Build Things, Read Deeply, and Give Learning a Purpose

Get your kid to make something, make reading a hero, and connect the curriculum to something they care about. These are three ways to enlarge an education that may already be perfectly competent at assigning lessons and checking answers. They ask more of it. The child should encounter the resistance of the physical world, the accumulated experience of other people, and a purpose that makes the work worth returning to after the easy part is over.

Start with the hands. Build something, cut something, sew something, or learn enough about electronics to make a real connection under appropriate supervision. There is a kind of honesty in making that a page of completed answers cannot always supply. The thing has to work, fit, stand, or hold together, and the learner has to discover what their knowledge amounts to when the material does not cooperate with their intention.

This also enlarges what a child can imagine doing. An idea that remains only an idea places very few demands on its owner, while an idea they intend to make requires decisions about materials, dimensions, order, and revision. Practical knowledge gives creativity more possibilities because more of what the learner imagines becomes something they can attempt. Hands-on work belongs within a serious education for that reason, rather than as a treat awarded after the supposedly intellectual work is finished.

Reading makes the complementary demand: admit that your own experience is not enough. That is the force of the argument about books I admire in General Jim Mattis. A single life is too small a sample to furnish all the judgment a person needs, and childhood supplies a smaller sample still. Books let a learner encounter knowledge and consequences that would otherwise remain inaccessible, or become accessible only through expensive mistakes of their own.

Fiction matters within that account of reading. It gives us people to admire, motives to examine, choices whose consequences we can follow, and lives we would not want to reproduce. Nonfiction brings other forms of experience into reach, including the records and explanations through which we understand the past. Neither kind of book does our thinking for us. Both give our thought something richer to work on than the narrow circle of what has happened directly to us.

The third recommendation concerns why the child would undertake any difficult learning in the first place. A student who wants to design rockets may have no independent affection for mathematics, but the ambition gives mathematics a purpose. They still have to learn it; wanting something is not a substitute for acquiring the ability. What changes is that the effort can belong to a future they care about, which is a far more substantial reason to persist than our insistence that the assignment is compulsory.

These recommendations give one another greater reach. A child can read a novel that changes how they judge a character, learn a practical skill that changes what they can make, and study mathematics that serves an ambition still years away. The connection is the growth of their capacity to act and understand. That is the kind of education described in our manifesto, and the reason personalization matters to what we are building.

I would be wary of an education that made a child efficient at completing schoolwork but left their world no larger. Give them tools they can use, books that exceed their experience, and demanding work whose purpose they can recognize. Those things will not always produce a tidy afternoon or an impressive-looking result. They give the learner something more durable: increasing access to what other people have understood and increasing power to do something with it.