Slashdot Mirror
The Creativity Crisis
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from an article at Newsweek:
"For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. ... Like intelligence tests, Torrance's test — a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist — has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect — each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. 'It's very clear, and the decrease is very significant,' Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America — from kindergarten through sixth grade — for whom the decline is 'most serious.'"
Shocking, who'd've thought that standardized testing, eliminating recess and general free time would have consequences. Perhaps actually letting kids play would help that.
I have a rising third grader. I've been informed that the next year will be all about memorization of the necessary facts which will get her to pass the Virginia "Standards Of Learning" (yes, they really call them the SOLs) exam at year end. Everything in the school system, from her promotion to the evaluations of the teachers, administrators, and facility are tied to these scores. There is no creativity required or recommended on these exams.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If you're familiar with the founding principals of the public education system this isn't a surprise. Schools were intentionally designed by early 20th century psychologists to reduce creativity and increase conformity.
If anything, it's surprising that it took this long before this effect started to manifest.
From the article:
"It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children."
One of the test questions was “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?”
If you went to the average TV viewer and asked them what could make their T.V. shows better, I sincerely doubt that they could give a succinct and "creative" set of ideas that would improve various shows. If you asked a video gamer for say an MMO like WoW or even a browser game like Farmville what suggestions they have to improve the games, you would probably have to gag them to get them to shut up. For video game fans, new ideas (some of them quite creative workarounds) are a dime a dozen, and the challenge is filtering them to find the best ideas for how to gear/play a character or how to run a farm.
Video games are almost perpetually linked with television by virtue of being activities in which one sits down in front of a glowing screen, but video games tend to be highly interactive with constant feedback/user response while television is nearly 100% passive. (American Idol voting doesn't count) I would agree that the increase of mindshare and time devoted to passive pursuits could decrease creativity, but I really wish that the media would, as a group, get a better idea of how different video games and television shows are. The difference between games and t.v. is the difference between using a kitchen knife to chop vegetables and using a kitchen knife to stab people, yet again, video games are taking more blame for making our kids less creative than the school systems' standardized tests and performance obsessed culture.
Signatures are the new names.
1980-1990 seems about the time cable television became more common than OTA TV. OTA TV used to be very boring for children, but cable brought Nickelodeon and the Disney channel in homes to become defacto babysitters for millions of kids.
The inevitable result of being taught to accept everything they are taught without question, rather than being taught the basics and critical thinking, is that students mostly stop asking important questions. Even if they do ask, they depend on someone else to provide "the one true answer" - because they don't have the tools to arrive at a useful answer on their own.
Music teaches focus. Art cannot be done without fully applying yourself. Sports teaches teamwork and pragmatic execution. Yet we cut all that and emphasize stuff in text books, as if they were bibles. No wonder creativity is stuck in a pot hole.
Anyone with any slight interest in the topic must see:
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&playnext_from=QL&playnext=1
How do you measure creativity anyway?
90 for people that give all the correct answers.
90-100 for everybody that fills in answers that have nothing to do with the questions.
100-110 for those that draw pretty pixelated pictures using the multiple choice boxes.
110-120 for the people that draw pretty pictures outside the boxes.
130+ when they make the questionaire form into paper mache.
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rather than playing using our imaginations, most kids prefer to watch tv or play video games. both of these activities are the act of media Consumption, and not of using their own imagination. when i was a kid (now i sound like an old man), my folks would kick my brother and i out of the house and tell us to play until supper time. this meant playing cops and robbers or army man or explorer or maybe some baseball and football. aside from sports, we had to use our imagination a lot - LARPing for normals. of course by the time i was 15 I preferred playing D&D and reading books, which meant less time outside and more time PRETENDING and using my imagination.
that's why I started playing D&D with my daughter when she turned 8. she loves to read and we have a lot of fun in our campaign. we're always using our imaginations when we play, as opposed to when she's sitting at the computer playing her FLASH games.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
especially in the last years parents pumping their kids full of behavior adjusting drugs? Ritalin maybe?
Creativity tests... heh. Most of these tests are completely ridiculous.
