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

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. First of all, as a matter of elementary logic, it is never possible to get somebody to become more focused on something by continually accusing them of being distracted — because the very accusations themselves are more distracting than anything else could possibly be. Secondly, they have never justified why restricting one’s attention to only what was on the school curriculum was a worthy goal. Indeed, I don’t think that the thought had even crossed their minds that this needed any justification whatsoever. But why should my judgment of the importance of any subject be based on what some committee has decided on a school board? (I have nothing against school boards, and in fact I actually appreciate the difficulty of their work; but the point is that their mandate is to create a curriculum for the average student who is not likely to ever use the material again, and not for the bright student who is actually interested in pursuing a career in science.)

But even if we allow that the goal is to learn the materials on the school curriculum, nothing could be more counterproductive than their behaviour. I cannot even count the number of instances where the topics that they had dismissed as worthless on account of their not being on the school curriculum would either be encountered in a later year, or would be added to the curriculum soon afterwards. The latter situation would occur especially often with topics related to computer science, which in the 1990s saw enormous changes because of the spreading prevalence of the personal computer. (And as everybody knows, computer science classes in high school are a joke, because most of the students knew a lot more about computers than the teachers.) By continually harassing me for studying subjects which were not on the school curriculum — that is, the current school curriculum for that specific school year — they were effectively punishing me for being very far ahead of everybody else. This had a very detrimental effect on my concentration, because when the time finally came that the topics which they had attacked me for studying actually appeared on the school curriculum, all I could think about was how my parents had called those very topics “worthless” and had punished me for studying them just years earlier. To make matters even worse, they would then attack me further for not being focused on studying the very subjects that they had earlier dismissed as worthless.

To give a specific example that perhaps other people can identify with, I played around a lot with cryptography in high school. At the time, there was a certain popular commercial software security suite, which I won’t name, one function of which was to encrypt and decrypt files. I spent a couple of days studying it, and finally figured out how to decrypt files that had been encrypted on the lowest security setting without having to know the password. (I guess I should acknowledge that I had probably violated the software’s EULA in my actions, but in my defense I was wearing a white hat the whole time.) I was very excited about this, and so I gave a demonstration to my father. His response: “So what? Stop wasting time and go do your homework.” Years later, when I actually had to study cryptography for a course in university, I just could not concentrate on it at all, even though I already knew the material because I had learned it all on my own in high school. And this experience has been repeated a large number of times in classes during my undergraduate years as well as in numerous situations in graduate school. Ironically, some of my poorer grades in university have been in subjects that I had been studying years earlier in high school, well ahead of any of my classmates, because my parents had punished me so harshly for studying those subjects at the time.

How many successful computer security experts got their start by experimenting with weaknesses in commercial security software, as opposed to reading about cryptography from textbooks? More generally, how many scientists became leaders in their fields by performing experiments on their own rather than waiting to be taught from a curriculum designed by someone else? For that matter, I don’t think it’s possible to become successful in any intellectual field by not pursuing one’s own interests and waiting to be told what to do and what to study by someone else.

Because of my interest in the physics of computation, I was very far ahead of my classmates in the technical subjects, especially mathematics and physics. I had been going to the library and reading college and university level books on science since elementary school, at the suggestion of my teachers. It’s just common sense that if you study ahead you’ll get good grades. I will return to my interest in the physics of computation, and my parents’ opposition to it, in later posts. But here, I want to especially emphasise that it was my interest in topics that apparently have nothing to do with science that allowed me to do so well in high school.

In those days, I used to drag everyone else into things that I was interested in. I had acquired the habit because my elementary school teachers in the gifted program had encouraged me to do so. So I made the mistake of telling my parents about my belief that there would be a shift in global politics in the near future and that religion would re-emerge as a significant geopolitical force. This was in the late 1980s, at the end of elementary school. My parents ridiculed the idea at the time, but I held on to it. When they saw that I continued to pursue the idea in high school, they began to criticise me for “wasting time” on a “worthless” subject. They kept insisting that my pursuit of the idea distracted me from school and lowered my grades, and persisted in applying pressure to prevent me from continuing to study the subject.

