What shall I teach my son?

If lifestyles support it, and parents are so inclined, I'd worry less about teaching the first few years and more about reading to them and with them, esp. with some silliness and improvisation, hiking, camping, and shopping as a family, especially at local markets.

Spend meaningful, loving time together, and out in the world, as much of the small scale natural world as you can. Listen to their questions, answer when you can, learn the answers together when you can't.

If they are accustomed to hiking and camping, especially wild camping, they will learn much from you and will ask for more.

If you shop together at markets, they will start to develop a more complete relationship with their food supply and with the people working it.

Empathy and kindness and resilience will develop in those experiences.

Later, when they are closer to school age, be as honest with them as you can about the different personalities they will encounter, the conformist teachers and students, the rebels, the do gooders, the no goods, etc., and comfort them that their people may be there right away or may not be there for decades.

> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son?

Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list. Things like encouraging curiosity, agency and freedom to pursue things that I showed interest in even if it meant spending many weekends and many eurodollars on me that they would no doubt have found ways to spend otherwise come to mind first, along with general values about society and how (not) to treat people.

Edit: there are "hard skills" they taught me, but they are more along the lines of "we want you to be a self sufficient human being capable of dealing with life" (cooking, cleaning, how to budget and think about money,...) and less about increasing my value as a participant in the labor market

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?

> "...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

Compassion, respect for all living things no matter the colour or gender, how to live healthy and physically active, financial literacy. Most of these things have a huge role model part. Don't give him a screen mounted to the stroller.

Remember that while still being unborn the child will get acquainted with you voice and time if voice. Once born he will observe you and how you conduct yourself from very early on; how you treat others, how you swear, how you treat your wife, and nowadays your device pickup habits too.

I am a highschool dropout, so I am perhaps not the best judge of this, but I later worked on-campus at a major university and befriended many students, most of whom struggled to find employment after graduation.

I would counter that education, at least in the USA, does not adequately prepare one for life, the real world, and effectively finding employment.

What ACTUALLY mattered in my life turned out to be:

1. Who you know, and by proxy, what kind of a person you are

2. The value of "just showing up", every day

3. How important personal relationships/networking are, and just how SMALL the world is for how vast its size

Knowledge and skills are things you can sort of just pick up as you go along, but being given any kind of opportunity in the first place is not quite so easy.

I have two boys ages 14 and almost 17. First priority is for both mom and dad to invest the time and energy to build a bedrock solid relationship from day 0. It's so frustrating and exhausting but that's priority 1.

When my kids were small we were either at the Perot museum or the Dallas World Aquarium every Saturday morning (giving mom a break). We had family memberships to both of those places and we used it to the fullest. Going to the same places over and over seems boring but I think it really helped them digest what they were seeing and messing with. I feel like a new experience every day is enriching but also overwhelming, especially for really small kids.

I always joked with them "get good at learning and you don't have to get good at anything else". I feel like they've done a pretty solid job at that and can learn/develop their own interests at will. My youngest taught himself guitar, he's really good too, and knows a handful of RATM songs which isn't the easiest music.

Both have gravitated to STEM and attend the magnet HS's in Dasllas ISD ( Townview TAG and Townview SEM ). My oldest is interested in petroleum engineering (i don't really know why, he just is) but my youngest spends all his free time and before school time with his creative writing teacher who he loves. Time will tell with him i guess.

> My favorite suggestions of Postman’s are:

> 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.

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.

Teach them how to build civilization from scratch.

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.

> “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.”

Stafford Beer wrote that the purpose of a system is not its declared intent but what it does - what it manifests, causes or how it behaves (1979, 2001). Higher education has a lofty purpose, but the system manifests as a Defence Contractor among other things like teaching one’s kids. “We’d prefer not spoken aloud” is probably true.

Thinking radio, calculators, the internet etc will make teachers obsolete misses something fundamental.

Could people learn by themselves? – possibly.

Do they? – generally not.

Having agents changes nothing

Access to information isn't the same thing as competency or skill. Giving someone access to google does not make them educated. Have they met people?

You should teach your child how to learn and think critically. This is probably the biggest skill that can be taught to a child now days.

It kills me that education is not a solved problem --- we have many of the same hurdles which the Greeks faced, and apparently, one of the best schools which I ever attended is no longer run as it once was (classes were divided between academic and social, the latter were attended at one's age level (homeroom, phys. ed, social studies, &c.) and academic classes were attended at one's grade level with teachers at the combined elementary/high school also being accredited as faculty at a nearby college and students being able to continue on to university level study until such time as they had attended their 12th year of education, with the possibility of being awarded not only a high school diploma, but also a college degree, or at least being afforded a transcript of college-level studies to apply at the school of their choice.

One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.

The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.

Growing up, my daughters HATED anything STEM (maybe because I'm such a nerd :-)

Now they're realizing that all "work" is tech related, and younger one is actually taking comp sci.

I suggest you have them learn a foreign language when young. Particularly Spanish and Chinese.

Kids get addicted to video games and TV. I think you should just set those into Spanish and Chinese. Tell them "play all the video games you want so long as the games are in Spanish or Chinese, you're learning a language".

Other than literacy and Math, I’d say, if you are capable, and is willing, teach them about everything that involves some manual labor.

