The catch? For two years, I cannot be enrolled as a full-time student at an academic institution. For me, that's not an issue; I believe higher education is broken.

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

...College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. In the book "Academically Adrift," sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college. Student loan debt in the United States, unforgivable in the case of bankruptcy, outpaced credit card debt in 2010 and will top $1 trillion in 2011.

... Learning by doing -- in life, not classrooms -- is the best way to turn constant iteration into true innovation. We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions.

... We who take our education outside and beyond the classroom understand how actions build a better world. We will change the world regardless of the letters after our names. _College is a waste of time

Brave words, which will need to be backed up by braver actions. Stephens will receive $100,000 and access to expert advice and assistance in reaching his entrepreneurial goals. Stephens has already been signed by Penguin Press to write his first book, "Hacking Your Education."

What is most interesting about this phenomenon is that Thiel's initial investment is spurring a downstream expansion in interest in entrepreneurial alternatives to mainstream college education. And this downstream expansion is likely to spawn further downstream expansion, and so on etc. . . .

Wise people understand that school is not the education. Life is the education. The efforts of modern society to place emphasis on the educational effect of schools at the expense of the educational effect of life, has led to a society of Peter Pans and Cinderellas, perpetual incompetent adolescents of the psychologically neotenate variety.

Peter Thiel aims to change that emphasis back, in an effort to help save at least a few youth from wasting their time and lives. Peter Thiel aims to misbehave. And he is hoping that the attitude will be catching.

Approaching a Curriculum for The Dangerous Child

The dangerous child is a child who is self-motivated, and resistant to outside coercion. He is in many ways the opposite of the modern psychological neotenate -- the lifelong incompetent adolescent -- which schools are currently spitting out into the public ways by the gross.

Dangerous children enter into their education quite early in life, and never truly exit the process. It should be clear to all educated people that children need to learn multiple languages at a relatively young age, to encourage a more powerful brain development. It should also be clear that besides being exposed to music, children should receive some type of musical training at a fairly early age. And it is also highly probable that children could benefit from early childhood foundational training in mathematics.

All three of those crucial early childhood educational topics could be easily incorporated into a normal playful upbringing, without the need for expensive private teachers or institutional enrollment.

The human mind is instinctively primed for language, music, and probably mathematics. The developmental windows for those areas open up relatively early in life -- although each child is different and should be approached as an individual when planning and unfolding his curricula.

The younger the child, the more crucial the aspect of play. Play is incorporated in Montessori education, in Waldorf education, and in most other forms of effective alternative curricula of early childhood. But the sheer vast breadth of play has hardly been explored in this regard.

The foundations of music, maths, and multi-lingual language learning cause changes in brain development which permit a higher level of learning at an earlier age, than would otherwise be the case. The more skillfully the training can be enmeshed in play, the earlier the foundation building can take place in an intentional manner. But the play must be real, and not "pretend play." Children can generally tell the difference through non-verbal cues. Don't be a parental putz. Let your inner playful child emerge, it will help both you and your child.

Besides music, language, and maths, there are a number of other foundational beginnings which need to be laid, if one is to take advantage of the opening of the critical developmental windows in the child's brain. But these other areas are less well known to modern neuroscience or early education, and should be discussed discreetly, between responsible and qualified practitioners and serious parents and prospective parents.

As in the Garcia curriculum, the dangerous child will be trained in areas practical, philosophical, artistic, and technological. As in the Robinson curriculum, by the time the child is 16, he will be well prepared for advanced college-level work in a number of areas -- particularly math, science, and engineering.

But in addition, by the time a dangerous child reaches the age of 16 to 18, he will be able to financially support himself in the world at least 3 different ways. He will already have a significant nest egg saved, and will have several ideas for lucrative enterprises reasonably well planned. And that will be just the beginning of whole-life education which by then will be almost entirely within the hands of the dangerous child himself.

Ridiculous!, you may say. And judging by the potential of virtually every childhood curriculum you have been exposed to, you would be absolutely correct. But for those with the fortitude to work their way through the materials to be provided in future entries to this series, it is likely that you will begin to see how the threads can come together.

