I agree with the original tweet, because I interpret it as a message to parents pushing their kids. There are a lot of parents these days that are hyper-obsessed with their child's success and that can easily lead to a loss of childhood. I've seen it happen, I'm sure you have too.

This is not about the kids who love to learn things that end up being useful skills. By all means, let them learn. But don't stop the kids who like to run around in the woods or fingerprint or pop wheelies on their bike for the sake of their future career prospects.

I don't disagree with your sentiment, even though I am also not a person who looks back fondly on my childhood.

The fact that the tweet specifically calls out schools "teaching vocational skills so young" makes me interpret the tweet as a generic luddite response - as if Montessori schools don't make working with hand tools an explicit part of their early childhood curriculum! This does seem like she is opposed to her kid learning and not an anti-Tiger Mom take.

This is a privileged Western attitude towards child rearing. "I turned out fine without hard work, so you will too." I've seen far too many of those kids get a rude awakening when they reach adulthood.

Playing outside, painting, and bicycles are privileged Western things?

Not stopping them from doing that when it risks their future prospects is a privileged Western attitude.

"risking future prospects" in this context has not been clearly defined.

It was clearly defined in the comment I replied to, which is the context of this thread. I am using the same definition.

No it wasn't. Be more specific.

That comment specifically mentioned risking future career prospects. That is clearly defined to me. If it isn't clearly defined to you, you need to fix your wording to communicate what you actually meant by that.

>> What do you even think school is for?

At that age? Daycare. Sending all kids to government-run schools freed up the parents to work longer/harder jobs. But I would never argue for kids not to get schooling. I know too many adults who cannot read properly, who cannot write a cohesive paragraph, who don't know affect from effect. Kids need more reading, not less.

I learned about computers so very young. Not in the sense of consumption in the sense of "what you can do with code"

TO this day, writing code, feels like play. I get the same child like satisfaction that building something out of lego would give me, that sense of "Look what I did".

I think you're reading way too much into it with little context. For instance, we don't even know how old the kid is, or if the workload on the kid from school is super high.

...you can mark all the books you've checked with a hole so you know you've checked them.

Work harder, not smarter. /s

Jokes aside, I still agree with GP, in that there are more practical skills that are left out of education that would be far more useful in day to day life. The Dewey Decimal System has been replaced with search engines.

I don't need to know how a search engine works in order to type in "how to use a drill press" and read the results. But that's because the knowledge and understanding of how computers work at a high level circumvents the need to do that - a search engine is a form, give it something to search and hit the submit button. Easy.

Being taught by someone to use machining tools helps build an understanding of how every day items are made using those tools, so you have a more fundamental understanding of the items could be combined together into other more interesting things, repair them, take them apart and service them.

It's almost the opposite problem of maths in schools. We're taught maths in various incresasingly complex ways, all the way up to calculus. Those methods teach us how to use maths to do clever things. But every day maths doesn't need that. We're taught compound interest, but we have to use that to figure out how to do our taxes by ourselves without any help. Wouldn't it be nice to have an overlap there, hit two birds with one stone and we all walk away with a stronger understanding of the world?

If we're not taught how to make things, we struggle to learn how things are made, which means less things get made. Learning how to make things early, and embedding the knowledge of how things are made, enables more things to be made in future.

Yeah, sure, today we can teach people to use a search engine and whether you should believe the first result. Is the chatbot always truthful? Not sure when or why it was decided that media literacy isn't a useful everyday skill.