My kids' teachers will be there community, with myself and my partner as facilitators. It's time to get back to learning how to learn together.
And capitalism? You aren’t going to enroll them in capitalism? How’s that work? You’re not going to let them buy things or work for money?
Before you try to “facilitate” education for your future children, it might be a good idea to facilitate your own education first.
I'm going to explain to them there are other ways of meeting human needs, like developing a supportive community among people who all help each other. I'll also minimize the things we use money for, as well as the ways we bring money in. There are already groups online geared toward this goal, such as Buy Nothing groups. This is how capitalism will start to be phased out and how I intend on doing my part.
I'll also teach them to realize sometimes forgetting to proofread is not an indication of being uneducated.
Not enrolling them means educating them about how humanity:
• goes through cultural phases, sometimes cyclically
• is currently in a transitional phase between creating legal systems that don't recognize the freedom to choose any strategy to meet a fundamental need for life (eg. the freedom from money) and creating legal systems that do.
• changes through culture, so what we do with our lives can be considered a voting system
• is going from a point in time where programming ourselves on the individual level is done intuitively without explicitly defining the mathematics of doing so to a point where we can use category theory of the brain & mind to explicitly define models we're using to program ourselves
• is going through a period where we don't see how we can cooperate without laws to a period where we can start defining culture-driven, decentralized ways of life
• periods are identifies by the messages within their culture and the actions those messages lead to and stem from
• old periods use shame, blame, criticism, judgment, anger, scarcity, control, and other forms of denying needs in their actions/messages
• can make up and choose whatever messages to believe, on an individual and collective level
• can learn through our example
• can learn to accept that helping someone materially can be repaid emotionally/physically/mentally/spiritually/socially, so material possessions aren't necessary
• is comprised of individuals who experience a world they're modeling based on what they sense and perceive, so anytime they say anything, it's to a person in their head and not the real person, so nothing is personal
The primary focus will be on self-programming skills and studying how human needs naturally emerge from a basic definition of life (http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-mean...).
I'm packaging all this as a religion of absurdity devoted to helping the world through hacking the self. It's a choose-your-own-religion religion. The reason for making it into a religion is because that's what happens when we radically decentralize: everyone governs themselves how they like, including what beliefs they choose and laws that follow. I'm be curious to see how it stands up against current religious legal theory in the US, as well as around the world.
If I teach my kids this stuff and we talk about the needs they're meeting or trying to meet through their actions, we can diagram it all out and reason about things in a clearer way.
Or at least that's the hypothesis I'm testing through experimenting on my kids in this way.
(note: if you have a trust fund set up or something, then I guess it balances out. Just get ready for them to rebel in their teens by becoming neoliberals and putting up posters of Henry Kissinger on their walls.)
Ultimately, for the time being, we can only seek to minimize how we interact with money until the law catches up with human understanding. It's really hard to dump capitalism altogether and/or overnight, so it's about progressively stepping down/back.
There's a difference between challenging a child and loading that child up with busy work. My "college prep" school was mostly busy work; I spent more time on schoolwork in high school than college.
For example, exposure to history is important, but do you really need to push all the smart kids to the dry, dense history books? Do all the smart kids need to take only advanced classes in foriegn languages? I stumbled on anything that required wrote memorization.
By my senior year I started taking the "dumb" courses for fun. Ironically, I learned more in those courses than "college prep" because there was less busy work.
The best lesson from the advanced courses is when to run away from someone wasting my time on their ego trip.
Part of challenging a child is finding the right challenges.
In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless when you "just want to be a programmer", they all give the possibility of finding new ways of thinking or improve some parts of the brain. In the context of cursive for example, I think acquiring better motor skills means that a programmer could type faster thus making that faster-typing programmer a bit better than other programmers.
If I were given the choice to do what I wanted to do I would suck at what I would want to do. For example I don't like math much, but if I weren't forced to "just" do it I wouldn't understand way too many basic concepts in for example programming.
Though I do agree with the idea of mentors guiding students, I remember reading a paper about it being super effective compared to regular classroom teaching, I really wish I would have had that chance back when I was younger.