The Dangerous Child Curricula: Part VIII

What makes a child dangerous? A dangerous child is disruptive, in the same sense that a breakthrough or innovative technology is disruptive. Disruptive technologies and dangerous children both affect and change the world in which they exist.

But disruptive technologies are developed by inventors and engineers, whereas dangerous children are created by themselves. If a child cannot teach himself to be dangerous, there is no way that anyone else can do so. You can get an inkling of this idea from Art Robinson, PhD, who homeschooled his six children on his own, after the tragic death of his wife.

Learning is not a team sport. Learning is an activity that involves solely the student and the knowledge. Everything or everyone else that may become involved in this process is essentially superfluous—and is potentially harmful as a distraction from the fundamental process.

In the adult world this is, of course, self-evident. Adults ordinarily do not have special teaching aids and dedicated teachers available to hold their hands when they need to acquire new knowledge. Usually, they have only books. When the knowledge comes directly from other repositories such as computers, people, or other sources, that knowledge is seldom tailored for spoon-feeding to an unprepared mind.

...Consider, for example, the teaching of math and science. Many homeschools use Saxon Math. Although produced with teachers and classrooms in mind, this series of math books is so well-written that it can be mastered by most students entirely on their own without any teacher intervention whatever. This self-mastery usually does not happen automatically, but it can be learned by almost any student with correct study rules and a good study environment.

While the subject matter, can be mastered with or without a teacher, the student who masters it without a teacher learns something more. He learns to teach himself. Then, when he continues into physics, chemistry, and biology— which are studied in their own special language, the language of mathematics—he is able to teach these subjects to himself regardless of whether or not a teacher with the necessary specialized knowledge is present. Also, he is able to make use of much higher-quality texts – texts written for adults.

Besides the great advantage of developing good study habits and thinking ability, self-teaching also has immediate practical advantages. Many children should be able, through Advanced Placement examinations, to skip over one or more years of college. The great saving in time and expense from this is self-evident. These and other comparable accomplishments await most children who learn to self-teach and then apply this skill to their home education.

Even children of lesser ability can, by means of self-teaching and good study habits, achieve far more than they otherwise would have accomplished by the more ordinary techniques. _Teach Them to Teach Themselves, Art Robinson

Much more at the link.

It is clear that the world will not adapt itself to the child, and children should not be given the impression that it would or should do. Instead, children should be given the tools for self-teaching from the earliest age, along with a number of basic options and directions of self study -- including an important core of learning which makes most other learning possible.

When a child is liberated to teach himself in this manner -- which includes making sure the child has good study habits from an early age and sticks to them -- it is obvious that the child is indeed creating himself, and making himself dangerously self-reliant.

There is much more to childhood development than book learning of course. The six Robinson children were raised by a widowed father on his ranch, and each had definite responsibilities.

...each one of them, spontaneously and without suggestion or demand from me, took over an essential aspect of our farm and personal lives. They did all work with the cattle and sheep, they did all laundry, cooking, and housework, and they were working beside me as Laurelee used to do in the scientific research and civil defense work that is our ministry and our professional life.One by one, my tasks just disappeared as the children assumed them.

In general, they preferred to work independently. They tended not to share tasks and did not divided them as one might expect. For example, at 11 years old Joshua was the cook – and already a better cook then than I. Zachary did all work with the cattle (about 30) and the chickens; Arynne cared for the sheep (about 100); Noah was in charge of all farm and laboratory repairs; and Bethany did the washing and taught Matthew to read. Some tasks were shared such as house cleaning, sheep shearing, and watching over Matthew.

This sort of extracurricular work is especially valuable as reinforcement for the home school.

While self confidence can be built somewhat in sports or other “activities”, the self confidence that comes to a child from the knowledge that he is independently carrying on an activity that is essential to the survival of the family is valuable indeed. _How the Robinson Children Fare

Some parents might abuse the budding competence of children and adolescents, using them as unpaid servants. Robinson warns against doing this, explaining that the years of childhood are gone too quickly, and too often the excitement, energy, and trust of youth are fleeting as well.