One of the most annoying things that my father did whenever I told him anything was that he would ask, rhetorically, “Who says that?” And then he would answer himself with “I’ve never heard anybody say that.” In a way, it’s a very minor thing, but I think it illustrates something very deep about the authoritarian mentality. It was always about the who and never about the why. He never once asked me, “Why do you think that?” or “What made you come to that conclusion?” In any case, whenever I did give him an answer, he would always come back with “I’ve never heard of him.” (People whom he had never heard of prior to my mentioning their names to him include Samuel Huntington, V. S. Naipaul, Kurt Gödel, and Stephen Hawking.)

I want to state for the record that the reason I did so well in high school was precisely because of my interest in religion and its re-emergence as a major force in global politics. Furthermore, it was because of this interest that I had the opportunity to do many of the things that I did in university and in graduate school, which I will talk about later. It may appear at first that religion has nothing to do with most of the subjects taught in high school, but actually, a person who really studies religion — by which I mean he is reading serious academic sources rather than apologetics — will touch upon almost every facet of the high school curriculum.

There is, first of all, the enormous advantage of knowing different languages. I had attempted to learn Latin and Greek in elementary school, and while I was not successful, I had acquired a lot of vocabulary and had become familiar with the Greek alphabet. Many of the terms used in biology and chemistry were Greek to the other students, but they were perfectly sensible to me. My knowledge of Latin was also extremely helpful in French (which appeared to me to be a sort of corrupted Latin — although I would advise not repeating this opinion within earshot of any Francophone). And finally, while other students struggled with Shakespeare, I had read the King James Bible cover-to-cover and selections of Milton, so Shakespeare was child’s play. (Incidentally, you have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.)

Next, there is the inescapable fact that religion has shaped many of the important historical events in the West. As I went to a Catholic school, the histories of Europe and of Christianity were naturally already part of the core curriculum, but even then, there are many things you can learn about those subjects that they will not teach you in the classroom. (The indiscretions and shenanigans of some of the previous Popes comes to mind.) But my interest in the impact of religion on the world led quite naturally to a pretty thorough study of world history: the Silk Road, the expansion of the Arab Empire, the various Caliphates, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, and so on. It was also because of this interest that I studied modern utopian political movements such as Nazism and Communism.

In addition to the linguistic advantage in biology, I was already familiar with the theory of evolution because I had been observing the attempts by fundamentalist Christian creationists to subvert science in the Unite States. About the only non-technical subject in which I owed my success to something other than my interest in religion was art, and that was because I read a lot of comic books, yet another activity of which my parents disapproved.

My point is not that one should study religion to get ahead in high school — so don’t go packing your kids away to Bible school. Nor am I saying that one can just ignore the school curriculum, or that one can cover the entire curriculum even if one spends most of one’s time studying something else. In fact, my study of the re-emergence of religion as a politic force left very large gaps in my coverage of the curriculum. But it never hurts to have additional knowledge, and I want to stress this point, because my parents were always dismissing anything that they did not immediately see a use for as “worthless” and “frivolous”. I suspect that the same is true of other authoritarian parents, and my experience is that not only are they absolutely wrong, but their imposition of this misguided belief on their children is extremely harmful. I repeat: it never hurts to have additional knowledge. There is no such thing as worthless knowledge, only dullards who lack the creativity to put it to use.

To give an example of what I mean, we had to learn about the two World Wars in history class. The way the class was structured was that there was a core set of topics which had to be covered, and which focused mainly on the European powers, the United States, and Canada. But some fraction of the time was allotted to a set of topics that the teacher had some flexibility in choosing between, depending on the directions taken by class discussions and so on. At the beginning of the course, my knowledge of the core materials was probably about as much as that of any other student who retained what they had learned from Remembrance Day. But I knew a lot about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the repartitioning of the Middle East, the establishment of modern Israel, and the independence of India and Pakistan from the British Empire. So what I could do that other students could not was to introduce these topics into the class by hanging them off the main topics. And this ensured that a part of the course was taken up with topics which I already knew, which in turn saved me the trouble of having to study. (I’m lazy that way. I was always on the lookout for ways to become extremely efficient so that I could reduce my workload.) And on top of everything else, my contributions to classroom discussions pleased my history teacher greatly.