I remember one of these tests where totally stupid answers were given points, just because they are "original". I hate people that think of themselves as "creative", yet, they cannot come up with something PRACTICALLY USEFUL. You can be "very original" and "totally irrelevant" at the same time. For me, creativity means original and usable (in a broad sense -- amusing, entertaining, enthralling, etc count as useful, too).
I hate even more those people that cry "all these rules just hamper my creativity". Again, bullshit! Limitations often stimulate creativity. Puzzles are all about limits on the solution space. Many writers, painters, poems made up artificial limits for themselves, just to see, what can they do within those limitations. Also, any engineer has to think inside some box, as the final result has to be useful and relevant to the problem at hand. Physicists are limited by the laws of nature -- still, many physicists are very creative -- especially because they have to use seemingly limiting laws to their benefit. Hacking is also a great example where the whole process is about seemingly bending the limits, but you really stay inside them, you just discover ways that were unexpected to be existing inside that "box". Logic is also a limitation. Are you original just because you deny logic? Sometimes yes (in these cases you end up with an augmented logic), but most of the times, no.
Rant off.
In order to ensure childres safety they are placed and encuraged stay in secuer safe 'creative' environments. Classic example, who here below tha age of 50 has every seen or even played with a 'real' chemistry set.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
If some evil mad scientist were to undertake building a device to systematically destroy creative thinking in humans, I doubt he could do better than the TV programming of this past decade.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
This is yet another example of the dangers inherent in over-parenting. "Don't climb that tree!" "Don't find out what dirt tastes like!" "Don't take the toy apart!"
This naturally evolves into the adult version. "Don't take pictures of that bridge!" "Don't try to find out what's behind that wall!" "Don't question anything your leaders tell you!"
It's all part of the plan.
He took a duck to the face at 250 knots.
Education in America today is focused almost exclusively on memorizing the tests that will be used to determine school performance. Little emphasis is placed upon creative thinking, deductive logic or expression.
It is no surprise that we are turning out "trained rats" who can perform a specific set of tasks to pass a test but do not have adequate skills to function in a society where creativity is the driving force for progress.
Tisha Hayes
More importantly, I suspect, stuff Just Works now. In the '80s, a typical home computer booted into a programming language. You needed a basic understanding of how it worked to be able to start a game, and a lot of children at least tried playing with the programming environment, because it was there and loading a game took 10 minutes. There was some TV to watch, but not a huge amount. Prefabricated plastic toys were common enough that parents complained that the toys they had as a child were better, but they were simple - you needed to use your imagination to have fun with them.
Around 1990, home computers started to become good enough that you could use them without any understanding, just pointing and clicking. In fact, the home computer as a market segment died around then - you had consoles (with no ability to run user-modified code) and you had computers aimed at businesses that were also sold to home users. You started getting a lot more TV aimed at children, and toys started coming with microcontrollers and 'interactive' functionality that let you borrow someone else's imagination.
For a business computer, working without user effort is a good thing. A business computer exists to make some other task easier - you don't want to be thinking about the computer, you want to be thinking about the task. For an educational computer, this is not such an advantage. If stuff doesn't work correctly, you need to use some creativity to fix it. How many people here remember the 'fun' of editing autoexec.bat and config.sys to make a game work? How many children born in the '90s did something similar? Of the two, who do you think has more of an understanding of the purpose of device drivers or of computer memory models?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Most computer games do not require creativity. They require quick reflexes and/or the ability to do mindless actions repeatedly for little reward.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I have noticed a distinct trend towards authoritarianism in American culture in the past 20 years. And this has been most especially pronounced in schools. Authoritarianism and creativity are at direct odds with each other.
My own HS started making changes shortly after I graduated in 1989. They started restricting student's ability to go off campus during the day. And I haven't really gone back to find out what else has changed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot more locked down than when I went.
I think America became afraid of its young people. There was this idea that young people were becoming increasingly violent and uncontrollable. For example, stories of cold-blooded killings and gang membership became the impetus for changing the laws so it was much more likely juveniles would be prosecuted as adults.
But I think there was more to it than that, and I'm not completely sure where the wrong turn was taken or what it was.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
How's the test structured? What's the researcher's definition of creativity? What are they measuring? Creativity is a very subjective concept as it is.