But children must learn to competently work, produce, and improvise, as well as learn concepts and facts. If learning is not put to use, it tends to be forgotten.

Children first learn to walk in order to walk. They learn to talk so as to get their intent across to the controlling outer world. They learn to ride a bicycle in order to ride, and so on. Children are quite motivated to learn in such circumstances, and the same can be true for a wide range of other situations -- if the opportunity is presented.

Neither Art Robinson nor John David Garcia devised their curricula as a way of making children dangerous. But if the children approach the curricula with the same dedicated abandon with which they learned to walk, talk, or ride a bicycle, they are almost certain to make themselves into very dangerous children indeed.

If they learn to teach themselves such broad and powerful methods of thinking and learning, they will naturally acquire an intellectual self-reliance that makes them an immediate threat to any persons or institutions that seek to control them or use them against their own interests.

That is why the approaches to the dangerous child curricula are so different from the way "education" is administered in government schools. Public education is meant to tame the wild child so as to make him more manipulable by society. That is not necessarily how things turn out, particularly in inner city schools, but certain proportions of delinquent dropouts are certainly a predictable outcome of the government system. As to those who graduate and go to college, the exploding growth of remedial education for new university students speaks for itself.

But don't think that homeschooling is the same thing as the raising of a dangerous child. It is possible to adapt the dangerous child approach to learning even to a child who attends government schools. But it involves a great deal of work, as well as a huge amount of "unlearning" of dysfunctional ideology with which the child is burdened by the public system.

If the child is to make himself truly dangerous, he will choose his own path which is likely to eventually diverge widely from any traditional institutional path of development. Eventually, once the child has developed the momentum to chart his own course and make it stick. Examples: College dropout billionaires

It is not necessary for a dangerous child to become a billionaire in order to shape the environment around him for the better. But it is necessary for him to be self-reliant, and be willing and able to teach himself what he needs to know, in order to move ahead.

Why Should We Raise a Generation of Dangerous Children?

Several correspondents are under the misapprehension that the Dangerous Child movement is intended to somehow save our modern dysfunctional societies from themselves. Perhaps we have given the impression that dangerous children are meant to find their way into leadership positions, and to somehow steer society into more productive directions.

Such a thing might have been possible had it been undertaken a number of decades ago. Unfortunately, the die has been cast -- at least for most of Europe and for the US. Skyrocketing debt and a declining demographic are combining with a widespread popular sentiment of entitlement and a loss of vital skills and skilled occupations.

In other words, even if truly wise and truly dangerous children were to find their way into important leadership positions of societies, they could do very little to correct the downward trajectories or to avert disaster.

The Dangerous Child movement is more about providing foci for building new societies out of societies-in-decline that inevitably find themselves suffering hard times. Construction, not destruction, is the intent of the movement. But construction that occurs in the context of a surrounding society that has caused its own inexorable decline.

Being a dangerous child is partially a state of mind -- sceptical of authority without being cynical or nihilistic. But it is also a state of preparation and a particular ordering of assets and skills. It is the most important quiet trend that we can conceive of at this time, for western societies that are in decline.

Some US cable networks are beginning to focus on "prepper" groups, families, and individuals. It is an interesting sociological trend, which has been around at least since the Jimmy Carter presidency. But the prepper movement doesn't hold a candle to the dangerous child movement, in terms of importance to the future.

US political movements which are intended to push back government bloat, excessive spending, and excessive regulatory and tax burden on US business and freedom, are very important. Groups such as the Tea Party movement, the libertarian movement, and other groups who attempt to hold back government tyranny, should do their utmost to achieve their goals. Optimism is clearly better than pessimism, in terms of a successful outcome.

Still, at least a few must make provision against a catastrophic outcome. In such a case, we will need as many dangerous children as we can get.

