My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet
> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be
> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us
These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.
A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.
I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class.
But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.
I hope we see a revival of the humanities in the coming decades. The original meaning of "liberal" in liberal education referred to cultivating free human beings (Latin libertas). Arguably, the most important skills going forward are the ability to think independently and critically, to adapt to new circumstances, to formulate one's thoughts in a coherent and convincing manner, and to understand things in a broader historical perspective.
I'm not sure how widespread this meme (in the general sense, not the internet fad sense) is, but I came across it theorized by this humanities account, Adam Walker - Close Reading Poetry:
Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well. If you ask me, my prediction is that humanities and liberal arts as organized schools of thought are going to fall even more to the wayside unless you’re very rich. It’s going to be replaced by cultural memes and other short relatable digestible pieces of “community” knowledge kind of like a lot of the youth already.
> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal
I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.
While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.
Humans as individuals and groups will fight tooth and nail to "have more" because that is our nature. Money was a brilliant invention that allowed people to get what they want without forcefully taking it from someone else, or having a particular skill or thing that you could barter.
You can demand whatever you want, but most people are not going to be with you. Very few people at least in the US are going to agree with the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor. You can suggest some form of workable socialism, which would be good, but I am mainly referring to the transition phase between now and some sort of utopian future where resources are unlimited and robots do all of our physical and mental labor. That transition period is going to last decades or for the rest of our lives and most of the early period, at the very least, for our kids.
>Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal, especially if you’re now competing against machines as well
What you've just stated is a Marxist/materialist perspective. Up to a certain point of meeting basic survival needs, it's probably true. But there are other ways to think about what ultimately determines human goals once survival needs are met. This illustrates my point about the humanities, often we put our thinking into boxes without realizing that the box exists at all.
To be adaptive. That's going to be the most valuable skill going forward, to be able to adapt to any and all circumstances that may come your way because it is going to be a rough ride for at least the next decade and possibly much longer than that.
I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.
That's always been an important skill (at least in the last couple hundred years as far as I can tell).
Industrial revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, the shift of technology over time.
Hell, they say that the reason millennials are so nostalgic and enjoy childish things is because of rapid technological and societal change in the last 30 years.
I doubt it'll slow down, the era of doing anything until you die was a foolish thing for even our grandparents generation.
That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree. In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture. It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels. Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
> That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree.
I strongly disagree with that.
> In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture.
Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere. One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal.
> It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels.
Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
> Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it.
The time when a single skill would get you from the cradle to the grave is over and done with. And probably has been for a while but it is going to be much more fractured going forward.
> That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what.
Partially agreed.
Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.
It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.
The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.
So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.
> "...Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good."
Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout.
> "Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out.
"
That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics.
As for the original question, "If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
School only worked for me because it forced structure onto my learning. Live lectures rarely engaged me, math and physics aside. So traditional teaching wasn't the draw. What mattered were the guardrails: quarterly exams, a peer group to measure myself against, and a pace that forced me to push past initial boredom until a subject clicked.
Without clear goalposts, external accountability, and support, self paced learning feels like running in a desert. You just end up going in circles. That’s exactly why MOOCs never worked for me, nor for thousands of others.
Tangentially related, but thinking about what to teach your kid years into the future before it's even born has a bit of an unhealthy touch to it. Take it step by step and especially don't pressure your kid with high expectations.
Questions are more powerful than answers.
My kids are 29 & 31 now. I'd suggest that they master how to ask well formed questions.
Also, "The medium is the message" is from Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964)
Could essentially be saying, obey and work. A lot of people won't agree that is the ideal life. If that's not how you interpreted it then you have my point.
I really like that paragraph in the article. We have more access to knowledge and other resources than ever in history, and yet not everyone is a Renaissance Man.
Availability of resources does not entail skill in leveraging them. I'm not sure classical eduction is the best way to learn that, but it's certainly better than nothing and a useful first step.
Teach your children about the things you love. Partially because children often don’t fall far from the tree, and mostly so they can learn how to enjoy something.
I feel the word 'son' carries a lot of heft here - if it were 'what will I teach my child' the expectation of passing on an economically-viable craft would feel less urgent.
But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal?
If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.
I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.
> and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?
Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore.
5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there.
Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling.
Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.
That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.
> Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.
> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.
