Makes me think about.
quotingEducation: a personal story
note18p7…ldg7
(Nostr only)
I grew up in an old “bach” (a small, modest home) nestled into a lush hillside of native New Zealand bush in the wild isolated coastal township of Bethells Beach, We were 45 minutes away from the main city of Auckland. Our nearest neighbour was a few minutes walk away. And the township was made up of a handful of alternative lifestylers, farmers, and fourth generation locals.
Life was rustic yet charming. We had a long drop toilet. I was bathed in the evenings in a tin bath. There was no running hot water. Instead we boiled rainwater from the tank on an ancient Atlas electric stove. There was 2 rooms, a small one for me, and a slightly larger one for mum. The rich native bush and cadence of birdlife was everywhere. For a child the setting was solitary and idyllic: rich in natural beauty – sparse in people.
Growing up with not so many other kids around – the landscape became my playground; the birds, sand dunes and the beach my playmates. I would wander for hours from a young age in perfect safety, free to explore my world. The environment provided a safe haven for all of my senses to engage. For better or worse, it forged in me a rigorous resourcefulness and a lack of need for the company of others.
My mother went out of her way to nurture the creative impulse in me. From the age of 4 each morning she would lay out a puzzle One in particular was called The Soma Cube. It was a wooden puzzle made out of 8 different pieces, which you had to make into a cube. It was not an easy puzzle and many adults would venture to “help” me. But my mother would pounce on them and fiercely forbid them as though they were threatening the life of her young. In a way, they were – the creative life of her young anyway.
My mother’s parenting had been heavily influence by her own mum who in turn read a book which I found out years later was written in the 1920’s by an educator called Charles Batt. One particular book called “Hands Off The Child” had changed everything for my grandmother, the impact had rippled down the generations. Now today a book with a title like that would be of one particular meaning. But in those days it was a metaphor for not intervening too much in the child’s development. The philosophy of Charles Batt was that a child has inherent creativity and most parents and educators leap in there to “help” and stunt the creativity of the child unwittingly in the process.
Years later I read some research suggesting that a neural pathway is set up if a child has to work out for themselves where the breast is immediately after birth. But when the mother attaches them to the breast, this neural pathway does not start to form. In other words, the very first act of life after birth will define whether the parent is over-parenting, or allowing the child to explore and immediately form new neural connections. It seemed to validate what Batt had said close to 100 years ago.
Anyway, my mother would put this cube out. But never as a cube. She would always take it out of the box and dismantled it first.
I'd never seen the cube fully or inside the box. So I would simply play with these eight fascinating wooden pieces as any child would. I would make buildings, animals, furniture or whatever came into my mind. Or else I would just seen how they fitted together with no goal to create any bigger shape at all. I did this happily for around about 3 weeks. Then one morning I made a shape I hadn’t made before. Something adults called a cube.
Later that morning, mum came over to give me a good morning kiss, but she never made it that far. She froze in her tracks – her eyes fixed on the cube.
“Did you do this?” she ventured. As though there was another explanation of how the cube could have formed during the night.
“Yes” I remember neutrally replying – neither expecting adulation nor feeling any particular sense of occasion. It was just “one more thing that you could make with eight pieces of wood.”
She looked stunned. Perhaps she felt she needed to see this cube appear one more time before she could fully believe what had happened.
So the next night she again deconstructed the cube and removed its box. The next morning a cube again emerged.
What had occurred was my complete freedom to play with these shapes without any sense of objective, had allowed me to reach the objective without a sense of whether this was success and failure, but also make many other things in the process.
I didn't realise that at the time of course, but she was teaching me a principle, which I would find invaluable in later life many times, including when I started and ran my first technology company.
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My questions for you:
What does education mean to you? Is it finding the right answer, or the ability to ask the right question?
Do you think that if more people had the ability to ask the right questions, more people would be bitcoiners?