The Dangerous Child Curricula: Part VII

The early childhood curriculum which has been excerpted over the past several postings was not developed in a vacuum. It was developed as an important part of an overall approach to the transformation of modern western society into a more ethical and creative society. Here are some excerpts from chapter 6, "An Educational Alternative" to provide a larger perspective into the project:

The curriculum is one that can be started by young children and continued into old age without being exhausted. A person wishing to maximize creativity in the shortest possible time would follow the curriculum approximately in the order given; but anyone should be able to take many different paths within this curriculum, including specializing at any time. All students would be counseled on the consequences of their actions, but encouraged to follow their instincts by doing what feels right for them without fear of making a wrong choice.

The objective is to make the totality of human knowledge readily and easily available to as many persons as possible in such a way that, if they wish it, they are constantly maximizing their rate of growth in creativity relative to their present intellectual and ethical potential. In order to do this we plot an optimal course through the curriculum for all octets or other groupings of students and let them modify the courses according to their own personal inclinations. We also make the feedback on their progress and that of other students readily available to them whenever they wish it, but on a private basis so that any particular student's progress is known only to the student and his/her counselors. All other data is in statistical summaries and protects the anonymity of each student.

The expectation is that, under this system, learning and creativity will be seen as among the most joyful of human experiences. Students will learn to play the Game of Life for the joy it brings--without fear of punishment or expectation of extrinsic rewards. If their studies are disassociated from external reward and punishment and all students are respected for whatever choices they make, the students will optimize the curriculum for themselves. The essential requirements are to have the totality of human knowledge available and accessible at all times without extrinsic rewards or punishments associated with it. This may be done as follows:

We divide the totality of human knowledge into three primary areas, or dimensions, because human beings normally perceive the integrated whole of the cosmos as three distinct types of phenomena. These are the physical, the biological, and the psychosocial. There are many levels of knowledge within each of these dimensions that are normally associated within our archaeological and cultural history. Indeed, what integrates the three dimensions into a whole is the evolutionary perspective (as in the first four chapters) by which we see human history as a continuation of our biological evolution and biological evolution as a continuation of material evolution. Therefore, at each level the student is presented with the three distinct areas of study--plus a fourth discipline, which is an ethical evolutionary-historical-artistic integration of the first three.

Art integrates knowledge at the unconscious level. The entire program integrates knowledge by having ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny at the psychosocial level. Students learn in an order, context, and manner similar to that in which the human race learned the same material and are given an opportunity to rediscover this knowledge. Everything they learn is always related to everything they know in a meaningful, practical way. _Educational Alternative _ Chapter 6 of Creative Transformation

More from John David Garcia's early childhood curriculum:

		Physical		Biological
Avg. Level	Avg. Age	Physical Theory	Physical Practice	Biological Theory	Biological Practice
9.00	11.00	Begin advanced calculus and partial differential equations; detailed study of the work of Lagrange and Euler, the calculus of variations from Newton to Lagrange, elementary probability theory from Pascal to Cauchy and LaPlace; applications in optics, astronomy, theory of heat	Begin construction of simple steam engine, making from scratch, doing all machining of parts by treddle-driven lathes and water and windmill power; check the detailed mathematical models against astronomical observations	Conclusion of the study of human anatomy and embryology	Conclusion of dissections and microscopic observations; the general functioning of the human body has been observed
9.25	11.25	Continue work of previous quarter; detailed theory of steam engine, the work of Lavoisier, Priestley, and Dalton	Continue above project, switching to electrical machinery; do early experiments in electricity by Gauss, Coulomb, Amp^ere, and Volta; the atomic model of chemistry and experiments	Begin study of animal physiology and describe biochemistry through mid 19th century; repeat experiments of Helmholtz in biophysics	Experiments in basic physiology showing how human body consumes oxygen and produces carbon dioxide; human body as a heat engine
9.50	11.50	Continue work in chemistry; the work of LaPlace and Carnot, the laws of thermodynamics, the experiments of Faraday; advanced studies in partial differential equations; wave mechanics in optics; begin study of the works of Gauss	Continue chemistry experiments; finish work on steam engine; test efficiency using Carnot's concepts; begin repeating the experiments of Faraday and empirically derive the basic laws of electricity and magnetism, including Ohm's law	Animal physiology and biochemistry continued; the work and life of Pasteur	Experiments in animal physiology and biochemistry continued
9.75	11.75	Maxwell's work on the wave theory of light and the derivation of Maxwell's equations and their applications; continue study of Gauss' mathematics and physics	Electromagnetic motors and generators, construction of batteries, transmission of electromagnetic waves, early work of Tesla, the telegraph and the wireless constructed	A course in botany and plant physiology; begin experiments in plant genetics after Gregor Mendel	Study and dissection of major plant species; field studies, microscopic dissection, plant breeding per Gregor Mendel