Just because someone creates a test doesn't mean it measures what they think it measures. We've been through all this with intelligence tests.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I grew up in a surrounding which i pretty much could understand (lets exclude politics here) at age 10. I was presented with toys which you can use to build sth yourself (lego bricks, later lego technics, electronics experimental kits). I was not allowed to watch television unsupervised and in average maybe watched 30 minutes per day. I helped renovate the parents house and played outside in the forest. When i started to play computer games i knew how they were programmed. Which means that for me the fun and the possibilities to do sth depended on and grew with comprehending the world and finding creative ways to use this understanding. To me it seems that kids today are raised under a different paradigm: give them an extreme amount of toys which are completely incomprehensible - and no level on comprehension which the kid could achieve will enable it to reshape this toy. An DVD player will never do anything else. Even computer are castrated nowadays (Hello, who of us did not start programming with typing something on the C128 for curiosity) to be game-consoles only. Electronics kit can never come close - even qualitatively - to the millions of gadgets surrounding us, I dont even want to talk about the sense of security which would forbid that children modify their bikes. Nothing which you paint, write, do, will compare to the best amateur thing you find on the internet. So let me formulate that way: we have raised the level of intelligence and knowledge required before creativity pays of visibly to a level not achievable for most of the kids.
Well, OK. But keep in mind your bias. Very few homes nation-wide had or could afford personal computers in the 80s. Since then, a number of technologies have proliferated (and become more affordable, to a degree) that encourage interacting with the device/medium in scripted ways: cable television, the internet, computers, computer and console games, cell phones. All these things happened at the same time that obesity began to skyrocket and (according to this article) creativity began to decline. This is also the same time when our schools began to get "back to basics" and cut programs like art, photography, and even recess. Variety is important, and moving from one screen to another doesn't cut it. Still, I'm uncertain about my own claim here, as a great deal of creativity begins at a very young age. I'm also not taking into account that the 80s marked the beginning of greatly increasing hours at work for most adults, and greater competition for jobs, as well as a tendency to spend more and more on consumer goods and service, an increase influenced by more readily available consumer credit. So much less parental involvement is possible. I say that as an often-exhausted parent. I guess, for me, it boils down to a perfect storm of impending idiocracy. I say this as an English teacher. I can see the change in the papers I've collected in the last five and ten years.
I've sometimes thought, looking back at my own career in engineering, that my problem solving ability has got in the way of promotion. It's actually easier and more effective to find someone else to fix the problem, or persuade management that the problem doesn't need fixing (kill the product, for instance). And, if you aren't spending a lot of time on the 98% of perspiration that follows the 2% of inspiration, you have time to play golf with the boss and network your next promotion.
I think the rot really set in when the word "consumer" became a generic term for everybody. Umberto Eco made this point once, showing how industrial exhibitions had gone from showcasing technology (buy one of these and you can make whatever you can imagine) to showcasing products (buy one of these and your life as a consumer will be better.)
Schools only reflect society. If teachers are mostly consumers, they won't see the value of (genuine) creativity.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This sounds like a test developed by baby boomers to test baby-boomerishness in people. It's the get-of-my-lawn test.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The controls were put in place mainly to shield the schools from litigation. Schools don't have BP-style resources, so every dollar counts. Let's face it, the average family can't afford to send their kids to school (it's about $10k/student for public, somewhete between $17k-20k for private), so there's not going to be any new influx of cash in schools.
Some of the controls (I got out of HS in 87) were to prevent vandalism/waste - like making the copier off limits to students, though my best friend in HS and I were the only two, save the principal, who could fix minor problems with it. Much of it stems from very rare, isolated cases of injury/loss/death during school hours while the students were not accounted for. There is no wrath like a parent who has lost a child. When you have to have a perfect safety record with several thousand unpredictable teens 180 days out of the year, things get a little crazy.
We're not afraid of them, per se, but afraid something will happen to them. A college student gets drunk and falls out of a 4th story window to her death, so the college welds all of the windows shut. An appropriate response? To the parents who no longer have a daughter it would have prevented her death. Won't you think of the children?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Knowing - and probably more importantly learning - details is still quite valuable. Just a matter of how it's actually done.
Testing is the snake oil of our times; but a fool and his money...
