Potential

I keep wanting to tell parents this:

"Your child's potential is not a trained dog that it should be unleashed. It is the patient accumulation of skill and ability that can be made to do useful work over time. Children have no potential at birth; they have possible futures in which they accumulate potential."

It's the duty of parents and teachers to help them develop those futures so that they can build up the potential with which to do wonderful works — thaumaturgeia, as the Greeks might have said.

What I've been musing on is how the word 'potential', which used to mean 'power, authority or might' became twisted into 'possible use of power, authority or might' in the early 1800s, and now merely means 'possibility regardless of how silly it looks'. Everywhere, you read about 'unleashing potential' without really thinking about how this comes about.

It's more useful to look at the equally common 'developing potential', which actually has more meaning. You can't 'unleash potential' without accumulating some first. Anyway, 'unleashing' is more along the lines of Shakespeare's immortal line — "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war!" It's as if you can train potential so that once you let its leash slip, it will automatically do what is right, useful, purposeful and wise.

Sorry, that's not how it works. Potential needs to be worked at, and then used wisely and carefully. And once it's gone actual or kinetic, it's gone.

Chaogens, Pathogens

Children used to be sequestered, on the inside of stout defensive but selectively permeable walls made by women, to whom all humans owe life and fealty. And beyond the walls, the patrolling T-cell bands of men, not so useful in the home and at the hearth, but energetically and intellectually narrow-band enough to hunt and fight and kill random targets.

But these days, you see the children running wild. The curious psychopathology of our times is that the faster you give them adult freedoms, the better adults they will be. I think that's wrong. I think that the longer a sequestration you enforce, the more time you have to mould them and keep random influences out, the better adults you can make from children.

Yet there they are, running around, transmitting diseases to a vulnerable adult population. There they are, absorbing unuseful memetic material in exchange. And there they are, out of the control and/or responsibility of the adults who spawned them. Ugh. What a time we live in. What a time. What.

Journeyman (Part 4)

It has been a strange journeying, and a cold time was had by all. Yet we were strangely warmed, for in the movement, one learns that what moves cannot be destroyed.

How then should we teach fear and violence, disgust and hate and all unpleasant things, and yet preserve the future sanity of the young?

This is no idle question, fellow journeymen. For you must know, no human is born sane. All humans are unformed, lacking mind and awareness, and they will continue like this until they reach the mediocrity of the norm.

The norm being what it is, half of them will then move beyond that, but it is touch and go as to whether a given individual will be sane. For according the mighty and constantly updated tomes of the Dei Sub Majoris, most people are as mad as coots.

Journeyman (Part 3)

And this is what it boils down to, that fuliginous residue of your time and power: you need to get them when they're young, for when they are old and mindless, you will never defeat them.

So I sat and watched, and I saw a grievous evil — that when people decided children should be protected from fear and violence, they forgot about nature being fearsome and violent, and that reflexes save children where reason will not serve.

Then it was that I purposed in my heart, "You shall see fear in a grain of dust."

Journeyman (Part 2)

You sip your coffee and your coffee sips you and suddenly, the most important question is: What do babies believe in?

This is when you realise that horror and pain are things best taught early, because without these, the intensity of life is much diminished.

But there is a school of thought which says, "Bring up the babies in a calm and rational way, and they will be calm and rational people."

Yes, well, that may be true, but they will lack affect. You must teach them disgust and fear, so that they might understand love and reason that much better.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Parent

These days, you read a lot about the clash between supposedly Confucianist discipline and supposedly Western-Enlightenment discipline as ways of developing children who are either successful or creative, or both. To me, proponents of both are attempting to bake cakes using either flour alone or using butter and sugar with no flour.

In the former approach, you will be successful. You might get a lovely piece of rock-hard inflexible gluten that will last forever, or something softer but edible. In the latter, you will always get something edible, but it won't last.

The great news is that life tends to add whatever you missed out on. Parenting is not the sole determinant of most lives. It's the most important in most cases, but how much more important it is compared to environmental and peer influences varies and has varied greatly from place to place and across historical periods.