		Psychosocial		Integration
Avg. Level	Avg. Age	Psychosocial Theory	Pyschosocial Practice	Integrative Theory	Integrative Practice
9.00	11.00	Detailed analysis of the American and French Revolutions; detailed analysis of the writings of Jefferson and his correspondence; comparisons between Jefferson, Washington, and Napoleon; how Napoleon betrayed the French Revolution in the pursuit of personal power; how the U.S. government betrayed the Libertarian ethic	Write essays comparing the ethical course of the American and French Revolution; relate the ethics of Spinoza to these revolutions; relate to evolutionary ethics and show where they went wrong	Artistic synthesis in the early work of Goethe and the music of Beethoven; ethical synthesis in the philosophy of Lessing, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn and their interpretations of Spinoza	Reorchestrate and perform Beethoven's Grosse Fugue for octet; read Goethe's prophetic poetry; write a sequel to the Sorcerer's Apprentice
9.25	11.25	The philosophy of Kant, biography, The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason; compare to Spinoza; Kant's cosmology compared to LaPlace; explain Catholic hostility	Write essays on the scientific and ethical implications of Kant's philosophy; analyze in terms of the evolutionary ethic	Artistic synthesis continued in the work of Goethe and Beethoven; Goethe's Sorcerer's Apprentice and pessimism, the romantic hope and self-delusion	Produce as a group project Goethe's Faust and performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for several octets
9.50	11.50	The philosophy of Hegel--how he could be so wrong and so influential; Hegel and the misinterpretation of Spinoza; Hegel's theory of history and ethics; Hegel as the father of Marxism and Naziism; de Tocqueville as a visionary and prophetic historian	Essay explaining Hegel's influence through present times; a comparison of Spinoza and Hegel--how could Hegel so misunderstand Spinoza and deceive himself and others? Why was de Tocqueville so accurate in his predictions?	The romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth; the art of Watteau, Houdon, David, and Degas; the music of Berlioz and Liszt; Wagner as the musical equivalent of Hegel	Write epic poetry on a hopeful future from a romantic perspective; do a musical satire on a Wagner opera; paint a heroic romantic painting
9.75	11.75	A history of the world from 1775 to 1910; development of major ideas and philosophies, with particular attention to USA, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia; basic economics from Adam Smith to Marx and Engels	An essay explaining the Newtonian model and its influence on the intellectual history of the world; why Islam, India, and China were so far behind, why Japan was able to catch up	An ethical analysis of European and American imperialism; libertarian and socialistic ethics; the ethical turmoil of the age of liberty and social obligation; read War and Peace by Tolstoy; the paintings of Turner and the Impressionists	Read and analyze Pushkin, Melville, Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, George Eliot; study the music of Mahler and perform Das Lied von der Erde

It is fascinating how well Garcia's "Creative Transformation" approach parallels a number of other transformative ideas and projects being discussed by people who see many current trends in government and society as providing nothing better than a dead end. Example:

• Become self-sufficient in education, economics, health, defense, and everything else, in this order of priority. Only a fairly large network can become more self-sufficient than a current nation-state.


• Help other [groups], in your own network first and then in other networks, to achieve the same degree of self-sufficiency through education, trade, and mutual defense agreements.


