Giving range to children.
We, as a society, have to redefine learning. For quite some time now, we’ve been thinking about formal education as the most effective way to access information. It simply isn’t.
In the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”, I found this quote:
“That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.”
Along with it came a bunch of studies that show how we as learning beings evolve over time. The author brings up two vastly different ways to become excellent at something: How Tiger Woods became the best golfer in the world, and how Roger Federer became the best tennis player in the world.
Tiger Woods started playing golf almost as soon as he could stand straight by himself, and practiced insane amounts of hours to become the best. Federer on the other hand, didn’t choose tennis as “his” sport until his teens, instead he chose to play multiple sports because he wanted to hang out with his friends in the different locker rooms.
We often make the mistake of crippling down on one thing, and that one thing only. The thing is, the studies I mentioned show that in most cases, we benefit greatly from trying a bunch of different things and applying what we learn in the different activities.
In the case of formal schooling, this means that kids would probably be better off if we let them be, for them then to find what they’re interested in. It might look insanely inefficient to let kids play freely up until their teens, but what we’d really do is to give them range. They’d automatically learn stuff, because it’s impossible not to. Some kid would probably be curious about how a swing works, and discover that the same principles are used in construction. Some other kid would discover the way ants cooperate, and apply it in their work life twenty years later.
The point is, we’ve become obsessed with the Tiger Woods kind of story, where we push in to one single activity as hard as we can. And truth to be told, it does make way more sense to do so. But the bes soccer players didn’t start out practicing an offside trap. They’d play unorganised, fun soccer in the streets. And the best leaders probably didn’t learn how to be good leaders from a leadership weekend getaway.