Think about that greatly scientific Enlightenment household, the Victorian classical stereotype. I think it might have been as gruelling, or more so, than the modern 'Chinese' tiger-parent style so recently lambasted in the newspapers and magazines.

Modern parenting based on reason is certainly a success by accident in a majority of cases, judging from the desired outcomes as opposed to the actual outcomes. And since the mid-1990s, we've known a lot more about how human brains work — and the child-rearing literature hasn't caught up with the truth yet.

Meditating on Educational Abuse

Sometimes, the idea of abuse goes too far. You can sense it in extreme usages which are now much more common than they used to be. This is probably an unpopular point of view, but people ought to realise that when we say people can be abused, this presupposes that people ought to be used in some normal and acceptable way in the first place.

This is because 'abuse', with the same prefix as 'abnormal', 'abject', or 'ablative', means 'away from (normal) use'. (The others literally mean 'away from normal', 'thrown away', and 'carried away' respectively.)

Recently, I read about a Chinese mother who inflicted a rather unusual ('not according to common use') lifestyle upon her children, thus leading them to be abnormally successful. Immediately, the responses began to pile up. Most of them assumed a) that the children were unhappy, b) would likely be suicidal in future, c) were uncreative rote-learners, d) had no social life (see previous points), and so on.

The real point is that children are very malleable. They can be programmed and they can be trained, they can be taught, they can be shaped. 'Education', in fact means 'to draw out' and is related to the word 'ductile'. They only become resistant and cynical later in life, as their youthful flexibility is retarded by endless adult pressure.

You can show different kinds of success — and failure — for almost every kind of regimen that children have been put through, short of actual physical damage and the kind of psychological trauma that leads to observable brain shrinkage (yes, these almost always lead to failures). Most of the time, their social environment is what determines the outcome.

What the less-disciplined adults among us would like to believe is that cutting children some slack will make them better people; what the more-disciplined adults among us would like to believe is that enforcing discipline more will make them better people. The truth is on both sides — and is heavily socially-dependent.

If you have a society that says everyone is a success, you probably have a society where discipline has a social cost and the bar for success is low. If you have a society that says only some rare achievements are considered successes, you probably have a society where slackness has a social cost and the bar for success is high.

Because 'use' (as discussed here) is defined by utility value in a social context, 'abuse' would have different meanings in these two societies, apart from extreme cases in which all would agree abuse had occurred. It is actually both not-easy to abuse a child (as in have a philosophy of child development that's outright bad for the child) and easy to inflict abuse on a child (because they are physically smaller and have less access to power and self-determination).

What I observe in practice, from my qualitative-researcher perspective, is that my friends span the entire range. If you ask them to describe their parenting paradigms, and then look at their kids' behaviours without figuring out whose kids are whose, you would be hard-pressed to determine which parenting paradigm goes with which set of behaviours.

Last night, I observed some young people (under 10 years old) who were actually scolding their parents for having too much fun and not being serious enough. Ho ho.

And yet, all the adults in that room were extremely high-achievers (I think there were more advanced degrees than people there). How did the parents get that way? I'd suspect part of it was what liberals would call 'abusive discipline', and part of it was what conservatives would call 'indulgent slackness'.

Mine

Somewhere in middle Burma
Where gorges cut the land
The corundum gods bled out
In lakes of ruby sand

The mighty rocks laid cover
Upon the ruby pools
To keep the god-red essence
Far from the hands of fools

Where riches hide in splendor
Man's heavy hands will go
And so it was with Mogok
Where ruby veinlets show

Gods demand a sacrifice
For every ruby found
And so the Burmese warlords
Gave tribute to the ground

I took a walk in Thailand
I bought a ruby ring
I dreamt that night of Mogok
Of endless tunnelling

Where passages are narrow
They send the miners deep
To harvest ruby darkness
Up from its stony sleep

My dream was one of children
Enchained in endless line
Chipping out each ruby
From filthy fractured mine

One turned to me in silence
Her words were blood-red tears
They fell like rubies falling
Upon my flaming ears

I came alone from Thailand
No ruby on my hand
But dreams at night still haunt me
Of distant grieving land

Children's Day

You know, the problem with my research is that the more I dig, the more like a graveyard it looks. I feel that I'm some sort of archaeologist of the educational past – a palaeoeducationist (see note 2 below), if you like. But the evidence is all in the bones, buried long ago. Sometimes you dig into the ground and you think you've found a midden. But sometimes, you realise the bones don't indicate food or cooking or waste dumps. You realise it's a cemetery.

