This post lacks any historical grounding whatsoever. It's only recently that 15-year-olds
have been considered children, and prior to the
insulting modern-age (last 60 years?) view of
kids, they could be intelligent, productive,
and contribute something through real work
at a very young age. Now they are given curfews,
given little access to hands-on training that
builds early confidence, told they have no rights and that if they even look funny (like wearing
a trench-coat), they will be treated like a a criminal sub-element of the outcasts they already are.
In former times, there were fields where young
people always dominated or at least had very
big contributions, including mathematics and
physics, as well as warfare, literature and so on (aside from the obvious sports/film/music). Newton, Rimbaud, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra... Ken Kesey had written Cuckoo's Nest by the time he was 22, and followed with a possibly better book at 25, at which point he gave up the ghost literarily. Many of the well-known entrepreneurs like Ari Onassis or Luciano Benetton were already successful businessmen as teenagers. Need and
desperation are two very good inspirations, but
childhood curiosity is another. When I was a kid,
we blew more time on TV & passive games like
pinball and Asteroids. Now kids have access to
machines that let them interact in duplex, creating programs and effects, and learning how
systems work. This is not a substitute for
formal computer science principals, but then
there are many who graduate from a computer
science curriculum with no practical programming
experience (such as moi). Better to
have some good motivational experience going into
your college studies to round out the learning.
But the main point of a youthful viewpoint is that every young person experiences new things as if they discovered them for the first time in history, and often this enthusiastic/naive/arrogant/beautiful attitude does foster a new approach to problems and situations that does create a useful new response. Wait till they're older when they can cite the theorem or physical law of how they should interpret their perceptions, and they've lost
the potential for innovation.
I've been reading "Europe: A History" by Norman
Davies lately, and besides being refreshing to
read something more thoughtful and involved than
crap off-the-cuff Web postlings, the book goes
into a variety of historical misconceptions and
misrepresentations of "known" historical facts.
Including the idea that facts are almost invariably warped to fit the peculiar circumstances of each age. In our case, the
internet is prominent so we use it as a ruler.
20 years ago no, probably not in 20 years either.
Slashdot Mirror
This post lacks any historical grounding whatsoever. It's only recently that 15-year-olds have been considered children, and prior to the insulting modern-age (last 60 years?) view of kids, they could be intelligent, productive, and contribute something through real work at a very young age. Now they are given curfews, given little access to hands-on training that builds early confidence, told they have no rights and that if they even look funny (like wearing a trench-coat), they will be treated like a a criminal sub-element of the outcasts they already are. In former times, there were fields where young people always dominated or at least had very big contributions, including mathematics and physics, as well as warfare, literature and so on (aside from the obvious sports/film/music). Newton, Rimbaud, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra... Ken Kesey had written Cuckoo's Nest by the time he was 22, and followed with a possibly better book at 25, at which point he gave up the ghost literarily. Many of the well-known entrepreneurs like Ari Onassis or Luciano Benetton were already successful businessmen as teenagers. Need and desperation are two very good inspirations, but childhood curiosity is another. When I was a kid, we blew more time on TV & passive games like pinball and Asteroids. Now kids have access to machines that let them interact in duplex, creating programs and effects, and learning how systems work. This is not a substitute for formal computer science principals, but then there are many who graduate from a computer science curriculum with no practical programming experience (such as moi). Better to have some good motivational experience going into your college studies to round out the learning. But the main point of a youthful viewpoint is that every young person experiences new things as if they discovered them for the first time in history, and often this enthusiastic/naive/arrogant/beautiful attitude does foster a new approach to problems and situations that does create a useful new response. Wait till they're older when they can cite the theorem or physical law of how they should interpret their perceptions, and they've lost the potential for innovation. I've been reading "Europe: A History" by Norman Davies lately, and besides being refreshing to read something more thoughtful and involved than crap off-the-cuff Web postlings, the book goes into a variety of historical misconceptions and misrepresentations of "known" historical facts. Including the idea that facts are almost invariably warped to fit the peculiar circumstances of each age. In our case, the internet is prominent so we use it as a ruler. 20 years ago no, probably not in 20 years either.