There were of course students (mainly Asian) who studied the way that my parents kept pressuring me to do. I don’t deny that they often had good grades in technical courses such as mathematics, but this was usually offset by average or even low grades in other areas. I had high marks across the board, and in fact I had the highest marks in all of the mathematics and most of the science classes, and also in many non-technical classes as well. Furthermore, I was a year ahead in mathematics. So clearly I had far better study habits than my classmates who obeyed their authoritarian parents, and if my parents’ goal had been to ensure that I obtained high marks, there was absolutely nothing for them to complain about. Instead, they would harass me or scream at me when they found me reading books that were not “for school”, yank them out of my hands while I’m reading, and on occasion even hit me with them.

But the worst part was that they kept pressuring me to alter my study habits to be more like that of the other Chinese students. My parents would describe my classmates as “hardworking” and “obedient”, and tell me that if I didn’t stop “wasting time” on “frivolous” subjects then they would overtake me. This made no sense whatsoever. I had much better grades than they did, so if I adjusted my behaviour to become more like them, the only outcome that I could foresee was a lowering of my grades. And to make matters even worse, these very same classmates would ask me at school about my study habits so that they could become more like me. So I would come home from school, having just spoken to a guy who had asked for my help with his homework and who wanted to know the secret to my success, and my parents would nag and scold me because I wasn’t more like that guy. I don’t think anybody who hasn’t experienced that situation firsthand can understand the comedy and the tragedy of it.

I really, really believe that children, once they have reached the age where they are motivated to learn things on their own, should be allowed to study whatever they want to study. In fact, their interests should be encouraged, whatever they may be. And I also think that parents should never tell a child to stop studying a subject or to stop doing something unless they themselves are capable of having an informed discussion about the subject or activity, in which case they should present their argument for why the child should stop.

There is no quicker way for parents to lose their child’s respect than to disallow discussion when the child knows that they are blatantly wrong. My parents never gave any reason for why they believed that the shift in the role of religion in global politics that I had predicted would not happen, or why it was not an important topic. Instead, they would just call it “worthless”, “frivolous”, “nonsense”, and so on. Not long afterwards, Samuel Huntington published an influential essay that was universally lauded positing that future global conflicts would be between the world’s major civilisations and would arise because of cultural differences. Now, what I had come up with was more focused on the role of religion, and was restricted to the frictions between the West and the Islamic world. But his essay basically agreed with my ideas in broad strokes. So on the one hand, my parents kept calling my ideas “worthless”, and on the other hand, I knew that ideas very similar to my own were being discussed in really high places by really smart people. So how do you think that made my parents look in my eyes?

In the literature on gifted children, parents are often advised to look out for unorthodox ways in which their children may be learning. I learned a lot of what I knew about various topics in applied computer science — programming, graphics, operating systems, and even networking — from reverse-engineering computer games. Whenever my father saw me studying computer science, he would tell me to “stop playing games and do your homework”. So he was disrupting my studies and at the same time accusing me of not studying. After years of being accused of playing computer games when I was actually learning about computer science, I finally gave up and started just playing computer games without dissecting them. This is yet another illustration of how authoritarian parenting is always counterproductive.

In my experience, in every single instance where my parents have managed to get me to stop doing something that I had been doing, it has been to my detriment. I really believe that I would be a lot better off today if my parents did not prevent me from doing a lot of the things that they labeled “a waste of time”. This will become clear in subsequent posts when I relate my experiences in university and graduate school, where all these “worthless” and “frivolous” things would turn out to be vitally important.

– davinci

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