It is a thinly veiled excuse for furthering the "war on terror".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I had roughly the same schedule, but I didn't bother paying attention or doing my homework so I saved myself several hours a day. I think that was pretty creative thinking on my part.
Also, back then normal people couldn't afford laptops, so I would work out my BASIC and Pascal programs in a notebook and use the power of my imagination compile them. That's what I did most of the time when I wasn't paying attention.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED052254&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED052254
The Interpretation of Torrance Creativity Scores.
This study tests the appropriateness of Torrance's assumptions of trait independence and the combinability of measures (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) with respect to the scoring of the tests for a younger population and estimates the homogeneity of the scores. The sample consisted of 128 elementary school children. Results indicate that separate scoring for fluency, flexibility, and originality traits is not warranted, because any special dispositions for these traits that may exist are overwhelmed by the task specificity of the scores. It is suggested that the Torrance scores reveal nothing interesting about the individual, and the report contends that use of more than a single score from the Torrance battery makes little sense. The major question still unanswered is when, if ever, it makes sense to use a score from the Torrance battery.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
Pot smoking among school kids went down by the early '80s. I'd cite statistics, but those are all suspect, being produced to support claims for the effectiveness of government programs (in a word, "creative"). Still, there can be no doubt by any serious cultural critic that creativity in Western Civilization peaked in the '60s, along with peak use of creativity-enhancing drugs. Because that creativity was perceived as - and may have been - politically dangerous, it and the drug use which enhances it have been discouraged since.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, DMCA, DHS, USCIS, PATRIOT, etc.
Any time you begin to enter a culture of control and conservatism (not just a machinery of, but a culture of, in which agency, originality, and deviation are considered morally/ethically wrong), you'll find that people begin to frown on creativity. Innovation is nothing more than deviance with a positive outcome. In an value system that places a premium on nondeviance and sees it as a primary measure of status on the one hand, and that normalizes or obscures awareness of the importance of others' deviance/innovation on the other (read: political and market-oriented historical revisionism the change in our understand of knowledge to that of a commodity to be manufactured), there will be no innovation.
Basically, intellectual property is killing innovation. 9/11 and the war on terror are killing innovation. Big capital is killing innovation.
Where you have a field of perfectly efficient and predictable consumers, you have zero innovation and creativity quotient. By definition.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Well, there's also the old adage that "necessity is the mother of invention". People were a lot more hands on back then with their day to day..well, stuff, plus a lot of things got repaired, not just thrown away when something trivial broke. This lead to "how do I make this better" type efforts..back to caveman days. As applies to children..they mimic adults, they don't see adults doing this anymore that much, repairing or building anything from scratch, figuring out a new tool or how to do something, so they don't either. How many kids today really watch their dad fixing things, or building anything from scratch? the world went from a lot of generalists who could use any tool thrown at them, plus make new tools, to now you need to be an extreme specialist in just one subject to even think about it. I know when I was a little shitter, I was following pops around as he tore down and rebuilt cars, did his own plumbing and carpentry, rebuilt TVs and radios, etc. So..I started doing similar, all the way to getting into trouble for disassembling the lawnmower, etc, building forts, etc with saws and hammer and nails. Kids today..are they really doing that, or mostly just..dunno..playing video games? Being a tool user means you need to use tools, then getting creative with that.
And then, where is the dividing line between art and tech/engineering? Hard to define creativity when we have no real distinction. Perhaps creativity is just not being recognized clearly enough today?
i always found the Flynn effect to be quite interesting - given that it is demonstrates quite clearly that IQ is something that is down to the environment and has little to do with innate or genetically determined factors.
imho, unless you looking to 'scientifically' justify right-wing or racist ideas then this would be fairly obvious to anyone who's interested.
i'm naturally rather suspicious of any similar such test for creativity - to try to capture or measure something as nebulous a concept as creativity seems at face value to be troublesome.
While I agree with your premise, I disagree with your conclusion. While a greater number of components were accessible and could be theoretically fixed by the end user, I suspect that in reality it didn't happen. Your average person didn't open their TV to see what tube burned out. If the washing machine quit working, they didn't go at it with a schematic and a multimeter. They called someone to come fix it. The same thing happens today except that in many cases it's easier/cheaper to replace something rather than fix it.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I watched the movie Idiocracy last night and got a sense of our culture's non-creative future, 500-some odd years removed.