DIY, homesteading, animal husbandry, electronics repairs, survival skills, cooking, whatever that cannot be easily automated.

Also teach them weapon handling, surveying, map reading, ham radio.

> 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.

Learn how to break down a problem when you're stuck.

When I was ~10, I tried to get my TRS-80 (yikes I'm old) to display something like the star wars death star on its primitive graphics. I got pretty far, thanks to the trig examples in the manual. But I was flummoxed that my degree measurements yielded crazy sin/cos results. I felt crushed. Some years later I learned about radians. I often think back how my life trajectory might have been different had I known something simple: how to break problems down.

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.

"I will teach my children to lie.

They will know it's wrong to be right.

It's the only way they'll ever get paid.

I will teach them to lie."

— Mobius Band Twilight

No, I don't agree with it. But on my most cynical days… I do enjoy the song.

In the list of purposes for education he left out "Daycare for children of working parents".

> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son

Did the author get their programming skill from their parents? I feel it's a quite weird question.

So long as the primary purpose of school is to babysit children while their parents "work" it can never be supplanted by anything educational.

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)

This all sounds like cope to me, from people who don’t take AI seriously. Either they don’t think it is as impactful as it already is, or they don’t think we will continue to see exponential capabilities improvement for a while.

Let’s take the likely situation where, AI can do Math, code, biology etc better than most humans ever can and increasingly needs minimal oversight or direction.

The only valuable skills then are social soft skills. This is not that foreign of a concept to humanity, many an aristocracy in times of peace have lived exactly like this, sometimes for generations in a row, Game of Thrones characters like Tyrion, Varys, Littlefinger are all this.

We actually live in a rare time in history, where you could learn some technical skills and advance regardless of your social skills (though even here having good social skills is a huge plus). That will go away. This will feel apocalyptic to the introverted nerd, but probably exciting for other types of people.

Some AI futurists of the permanent underclass meme, believe access to capital before AI gets good enough will be the only differentiator. I doubt that, it will be helpful for sure, but even if you have millions, you’re still going to need friends, a wife, a society etc. The money will diffuse out, marriage being the largest wealth diffusion event in a persons life. In this world, Marriage would arguably be the most important path to social mobility, for men and women alike. This is already true in many countries that haven’t fully entered modernity, it was also true for old western aristocracies.

So finally to answer the posts question, “What shall I teach my son”, well teach him to go and find a place in school. Successfully navigating the high school hierarchy, will be the best predictor of him doing well in society.

Teach him to be rich. That's all that matters from now on. That's the only measure of merit. He can buy IQ by the token.

Terminator 2, Sarah Connor teaches her son survival skills, how to live without depending on institutions, how machines and technology work, how to bring people together against a powerful threat, why human life is worth protecting when machines become intelligent.

According to the Ancient Greeks, the single word to aim at with education is not "resourceful," it is "virtuous." Hard to get Lindy-er than that.

>become a good person

>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.

I am a reader; I'm not interested in fiction particularly but I read absolutely extensively, constantly and on more or less any topic, so the internet always appealed to me.

My siblings, also non-fiction readers, both learned to read before they went to school.

I point-blank refused: I was confident I could learn to read, and with the now-long-lost confidence of a summer child, at the age of less than four, I said "no, that is what school is for".

When I got there, I was reading well above my level within the first couple of weeks.

I assume that as well as my parents showing what reading was, I had seen my brother reading, and he had read to me and had shown me what learning to read looked like.

The point of this disjointed anecdote is: be engaged, be inquisitive, show yourself learning and exploring; if you are shown a puzzle, approach it as if you don't know it. Furrow your brow comically, make mock mistakes, show your working. Enlist others to play these learning game.

You don't have to worry about teaching your son anything except that learning is great, and if possible that all sorts of adults have all sorts of things they can teach.

Once your kid is at school, then you can fill in the gaps; then you can be the extra teacher who engages with the subject matter (which as an adult you will have long forgotten and really can approach with fresh eyes).

It's your job to help make a learner, not to be a teacher.

How to establish safe and effective social and work boundaries, financial literacy, time management, and "Eat the Frog" principle for tasks.

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 once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”

That seems pretty good. I might add "curious" and "skeptical."

For me - it’s a love of reading, music, and intellectual curiosity. From there most everything else follows.

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.

Teach your child Mathematics.

America is in piss poor 25th place in PISA ranking in Mathematics. Never rely on public school to be anything, but free daycare. Teachers (Education majors) are regularly self-selected from the bottom of the barrel SAT score students, so dont ever rely on teachers to do anything.

Teach your kid everything you want them to know.

Teach him well the thing you cannot avoid teaching: how to raise a child.

Get them cracked at Deadlock

Shit, I feel a but better about my life kids chances of making it in the world seeming how many people have nothing to pass on to their kids but empty virtue signaling about "being kind".

"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"

That's less Mcluhan and more Foucault.

Please, thank you and power electronics

> 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.

Institutions are meh. My bet is on individuals.

Be kind.

Teach your kid to be a good person, to value hard work, to set lofty goals and strive to achieve them. Beyond that they’ll find their own way. “I’ll make my unborn son a programmer just like myself” was always going to be pointless, AI or not.

theology, algebra, coding, calculus, physics

How to determine what is true, and how to avoid being deceived?