Completely agreed, and this has been argued since antiquity. In Plato's Republic:

Socrates: Therefore, calculation, geometry, and all the preliminary education required for dialectic must be offered to the future rulers in childhood, and not in the shape of compulsory learning either.

Glaucon: Why's that?

Socrates: Because no free person should learn anything like a slave. Forced bodily labor does no harm to the body, but nothing taught by force stays in the soul.

Glaucon: That's true.

Socrates: Then don't use force to train the children in these subjects; use play instead. That way you'll also see better what each of them is naturally fitted for.

From Tolstoy's Wikipedia page: "Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded 13 schools for children of Russia's peasants, who had just been emancipated from serfdom in 1861. Tolstoy described the school's principles in his 1862 essay 'The School at Yasnaya Polyana'. Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived, partly due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police. However, as a direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education."

Politics and Culture in Anarchist Education: The Modern School of New York and Stelton, 1911-1915: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1179429?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

The Unlikely History of Tolstoy College: http://news.infoshop.org/education/unlikely-history-tolstoy-...

While Plato is something of an authority (and thus the best target for the joke), he does show his work. HN is pretty good about avoiding appeal to authority.

But it is a frightfully common logical fallacy, and the perhaps the only one we spend so much time educating our children to use. Largely by example.

All logical fallacies are actually valid ways of thinking about things.

It's good to avoid them (or use them) but only in moderation.

The idea that avoiding logical fallacies all the time is OK, is actually illogical.

Sure, something might not be true just because an authority on the matter said it, but it's more likely to be true than what some random person said about the subject. E.g. one would rather trust Einstein than the guy who says they invented perpetual motion. The idea of the burden-of-proof (which is totally valid) is against total adhesion to "appeal to authority".

And given finite lifetimes, and other interests, we're not gonna all learn medicine and evaluate any claim on a medical issue we have from our street cleaner and our doctor alike. We'll trust the doctor, appeal to authority be damned -- and it's the smart thing to do, even if it's not 100% accurate (the doctor might be wrong).

In fact conversation would be 100% impossible without "appeal to authority" of some sort, except if you expect anyone to prove everything from first principles.

The quote is a quote from a well regarded (for millennia) piece of thinking on pedagogy. You're not asked to take it as truth because Plato said it, but it's worth to ponder what he had to say, especially since it's a foundational part of western civilization.

You can read it as "hey, millennia of people though this has a good point -- maybe there's something into it?". Or at least at "hmm, here's what many people used to think is a valid point about pedagogy".

But it you're turning off your logic in casual conversation, expect to get burned. Detecting fallacies should be an always-on feature, like HTTPS. Most of the time you're not going to have a MITM attack... until you do.

I think you've also missed the point of TFA, which says that anti-authoritarians can accept authority, if it proves to be a legitimate authority. And it still requires you to use logic, because no authority is perfect. I may be a Lutheran, but that in no way makes me a creationist like Martin Luther.

I don't suggest turning off logic in casual conversation. Rather I suggest that one doesn't put it in autopilot -- as if fallacies (or their lack thereof) are the ultimate judgement of an argument.

I too read for the freedom and power it brought me. So many of us, I imagine...

And I do not debate his influence on European philosophy, which is hard to underestimate.

Mostly, the reason I dislike Plato is because in school I had a teacher who practically worshipped Plato and acted as if he was the pinnacle of philosophy or human thinking in general.

Also, a few years later, I was unfortunate enough to read an introduction to European philosophy written by somebody who literally said that European philosophers could be divided into two groups - those who agreed with Plato, and those who were wrong.

So when it comes to Plato, I am kind of "traumatized".

What I meant to say was that it took us surprisingly long to rediscover that particular piece of wisdom expressed by Plato, and that given my attitude towards him, I was pleasantly surprised to see him express such a thought.

Edit: Book VII, starting at 536d. You can compare against the public domain Jowett translation at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html (search in the page for "slave")

I added emphasis on an important word here. Of course kids don't like to be made to read something boring. Where things get serious is when a kid refuses to read AT ALL, or worse, is demonstrably incapable of focusing long enough to read.

While I think that ADD is over-diagnosed in kids, I also know from personal experience that some people (not just kids) really do have ADD and benefit from therapeutic intervention. To me it seems just as dangerous to over-diagnose political anti-authoritarianism as it is to over-diagnose medical ADD.

Anyway, 7-year-olds do not actually have an anti-authoritarian streak; they crave the attention, acceptance, and approval of their parents and teachers. But they are in the process of establishing an independent mental model of themselves, which means they experiment to find out where the boundaries are. Kids don't employ political thinking to reject authority, they are still stuck in the process of discovering and defining what authority actually is.

Thinking that kids are different or incapable of learning on their own is just people wanting kids to go through the same meat grinder of education that they did. My partner was unschooled, and after talking to her and getting over the initial reaction of "that's nuts" I feel like it actually makes a ton of sense. The data support it. I don't care if you're kid can't read at 7 -- if it's not due to a disability such as dyslexia -- and neither does their future education.

