5 Quotes Every Parent and Educator Needs to Read to Understand the Modern Moment
Essential insights for thinking about how we prepare our children for this novel world. And why we have to make parenting norms a community conversation!
Hello, good people! Today I’ll feature five brilliant insights about the modern moment, its challenges, and how best to prepare children for this novel world. Oh… and why we have to make parenting norms a community conversation. Onward!
#1: On the modern struggle…
“The modern struggle:
Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower fasting, meditating, and exercising… up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.”
Source: Naval Ravikant, founder of Angel List, angel investor, futurist, philosopher
Take home message: We usually focus on techniques. These help, but we’d get more from focusing on the roots of our issues. The best way to help people is by addressing the environment.
Temptation abounds. Environmental design should be employed at schools and at home.
#2: On the most vital skill for success in the modern world…
“The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
Source: Cal Newport, computer scientist and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and more
Take home message: Build schools around this principle. Less distraction. No phones. More expectations of focus, persistence, and depth. More writing, reading, research, creation, and synthesis. Avoid “busy-work”—it promotes superficial and distracted thinking. Prioritize distraction-free deep work in your life and for your family.
#3: On how schools neglect to teach the most fundamental skills for success…
“One of the consequences of not teaching people how to concentrate is that we leave that up to our environment. It is the same way with not teaching people to eat healthy. Then where do people get their eating habits? Through their environment. And what is the environment? It’s companies selling people junk food—crappy food to eat. So, if people don’t have any ability to discriminate between what food is good for their body and what's not, then they’ll just buy into the best marketing out there for crappy food.
And, similarly, with the mind as well, if you’re never taught how to concentrate and the world is always vying for your attention and trying to show you different things to engage with you, then you’re going to be trained… (into) distraction by the world around you. And, unfortunately, that is what has happened.”
Source: AOM Podcast with Dandapani, entrepreneur, author, and Hindu priest
Take home message: Craft better environments. Build your environment around focus and deep work. Implement mental training protocols (meditation, etc.).
#4: On the death of the village and its power to promote fruitful norms…
“… social capital seems to be more tied up with money capital than ever before. Maybe one reason for this is the social jigs once relied on by the middle class have been widely dismantled, in the name of personal autonomy...
The costs and benefits of such autonomy don’t always accrue to the same parts of society, and I think that is because the disciplinary functions of culture have in fact not been dissolved so much as privatized. They are located less in a shared order of meaning, such as Protestant thrift, parental authority, or injunctions against gluttony, and more in the professional nagging services provided by financial planners, tutors, and personal trainers.”
Source: The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew Crawford
Take home message: My wife recently showed me a picture (see this post’s cover photo) of Matt Stafford’s wife visiting her children at lunch. They go to a super expensive private school in California. This school lunch only served vegetables, fruits, whole grains, or a lean protein. All of these are rarely if ever present at a public school lunch. That’s a problem.
Culture matters. Use norms, heuristics, and culture, more generally, to make fruitful behaviors more likely. It might seem nice and “non-judgy” to let everyone do what they want, but it sets them up for failure. There is no real freedom without education and discipline.
#5: On what is really happening with our attention. And the best solutions for this…
“…former Google engineer James Williams… told me I had made a crucial mistake. Individual abstinence is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society. Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just “pushing it back on to the individual” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference”...
I learned that the factors harming our attention are not all immediately obvious. I had been focused on tech at first, but in fact the causes range very widely – from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we work to the hours we no longer sleep. They include many things we have come to take for granted – from how we deprive our children of play, to how our schools strip learning of meaning by basing everything on tests. I came to believe we need to respond to this incessant invasion of our attention at two levels. The first is individual. There are all sorts of changes we can make at a personal level that will protect our focus. I would say that by doing most of them, I have boosted my focus by about 20%. But we have to level with people. Those changes will only take you so far. At the moment it’s as though we are all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying: “You might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” Meditation is a useful tool – but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. We need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.”
Source: Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari
Take home message: I’ll quote Thoreau: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
Thank you for reading today! If you, too, think that educators and parents should think on this plane, please share.
Also, if you liked this, I wrote a related article a couple years ago: The Self-Fulfilling Nature of Willpower
Have a great week. Life is too short to be normal!
Shane