• Extend the protection of the self-sufficiency networks in the form of a libertarian society to any person who wishes to join it on equitable terms. Doing this will provide security for all human beings who need it and eventually leave the central government without power, wealth, or a creative population to govern. Remember that both security and insecurity are illusions. Only the Game of Life is real. The central government and its willing subjects, if they are not nurtured by creative persons, will consist entirely of parasites and will eventually collapse--to be replaced by a libertarian society. It is unethical to nurture parasites.


• Extend the process to other countries through education, trade, and mutual defense until the entire world is a creatively transformed libertarian society on the way to becoming a Moral Society. Never impose your way of life on others by force, but allow them space to be different in their own territory. Human intelligence without human ethics leads inevitably to self-destruction [280]. Similarly, you fight to the death to defend your liberty and that of affiliated octets. It is unethical to tolerate destructive behavior, however strong the culprit. Creativity can only grow through liberty, never through force. Every tyranny is worse than anarchy.

_Creative Transformation Chapter 5

These are clearly dangerous ideas, at least as seen from the viewpoint of the central established order. And yet Garcia's ideas were developed according to a far higher level of ethics than virtually anything one will see in the modern public sphere.

Creativity is dangerous. Transformation is dangerous. But stasis is death. And that is what modern humans are facing in the contemporary synthesis of power structures and societal trends.

Growing dangerous children is not just about chronological age and early childhood development. Remember: It is never too late to have a [dangerous] childhood. (Apologies to Tom Robbins)

The Dangerous Child Curricula: Part VI

In The Underground History of American Education, former teacher John Taylor Gatto exposed the destructive effects of the government school system.

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

...Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed." It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. _Underground History Prologue

In the early days of the USA, children were not subjected to monolithic, factory style government education. They had to learn for themselves, learning by doing.

Young people in America were expected to make something of themselves, not to prepare themselves to fit into a pre-established hierarchy. Every foreign commentator notes the early training in independence, the remarkable precocity of American youth, their assumption of adult responsibility. _JTG Underground History

Things changed, once "civilised education" was enforced upon the unprepared American population. No longer precocious, American youth are infantilised, psychologically neotenised, and made into lifelong incompetent adolescents -- thanks to government schooling and the concomitant withering away of parental oversight.

More from John David Garcia's Early Childhood Curriculum:

		Physical		Biological
Avg. Level	Avg. Age	Physical Theory	Physical Practice	Biological Theory	Biological Practice
8.00	10.00	Continue with study of analytical geometry; begin solid analytical geometry using Cartesian notation; study the design of clocks, thermometers, and astronomical instruments; a study of Kepler and his ideas about nature and the music of the spheres	Continue with mini-cathedral building project; build full-fledged observatory with telescopes, but in spirit of Tycho Brahe make observations to deduce Kepler's laws; take two-week ocean voyage on sailing ship; discuss how Europe extended itself throughout the world in the 16th century	Continue vertebrate comparative anatomy through higher mammals and relate to human anatomy; show how embryology of all vertebrates overlaps at stages; relate to Greek evolutionary theories	Dissect and study vertebrate anatomy, tissues, and organs; go through modern systematics for all major mammalian orders; study embryology of related groups with microscope; the fetal pig and its full dissection
8.25	10.25	The early basis of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, Boyle's studies, Galileo, the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, the notion of experimental "proof"; finish analytical geometry and learn elementary calculus of variations, the concept of limit, and early concepts of calculus to explain Kepler's laws	Continue observation project, build improved clocks, finish sextant, finish mini-cathedral, study map making and various forms of map projections; set up experiments to test Boyle's laws, simple gas laws, experiments to test circulation of the blood	Human anatomy in detail; all organs, tissues and bones, gross structure of the brain; embryology using the fetal pig; use anatomical drawings of da Vinci and Vesalius, plus Gray's Anatomy; these integrated studies will last a year	Dissect human cadavers, male and female; observe tissues, and relate to other mammals; show similarity of all organs for all mammals; note how different human brain is
8.50	10.50	The Newtonian synthesis; full study using modern notation of Principia Mathematica and the Opticks; derive Newton's laws from Kepler's observations; derive calculus from the need to mathematically describe the laws of motion and gravity	Begin making windmill and waterwheel; predict the orbits of the planets using Newton's laws and a few astronomical observations; predict the eclipses of the sun by the moon at different spots of interest on the earth; repeat Newton's experiments showing that light is a system of particles, and that white light contains the spectrum	Continue studies of human anatomy and embryology	Continue anatomical dissection and microscopic studies; learn micro-techniques and make your own slides
8.75	10.75	Derive the calculus up to the use of simple differential equations; derive the formulas for optics and the creation of compound lenses; compare Newton's and Leibnitz' approach	Continue work on windmill and waterwheel; build a Newtonian reflecting telescope; built a chromatically-corrected set of compound lenses for the telescope already constructed; make an improved microscope	Continue studies of human anatomy	Continue work of previous quarter