My partner made her own decision to go to high school as she was interested in going on to college. A lot of her friends were interested in college and managed to get in because of their work that they'd been doing on their own/SAT scores. Now she's a developer at Amazon, and a number of her friends went to top tier universities.

Of course a small number of them did nothing with their lives and live at home with their parents, but so did a larger percentage of people that I went to school with.

(also, I hate that I can't edit out that I put you're instead of your in a sentence about reading. the shame)

FUCK YOU.

This is the response you would have heard from 6 y.o. me, if only I wasn't scared that my parents would punish me for swearing. That's how far my respect for authority went :)

I had gone to preschool for one year. I remember it as being locked up for half a day with a bunch of infantile imbeciles under supervision of not much more serious adults. I despised all those alphabetes who didn't give a damn about anything farther than 1 meter away from their nose and equally despised the teachers who acted surprised that I didn't care to socialize with the former. I think they suspected me of autism, but this was clearly just psychological defense to cope with my rejection :)

Caring about the teachers attention and acceptance would have meant behaving like a little dumb shit running around screaming and quarreling with others such. Not an exciting perspective.

I remember how at one time the teachers complained to parents that I never greeted them (which means I probably did, ha ha). My parents had to enter the class with me after having threatened that they'd make a scene if I didn't greet the teacher :)

Actual school was only barely better. At least the other kids were forbidden screaming. Still boring as hell.

> Where things get serious is when a kid refuses to read AT ALL, or worse, is demonstrably incapable of focusing long enough to read.

Why would anyone focus on something he/she doesn't care about?

I strongly feel that the reason behind most of those learning disabilities is keeping kids in an environment where ability to read is completely unimportant except for those few unfortunate hours they spend at this asinine place called "school", hours they'd like to forget as soon as they end. I hated school for being childish and boring, but other kids apparently had their own reasons too. I don't think many kids there actually cared about school. Especially in the first few years.

BTW, regarding reading being unimportant, I wonder if the rising popularity of computers won't suddenly provide a magic decrease in "reading disabilities". I was raised in the age of TV, but I feel like nowadays it's harder to obtain entertainment with no ability to read at all.

Otherwise, I bet you're likely correct.

My sense of "me" was forming, and I was aware it was incomplete, and I didn't understand it. I had many authority problems, having rejected most of the school.

This went on for long enough, they eventually were wanting to intervene with drugs and a psychologist. Age 11 ish...

This, being the late 70s, scared me, and I remember a cold resolve to resist the entirety of it, for fear of losing that self before I even had a chance to understand and grow strong.

It did not go well. I did manage to convince the shrink the drugs were a non starter. Friends who went down that path changed. I could see it.

Never have quite got past that basic wrong.

Interestingly, the issues went away as soon as I managed to get some autonomy.

We're not currently at risk of under-diagnosing ADD. We're at risk to further over-diagnose it. The article and parent post did not say nobody should be diagnosed ADD. The article's author is merely shocked how many people are misclassified as needing to be medicated.

I don't feel peer pressure, even though I'm an extrovert. I fight for the underdog. I challenge unfair rules. Whereas I have very clever friends who observe, analyze, and find a way to move forward, I storm the castle.

The result of abuse, neglect, innate traits, nature, nurture, birth order, luck of the draw? Who knows.

In contrast to you, my reading and exploring were escapes, outlets, coping mechanisms. I was discouraged, coerced to be more like the other kids. Every person has their own way out.

What's magical to me is that for many kids, there can be 2 or 3 "angels" (mentors) to help them find their way. Instead of expecting every authority figure and their subjects to behave in some idealized manner, I wish that every kid has a chance to meet their "uncle" or "granny" figure role that makes life bearable.

We train ourselves to become mindless drones, and then put anyone who doesn't on medication.

We definitely infantilize our children in schools, teach them to act stupidly in order to get them to behave. Then we wonder why we have problems like youth gang violence.

Alas, those talents aren't common.

If their assertion is that the current form of primary school is causing creativity to decline, they only need to demonstrate that it causes more decline than alternatives.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360290

Don't think that it's so easy to find an alternative version of school that won't be a pain for some students.

https://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U?t=536

which is a delightfully digestible, abridged, version of this talk:

https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/event-videos/2008/06/...

whose transcript you can find here:

https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/videos/2010/10/rsa-...

whose figures are drawn from this book:

    Break Point and Beyond, by George Land

    So my question to you is what
    percentage of the people tested of the 1,500
    scored at genius level for divergent thinking.
    Now you need to know one more thing about
    them - these were kindergarten children. So
    what do you think? What percentage at genius
    level? 80? 98%. Now the thing about this was
    it was a longitudinal study, so they retested the
    same children five years later aged 8 to 10.
    What do you think? 50? They retested them
    again five years later, ages 13 to 15. You can
    see a trend here can't you?