I'm beginning to think that in Singapore's necessary haste to get education up to a high standard quickly, the country has overprimed the shotgun. When the 'O'-Levels were selected to be Singapore's basic level of educational qualification, nobody told the people that this was an examination for the top 20% of the UK population (1). Nobody pointed out that this was designed for a five-year secondary education course. And since the general population didn't know this, everyone prepared to do it in four years and many did very well. The Primary School Leaving Examination, that other pillar of the system, was designed (and probably still is) to be tough enough to eliminate 20% of all students. It was set at a level known to allow only 80% to pass (2).

All this added up to educational pressure beyond conventional belief. But there was another consequence. Since Singapore now had near-universal high-stakes education, the situation became one in which everyone was competitive. Since everyone was a viable high-stakes competitor, and this was the basis of the meritocratic society, the only way to climb to the top was to be significantly more competitive. Which meant that the schools were not considered excellent unless they provided a lot of 'extras'.

That in turn set the school system up for serious re-engineering difficulties. Niche programmes, holistic education, multiple intelligences, ability-driven education – all of which contradict each other philosophically – were used to 'sell' schools to the masses. The shadow education sector bloomed, since private tuition was now the main area in which cash-rich families could stamp their superiority. And that is where we are today.

Happy Children's Day! And God bless each and every one of you!

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Notes:

1. Citations are all from Tan, Chow & Goh (2008), Examinations in Singapore – Change and Continuity (1891-2007), World Scientific Publishing (ISBN: 978-981-279-313-0). (1) is from page 66 and (2) is from page 75.

2. I suppose I should point out that 'palaeoeducationist' is a bastardised Graeco-Roman hybrid. My bad. It should be 'palaeopedagogist' in order to be properly Greek. 'Pedagogy' of course comes from the Greek words meaning 'leadership of children'. It is interesting to contrast that with 'education', which means 'drawing-out'.

Random Encounters

I used to live for random encounters. You travel from place to place. You roll a d100. BAM: 1-4 crocodiles, estuarine, giant. You fight, pointlessly and amusingly. You survive. You keep going. It was all wonderful, pointless fun. Then one day, I got to be management. I could look at a roll of 76 (turtle, snapping, colossal) and turn it into a beach barbecue not to be forgotten, as the island sunset turns into an island which is not amused at having its shell decorated with chicken bones.

It has always been fun to be management. But the cardinal rule is: never forget when you were a worker; better still, never forget what it's like to be a client. It makes things so much more fun. I will never forget the day I caught those scouts attempting to forage under the back gate. In my head, the memory of self as a guy who crawled under the athletic field's fence, warring with the concept of crime and requisite punishment.

But some people seem never to have had childhoods, or earnestly put all childish things behind in a literal sense. They would never be caught doing childish things, or thinking childish thoughts – and at some point, the restriction becomes 'I will never be a child in any way'. And then they are caught anyway, caught by that very interesting statement of the Messiah in one of those chapters of Matthew's gospel that serious people sometimes oddly forget to read.

Here it is:

And he called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them;
And said, "Truly I say unto you, unless you are changed, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
"Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
"And whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name also receives me.
"But whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
"Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!"

Yes, that's it. Along with the injunctions for fathers not to frustrate their children and such, there's this section about how moral offences against children are dire indeed. Sure, the old part of the Good Book also says that sparing the rod leads to spoiling the child, and hence recommends the precise use of the rod as a corrective; but it doesn't say that children in general must get the stick stuck to them unless there is good reason.