In one scene the time clock spins forward over centuries, pausing intermittently only to capture a single image of a restaurant storefront in evolution: "FuddRuckers" devolves to "RuddPuckers", "PudSuckers", etc. (or some such). When the clock stops the culture has christened the restaurant "ButtFuckers".
Apparently the references to FuddRuckers, Costco, Starbucks et al caused Fox to bury the film, which portrays a future where creativity and intelligence have largely disappeared.
I'm speaking purely for the United States here. The first thing that came to mind was this great scene from the movie Apollo 13 where engineers are told they have to fit a square filter in a round hole using only the elements on the table. First reaction? They dive right in.
So to use this as an example, it sometimes feels like we've lost the raw brilliance and creativity that allowed us to put human beings on the moon. And we did it years before the development of advanced composites, sophisticated integrated circuits, and computer modeling. The moon missions were calculated with slide rules; even the astronauts had to be skilled mathematicians.
In that sense, it feels like our creativity is on the wane. On the other hand, perhaps it's just changing form.
True, we haven't put anybody on the moon in a while, but we've instead built a giant worldwide interconnected computer network. We've built a search engine that aggregates and indexes it all. We've built touchscreen devices that can make phone calls, access websites, pinpoint your location to within 30 feet using satellites hundreds of miles in the sky, and put it all into a tiny package that slips into your pocket and runs all day on a battery charge.
That's pretty creative, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. So I don't necessarily know that we're less creative today; I see the emotional and anecdotal evidence for it, but the contrary evidence suggests that we're still exceptionally creative and eclectic with our skills.
Necessity is the mother of invention, sufficiency is her lazy childless brother, and opulance is the serial killer who lives next door.
1.Kids arent being allowed to be kids anymore. When I was a kid in primary school, I used to take my 2 bucks pocket money on a Saturday morning and go tearing out of the house, down the street and across the local oval to the local shop to spend the 2 bucks on assorted lollies, most likely shouting who knows what at the top of my lungs at the same time.
Kids need to be kids, they need to be allowed to go outside and play, to kick a footy (Aussie Rules football) or a soccer ball with their mates, to get out in the fresh air.
2.TV, kids are watching more of it than ever (and what they DO watch gets worse and worse, a lot of what passes for kids TV these days is pathetic compared to what was on when I was a kid)
3.Lack of creative toys. These days parents are more likely to buy their kids a Nintendo Wii instead of toys that encourage creativity and imagination. Instead of playing with a GI-JOE action figure or a pack of army soldiers making "Pew Pew" noises, kids are playing video games where the "Pew Pew" noise is created by some guy in a sound studio.
4.The ever increasing pressure on schools to "perform" (and to "perform better" than the school one suburb over). This leads to pressure on politicians to institute measuring systems (usually in the form of standardized tests) so that they can see which schools are doing well and which schools arent. Then, the school principals (fearful that bad scores will negatively impact the schools funding) force teachers to "teach to the test" so that schools can get higher scores (and keep their funding). Courses and lessons like music, art, dance and drama are being removed from schools as they continue to focus more on academic performance and (for those kids who show talent) performance on the football pitch or the basketball court or whatever.
...now you need to be an extreme specialist in just one subject to even think about it.
It's not just the complexity of modern devices though - it is also that manufacturers now go out of their way to prevent people fix, modifying, learning etc. from things they make in order to prevent you from either improving on it or doing things with it that they do not want you to. When manufacturers actively stop you from 'playing' with their devices the result is not only that it is harder to "fix" it but you also risk breaking the device....and generally those with the free time (students etc.) don't have the money to be able to afford breaking expensive equipment. Hence rather than innovate creatively they just use the device as told.
Of course the above only applies to electronic devices but, as the newest and most capable tools we have these are the ones most likely to motivate creative and intelligent people to play with them because they can, in general, do so much more with them.
This transition isn't limited to computing. Every aspect of technology has improved in a similar way. How many people drove cars in the first half of the last century, but couldn't rebuild an internal combustion engine? How many now? Back when cars were new, if you couldn't function as a mechanic, you had a problem. Now, breakdowns are so rare that it's not essential knowledge.
