On the 19th of every month, at some point in the day, a brief moment of panic randomly pings me of my mortality as a parent.
It's my subconscious mind checking in on goals, experiences, and lessons I had intended for my daughter in the months leading up to her birth. It makes me wonder, do all or even most parents get to fully do, give, and teach all the things that they hoped to? Do they even remember what those were? Ziya just turned 8 months recently, and I've forgotten most of these aspirations, and my excuse is that life is too fast.
Before some of these fade in my mind, and she's old enough to actually converse these with, it might be best to document these, some privately and some publicly. One of the most important conversation topics millennials need to have regularly with their kids is education, and what it really means to acquire one.
Here are 3 ways I define it, and how I plan on approaching it with my kid.
1) Education is a culmination of school, work, and life experiences
It's foolish to associate education only with school. School is for training. Training your mind how to learn and process piles of new information. Training your body - your arcadian rhythm - to wake up and structure your days that consist of work, fun, and relationships, so in the real world, you don't struggle to strike work-life balance like your parents and their parents generations. Training your eyes to see interactions between your peers and teachers as human beings, and taking away lessons on how to be, and how NOT to be, so that you're ready to deal with whatever situations arise in your career and life experience as an adult.
Education is when all of these experiences snowball, and then some. It's a multidimensional process, like a Rubik's cube, and defining education by As, Bs, and PhDs, is putting it down after getting all greens on one side.
2) Education is reading forever
No matter what profession you venture into, your job title should always be Reader. Student of the game. A thing they don't tell you about titles is that you're not limited to one. Especially the one they give you. You can be a daughter, and a reader. You can be a student, and a reader. You can be a professional whatever, and a reader. Read stuff that's relevant to your studies or your work, and more importantly, read stuff that's not relevant. That's how your brain - no matter how ordinary - learns to connect dots and see patterns between 2 completely unrelated realms. That's a superskill you'll need to master to thrive in your lifetime, aka the age of artificial intelligence.
Machine intelligence is built and developed to create related, semi-related, and unrelated connections using massive data sets and algorithms in one realm. Human intelligence is also developed enough to make connections except to keep an advantage, you have to infuse data sets with empirical evidence, that is, personal sensory experience, and ideas from other realms. Reading is how you learn to do all that, through books, articles, and even TV subtitles.
3) Education is always asking dumb questions
Get in the habit of asking lots of questions early on. The dumber, the better. Asking my kid to get good at this seems hypocritical because it's something I could never get right myself. I care too much what people think. Though I'm going to ask her anyway because we believe she'll have thicker skin than both of her parents.
Ask dumb questions so false assumptions don't kick you later. Ask dumb questions because they lead to wiser questions. . Asking dumb questions creates links which create chains that lead to obvious 'oh snap' realizations.
I say this knowing damn well that as the kid gets bigger, louder, and more curious, she'll pester me with the whys and hows. She'll ask the same questions repeatedly, and I'll probably get annoyed from time to time, but that's ok, I'll learn to deal with it. My bad, in advance. Ignore me when that happens. Question everything relentlessly.
Many Millennials are realizing the hard way that getting good grades and good degrees alone doesn't pave the path to a successful career and life. It's time we starting preparing the next generation.
Raj Shah works for TakeLessons.com where we believe lifelong learning via arts, music, or languages takes individual education to a whole new dimension.