We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.
My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...
I am not, in fact my understanding of mechanics is extremely basic.
If I go back into my family tree, I can find three generations of Sugar House Labourers in Scotland in the early 1800s.. a profession that no longer exists in the UK as far as I can tell, and I'm certain they had a specialisation.
We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.
Our jobs as parents is to teach values and make sure they're good people and have the tools to make good decisions too, not to set them on a particular path... that's a losing goal, we can't tell the future for the next year- how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
I'd say giving them the tools to make good decisions will naturally lead them to a particular path, why not push that path as well?
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
its a lottery.
Mona Lisa Vito, is that you?
> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet
> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be
> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us
These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.
But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.
The New Renaissance is Coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvixEyV10Q
I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.
While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.
For those for whom making money is a primary goal, they miss their essential purpose in life.
What you've just stated is a Marxist/materialist perspective. Up to a certain point of meeting basic survival needs, it's probably true. But there are other ways to think about what ultimately determines human goals once survival needs are met. This illustrates my point about the humanities, often we put our thinking into boxes without realizing that the box exists at all.
I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.
Industrial revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, the shift of technology over time.
Hell, they say that the reason millennials are so nostalgic and enjoy childish things is because of rapid technological and societal change in the last 30 years.
I doubt it'll slow down, the era of doing anything until you die was a foolish thing for even our grandparents generation.
I strongly disagree with that.
> In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture.
Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere. One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal.
> It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels.
Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
> Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it.
The time when a single skill would get you from the cradle to the grave is over and done with. And probably has been for a while but it is going to be much more fractured going forward.
Partially agreed.
Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.
It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.
The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.
So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.
Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout.
> "Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. "
That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics.
As for the original question, "If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Without clear goalposts, external accountability, and support, self paced learning feels like running in a desert. You just end up going in circles. That’s exactly why MOOCs never worked for me, nor for thousands of others.
>become a good citizen
>make the world better
That's basically the whole game right there. Or as Hillel might say, the rest is commentary.
Could essentially be saying, obey and work. A lot of people won't agree that is the ideal life. If that's not how you interpreted it then you have my point.
That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."
Availability of resources does not entail skill in leveraging them. I'm not sure classical eduction is the best way to learn that, but it's certainly better than nothing and a useful first step.
That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.
But this question is tripped up in the idea of work being one's only value. If programming by humans were made illegal tomorrow, what would Steve Krouse do for work? How would he find a path forward? Who would he turn to for advice? How would he build community to this new goal?
If it's not clear, thinking about this is what to teach a child. Even in the end of the article we sort of elide the importance of teaching others to act with grace and reflection, but what more significant thing can you share with the next generation?
I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.
Nope, ship sailed. You haven’t had a child in school yet. It’s not like that anymore.
5 years ago in Palo Alto (Paly High) it was: Take your shoes off, get on your phone to watch a season of whatever you want, leave for “up to” 40 minutes. Paying attention to a teacher… who may have been teaching? or not? Why not just head over to the wellness center and get snacks? They let you hang out there.
Those IN CHARGE didn’t care to make learning matter or be rewarding. With AI, it “matters” less, in the credential-sense of schooling.
Institutions are meh. My bet is on individuals.
Perhaps Palo Alto isn't representative, and in fact might be doing some things wrong?
Not necessarily stuff like hunting and dismembering animals... but basic trades skills go a loooong way. Being able to do basic wiring tasks without ending up like the "how did you know my nephew's home burnt down" meme, woodworking, metalworking, painting, plumbing, maybe some basic car maintenance like changing tires, checking important stuff such as tire depth, tire pressure, operating fluids... soooooooooo many young people have zero skills in manual labor and have to call in tradespeople for everything.
That and how to find solutions for problems using Google are the most important skills my father taught me, and that is what I plan on teaching my children one day.
What happened to religion? Last I checked it was doing well.
> We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.
We typically confuse that that particular confusion is the thing. God is the model's weights running on the distributed computer that we form collectively with our brains and whose running realization we call "society." The Christians (which are superb at sleazing their way around the irrefutable lack of supernatural divinity) call it "concursus dei". Considering that in some parts of the world people consistently elect whoever looks more like a radical God-GPU-node, I would say this particular one among our "dī" is still firmly at the helm.