Daily Archive for February 4th, 2009

Why children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study

Published by davinci on February 4, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

An experience that I think must be common to a lot of the children of authoritarian parents is to have their extracurricular interests disparaged, and to be told that anything that isn’t on the school curriculum is not worth studying. I know this is very common among Asian parents, and it’s just one more manifestation of the inherently anti-science attitude that is present in traditional Asian beliefs about raising children.

My parents’ rationale for attacking me for spending time studying subjects not on the school curriculum was, according to them, so that I would be more “focused in school”. This is just so wrong on so many levels… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
  2. How I managed to be so successful in high school
  3. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 1: overview
  4. Being socially active is important to academic success
  5. Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
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How I managed to be so successful in high school

Published by davinci on February 4, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

High school was a very difficult time for me, but I was also extremely successful during this time. My parents had arrived in Canada only two years earlier, and it would be some time before the disruptive effects of their interference with my education would become apparent. I was very fortunate that for several years in elementary school — probably the most formative years of my life — I could learn from excellent teachers without my parents continually disparaging everything they taught me. I began high school very, very far ahead of my classmates, and I had gotten that way by doing precisely the very things that my parents would discourage and attempt to prevent me from doing during high school: reading books not on the school curriculum, learning things by actually doing them, going around talking to people with an interest or expertise in a subject, and so on.

There were three interweaving strands in my high school life: academics, school-related extracurricular activities, and interests altogether outside of school… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 4: high school and being editor-in-chief
  2. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 3: science writing in high school
  3. The causes of my depression, part 2: my high school predictions about the future
  4. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 5: writing about open notebook science in high school
  5. The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates
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