		Psychosocial		Integration
Avg. Level	Avg. Age	Psychosocial Theory	Pyschosocial Practice	Integrative Theory	Integrative Practice
8.00	10.00	The rise of humanism leading to the Renaissance and the Reformation; the writings of Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin; the Council of Trent and the rise of the Jesuit order; Giordano Bruno, the philosophy of Descartes, and a review of his contemporaries	Essay on the ethical implications of the Reformation; were the Protestants any less bureaucratic? mutual discussion of essays among the octets; essay on the ethical implications of the scientific method and the new philosophy	The literary synthesis, Dante's Divina Comedia, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus; the music of Monteverde and Palestrina; the art of Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo	Write an epic poem about the Christian view of Hell; write a play about a modern Don Quixote; continue study of organ and harpsichord; compose and perform music in the style of Monteverde and Palestrina
8.25	10.25	Hobbes, Montaigne, and Spinoza; read Spinoza's Ethics without analyzing proofs and note how this is a huge leap over the philosophy of Descartes and is the first totally rational treatment of ethics in history	Apply Spinoza's ethics to solving problems in practical ethics, politics, and religion; relate Spinoza's ethics to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism; apply Spinoza's model to formulating a model of the universe and evolution; write an essay on the meaning of Spinoza	The literary synthesis continues; read critically Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Hamlet; study the music of Handel; study advanced musical theory and composition	Continue study of organ and harpsichord; build a harpsichord as a group project; write a last act to Hamlet in which Hamlet lives; play the music of Handel
8.50	10.50	The philosophical contemporaries of Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, and Hume on improving the understanding; world history from 1000 AD to 1775	Essay on the hostility to Spinoza; an ethical analysis of the lives of Spinoza and Leibnitz; essay on why Europe embraced the scientific method and modern philosophy while the rest of the world did not	Spinoza's ethics, Christianity, Judaism, and respect for human rights; the rise of democratic ideology; Islam becomes totally entropic; conservative belief systems in the rest of the world; European predation	Group project to perform St. Matthew or St. John Passion of Bach; all learn to play the Musical Offering, the Art of the Fugue, in an octet; each octet does its own orchestration for the Art of the Fugue
8.75	10.75	Human rights and 18th century philosophy; Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and the Encyclopedists; the American Revolution; the philosophy and writings of Thomas Jefferson, the social contract, and the Federalist Papers	Essay on Rousseau and irrationalism; essay on the libertarian ideal and the democratic compromise; essay on the U.S. founding fathers allowing slavery to continue--was losing the revolution and hanging a better alternative? Write scenario on what would have happened if there had not been tolerance of slavery	The artistic synthesis continues; further study of the Art of the Fugue and the music of Mozart; the pessimistic writings of Jonathan Swift, a tragic interpretation of the democratic experiment	Compose and perform a conclusion to the Art of the Fugue; perform as a group project one Mozart opera of students' choice

Parents need to allow the child space, but at the same time need to carefully monitor the child's progress. The child should be allowed to take risks, to take on responsibilities, and to pursue rewards.

These are dangerous concepts, and should the powers-that-be ever suspect that significant numbers of children would be raised to be truly dangerous to the status quo, the reaction would be furious, and likely violent.