Would you tell your child to hop up off of your sofa and enroll in a marathon on a whim? Probably not. You wouldn’t drop them at the starting lineup of runners without preparation and expect them to win, would you? Most people wouldn’t. You understand that it would be setting your kids up for failure and humiliation. So why would you approach education that way?
People often compare education to running a marathon, but you might more accurately be described as ongoing cross-fit training. When most people go to the gym, they are going to get fit and improve their sense of well-being. Not to become marathon runners. They wouldn’t spend all of their time exercising just one muscle group. Not unless the goal was to perform in only one microscopic niche group. For this reason, training for a marathon run might not be the best way to achieve overall fitness and well-being.
Likewise, most people know that simply going to the gym and spending time doing random exercises they don’t really understand won’t result in any meaningful progress. It might actually do more harm than good in some cases. Progressing through skill sets and subgroups of skill sets would lead to better outcomes. It would produce a constantly evolving set of goals that have a good amount of unique and novel activities. Not only would it provide an appropriate amount of overlap and repetition, but also prevent regression in old focus areas while focusing on new areas.
Plus, isn’t it just more interesting to do a variety of activities than just to do the same activity over and over again?
So what is the correct way to learn?
If you were starting from the beginning, then you would start with the basics. You would build up a strong foundation, and then start adding more advanced skills on top of it. You wouldn’t run your marathon immediately. You would start by learning proper breathing techniques, improving posture and form, developing endurance and cardiovascular strength, and then hit the street for practice runs.
When planning your child’s education goals, you want your child to start with the most basic skills first. From there, adding increasingly advanced skills as simpler skills are mastered is best. giving your kindergartner a dissertation on Holography, Cosmology, and Super-symmetric String Theory and saying “go” would be an exercise is making them hate reading. First you would teach them how to hold a pencil. Then teach them to draw accurate and repeatable forms called letters. After that, teach them understand what sounds each letter makes on their own and in groups. Finally, after years of meaningful practice and repetition, they would be ready to try their hand at reading or writing that dissertation.
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