Just Joshin' #110 (Social Milieu)
1 Family Photo:
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​Henrik Karlsson is one of my favorite dad-bloggers. Thinking about childhood education, he surveyed early biographies of 42 exceptional people, trying to distill common childhood themes that unlocked their exceptionality. He found the childhoods of most exceptional people included dedicated tutors, opportunities for apprenticeship, and an outstanding social milieu—people who became exceptional were surrounded by and interacted with exceptional adults.
How do I create an outstanding social milieu for my kids? I don't even have a social milieu. Outside of family, the person I talk to most frequently these days is probably the guy who takes orders at our favorite burrito place.
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We did visit a friend in San Diego a couple weekends ago. It was fun. We played with trains, rode trains, and went to the train museum. Newsletter readers will notice this was...a lot like being at home.
Our friend also took the kids on a tour of his neighborhood. The tour including pulling up water covers so the kids could examine the cockroaches and crickets scurrying inside. One neighbor keeps chickens, so the kids played with chickens in his front yard. A railroad spike was laying around, so the neighbor Calvin a railroad spike. This was...less like being at home.
It's interesting to watch a mind make its impression on other minds. Calvin and Lawrence don't see sidewalks the same anymore. When we got home, they tried jamming their fingers in the hole on our water cover to pry it up (it turns out water covers here are much heavier than in San Diego).
These interactions grow kids' minds from the local maximum we're capable of as parents to some global maximum only they can discover.
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In that vein: is there something you'd like to teach my impressionable kids? Fill out this form!!!
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1 Dad Joke:
Making Friends 101
Highlights:
Social Education
​Helping Bryan Caplan homeschool his children by Tyler Cowen​
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...you should consider homeschooling your children for a while in this manner, if only for a month or two over the summer.
​Education Amid Endless Online Screaming by Ben Sasse​
​Childhoods of exceptional people by Henrik Karlsson​
​This seems to be true for >95 percent of the people I looked at.
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​These naked apes, the humans, are intensely social animals. They obsessively internalize values, ideas, skills, and desires from the people who surround them. It is therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exceptional tend to have spent their formative years surrounded by adults who were exceptional.
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Books can, in other words, be a good stand-in for a social milieu, up to a point, but eventually, you need direct access to exceptional people. And having access to them from a young age greatly increases the likelihood that you will be shaped by them.
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A lot of it does not require sacrifices, though. It is just a way of viewing children: as capable of competence, as craving meaningful work, as worthy to be included in serious discussions. We can learn to view them like that, but it is a subtle and profound shift in perception, a shift away from the way we are taught to view children. When I read the biographies, it feels a little bit like getting new peers. Their way of being works on me. Gradually, I raise my aspirations.
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There is a moving scene in John Stuart Mill's biography, when John Stuart is about to set out into the world and his father for the first time lets him know that his education had been . . . a bit particular. He would discover that others his age did not know as much as he did. But, his father said, he mustn’t feel proud about that. He’d just been lucky.
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Let’s make more people lucky.
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Josh Knox
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