Can we expect societies with low school enrollment to have greater percentages of people exhibiting creativity? Or do we also we a decline in this creativity despite not going to school?

My mum has done similar tricks to me and still does now that I'm grown up and out of her hair. But what if I just folded over and said "Okay" and went to bed when she told me to?

A child refusing to read is not necessary refusing to read everything. May be the child is refusing to read what teacher prescribed to read. May be the child hates the specific content. A good and empathetic teacher must see what is wrong here and help the child develop curiosity about reading instead of branding the child stupid.

In another story in my childhood in India: "elocution competitions" were very popular and all mothers wanted their kids to win the first prize. "Experts" had selected few stories that "built character" and we were supposed to memorize it and then reproduce it with acting. (You must bring tears in your eyes when describing the mother's pain in the story- teacher said).

Despite being a crazy reader I never excelled in this and my mother was very upset. Today I am author of several children's story books which are popular too. The reason why I failed to tell a story on stage is because I could never relate to the "character building story" that someone else selected for me. I wanted to tell a story from Alif Laila or some Bollywood movie not the "character building story" meant to instill value.

Even though your point that a "child refusing to read is not necessarily anti-authority" is correct, I think there is a good chance that the child's individuality and individual preferences are at play.

American liberalism is moving very fast towards "everyone must be like everyone else and have same opinions" and probably affecting public education system too.

As much as politicians want tomtreat programming as the 'new literacy' i can think of no better strategy to destroy an entire generation's intrinsic passion to learn technology.

Not to mention, the vast majority of teachers are woefully incapable of effectively teaching a subject they they, themselves don't begin to grasp.

There's no money in teaching so those with the background required to be 'good' teachers will inevitably pursue other, better opportunities.

Still haven't figured out that forcing kids to do things against their will does not make them love doing it.

Another level of perversion is singling out kids who stand up for themselves and refuse to (or just cannot) fit in the extremely unnatural and unhealthy environment that school is, often labeling them abnormal and often pushing for medicating them. Atrocious.

A great book on the topic is "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. Lots and lots of research showing how attempts for extrinsic motivation kill intrinsic motivation.

For parents reading this:

Praise kills motivation. Encouragement kills motivation. Rewards kill motivation (it shifts onto the rewards). Punishment destroys trust and creates motivation to not be caught.

;)

I imagine there is no good, scientific method to determining how someone should be motivated that we can train teachers with. Just have to trust they're human enough to see our inspirations before they apply their method. We can't all be amazing psychiatrists, and adults have a lot of influence on us at that age. I too benefited from a stand-offish approach to learning.

I wish the better teachers were paid more to be in our schools - I had a teacher that completely ruined my love for animation.

Largely I think schools exhaust kids to get them to change/conform.

http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp...

http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Pra...

edit: added last two sentences, needed a point to the post. I am flighty, but I digress...

I was a consistent B student, but when I got to do more AP and similar, more independent classes, I was able to really apply that knowledge I picked up through independent study. For a section on the Boer war, the teacher actually let me do the lecture!

They do not.

They have the desire the goal to create a work force, soldiers, and compliant citizens for society,.

Not to create educated free thinking persons

A few of then really burn for it and make wonders. Others burned out.

I think a surprisingly large percentage are not particularly suited to be a teacher,and they suffer as they are not in control of the situation.

A few are probably really bad apples and should not be allowed to work with children since they are paedophiles or sadists.

But I doubt that even more than a few teachers are thinking in the terms of creating a 'compliant' workforce.

Consciously, no probably not. They probably genuinely believe they are educating.. That is the by design.. After all the Students and Parents are not aware most of the time of the manipulation being done upon them either. After all students do learn things... They have to in order to be a use as workers, soldiers, etc. They however must learn not question authority, not question their masters, must not have critical thinking skills, or skills that lesson their dependency on Corporations or Government.

The Underground History of American Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWRqZrCMqbA&list=PL8v6e5jkrm...

Some teachers are soo brain washed by this replacement that they do not even recognize the replacement occurred, so insidious is schooling that the teachers still believe they have the same motivation, and same goal of education.

I certainly feel the same, but many of my peers seem to only do something if an authority spurs them on.

As people grow up though authority figures have more of their own incentives and the people they are commanding have the figure things out for themselves which makes for a much larger grey area.

The immense popularity of Roald Dahl books which continually portray a lot of adult authority figures as not having the children's best interest at heart but rather their own, speaks against the idea that children agree with you.

Anti-authoritarianism, as the article points out, is not against all authority; it's against authority which is thrust upon you and not by your own choosing. This is an immense part of the experience of many or most children. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way, indeed most children are very good at choosing who to trust and who to invest authority in and who not to. Taking that choice away is immensely frustrating for children.