Jessica Margolin, a colleague who I run into once a month or so over at the Institute for the Future, has written a succinct post that begins “The real harm of helicopter parenting: correcting the problems we encounter in OUR generation and forgetting that our children will encounter entirely different ones…”
Jessica does a lot of thinking about young people – and her focus is quite good.
Her post suggests to me that the important thing is that we should always be teaching hyper-skills (meta-skills and meta-learning) – skills that allow kids (any age!) to organize and reorganize their thinking and their actions when the environment changes.
For me this is totally, totally key to what I’m doing these days. As a PhD Computer Scientist, I have skills that are generalizable. But, in case you hadn’t noticed it, VERY small numbers of programmers are now creating applications that millions and millions of people will use. A couple hundred engineers at Google can create online products that are used by hundreds of millions. A small group at Apple creates an operating system (based on FreeBSD) that supports fabulous software on devices undreamed of even twenty years ago.
So when I first started writing software in the 1960s, we were anticipating a global need for millions of programmers. But today, even though there may be lots of programmers, there are some very small groups who are responsible for the majority of today’s software. And consequently, what I have been doing recently is “re-treading” myself so that rather than concentrating on software-creation, which is a less-in-demand skill, I’ve been focusing more on visual, audio and written journalism. And on online strategies for my customers.
What’s that have to do with helicopter parents? Well, as parents you should be ensuring that your kids have the skills to step up above what they do day-to-day, and rather than beat their heads against the wall trying to get mundane things done. Ensure that they have the ability to pop their head “up above the surface of the water” look around and see the environment, and then retool what they’re doing in order to achieve long-term goals.
[See also: an archive of the Meta-Learning Lab // or another archive]
Sky, I couldn’t agree with you more. The world is going so fast that if it’s not meta, it’s not going to be around long. You undoubtedly remember Carnegie-Mellon courses that taught now obsolete programming languages rather than the algorithms of software design.
In the debate over the efficacy of Personal Learning Environments, I favored helping kids learn to create their own PLEs rather than giving them some teacher’s concept of what works for today. When I suggested that this PLE-building would follow graduates to work, I was put down for polluting the purity of academia.
Perhaps we should rate school curricula for shelf-life. What topics will be relevant in five years? Ten?
Jay, I even took courses where I learned Algol 68 and APL. (Look those up in Wikipedia!) I don’t believe anyone ever wrote a compiler for Algol 68, and APL was used only by government programmers.
We struggled for a long time before we got up on our hind legs and started calling it computer *science*.
Well in the world of today there should not have a room for mistakes. Helicopter parents are the starting point where their children learn much without committing lots of errors. The point here is making everything a step behind perfection.
-Jan