When I was growing up, my father had similar complaints about radio. He'd been a radio amateur when he was a child, but now radios are commodity devices and no one builds receivers themselves, so building transmitters doesn't follow. For me, the personal computer revolution was a substitute.
There's been something similar for every generation since the industrial revolution - a technology that is starting to make an impact on consumer technology, which still requires a lot of understanding to use when you're a child and which becomes ubiquitous by the time you are an adult. I've no idea what this is for the current generation - I can't think of anything. I suspect some form of biotech will be for the next generation.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It used to be that people had to LEARN DISCIPLINE so that they could pay attention in school and learn. Meanwhile, the randomness of the thoughths they had to learn to keep under control was funneled into directed creativity.
These days, every kid is labeled with ADHD and given drugs that suppress random thoughts. Oh, sure they SEEM a little more disciplined, but we're chemically robbing them of creativity.
(I'm not saying that ADD doesn't exist. I know, because I have it. Indeed, I rely on it to help me come up with interesting random ideas. And it was indeed a long, challenging journey to learn to focus. I also realize that some people have it SO BAD that giving them some chemical help makes sense. But MOST kids in school labeled with ADHD just have discipline problems. But let's not leave it there, because often the discipline problems aren't their fault. Their diets are absolute shit. If parents would feed their kids properly, we wouldn't have half so much trouble.)
That's pretty much when Ritalin use in "rambunctious" children began to skyrocket.
As an adult with ADD, I can tell you for certain that Ritalin squelches creativity. I am a musician, and when I'm steadily taking the pills I always see a marked decline in my songwriting and recording.
It's often the more creative kids that get diagnosed as ADD as well.
Vicious cycle, America. Learn to teach creative, energetic kids, and we'll stay on top. Start turning them into rank-and-file automatons and this is what you get.
A crisis! Quick! Throw $500 billion at it! There! Done!
Don't you know that there are predators waiting on every corner? According to the NCMEC, 1,500,000 children go missing each year!!! (if you count 17 year olds who run away from home multiple times for each escape attempt - an average of 115 if you only count "typical" kidnappings).
But seriously, I recently traveled through South America, and the kids there are like actual human beings. With a little capital and rule of law, they'll go far.
As for North American kids: two words - "opportunity costs".
"How many kids today really watch their dad fixing things, or building anything from scratch?"
My daughter, for one. And she's only three years old. I hope she will grow up to be as bummed about Chinese "epoxy blob" Electronics as I was when I was a kid. I had to start dumpster diving for broken stereo receivers to get anything worth taking apart when toys turned out to be so pointless.
I'm saving a working Robosapien for her. Those are very hackable.
I've had to change a lot about the work I do in order to make it kid-safe. For instance, I can't have high voltage power supplies (backlight inverters) open with her around and switching entirely from Tin/Lead solder to Lead Free was a bitch. But it still means I can have her watching what I do and maybe even helping sooner in life than I.
I learned to solder when I was eight. She'll probably learn long before that.
She has been watching me build a render farm from trash computers over the past nine months and turn broken LCD and plasma TVs into working sets for over a year now. During the past six months, she has taken a genuine interest in the work. She will watch me work for far longer stretches than she'll watch Dora or Diego.
That makes me proud and gives me hope that our world isn't heading toward Idiocracy standards after all.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Then 'Learning to Think Korean' by Kohls will freak you out.
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Think-Korean-Working-Interact/dp/1877864870
It starts with ten or so business scenarios which will make no sense whatsoever to you, then explains why. There are reasons, you're just not attuned to them.
This is cool too...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKtSHKWkrXs
Look, I agree that we've kind of gone overboard with kid's safety. Kids should be able to just run around outside without parents freaking out about it. But geez, complaining about wearing helmets on bikes? Sure, lots of kids survived childhood just fine without them. But some didn't.
Come on, people. Making kids wear appropriate protective gear is not exactly child abuse. It's not that expensive, pretty comfortable, and it saves lives. Spare me the tales of woe that you're not able to let your kids jump their bikes, helmetless, off 15 foot high ramps without cries of child endangerment. Because that's what it is.