Loving your child's mind: Francisco and I discuss Ethan and Alana on knowing what they know

Hey Francisco, can you hear me?

I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Yep, I can, I can. So how'd you enjoy Ethan and Lana this morning?

I did, yes. I thought Ethan was a little distracted, but that's okay. It's gonna be fun to see how, you know, in In some ways he's just starting and he's at the place where, where Alana started in age and in getting used to these conversations. It's going to be good to see how he grows.

Yeah, actually, I think it's good to show that he was very squirrely this morning. And I think, you know, boys are in particular more likely to be like that. In some ways, if it's too easy— one problem I've always had is when I lead a Socratic and it's too easy, then somebody else tries it and it's really hard, they just give up. So in some ways it's nice. I always think regardless whether it's a classroom situation or these, it's nice to have kind of a hard one. And yeah, Ethan was kind of all over the place. I'm patient. Let him go after a little bit. You know, pull him in where I can. I don't, you know, get angry at him or shame him. You know, a lot of this is we want it to be a fun, interesting perspective. And sometimes he's been very focused. Today he wasn't focused. No big deal. You know, you just keep doing it. And as you say, as he matures bit by bit, you know, some people think everything I'm doing is so developmentally inappropriate because, oh my gosh, this is for, you know, grown-ups or high school kids or whatever. Like, no, you can do with kids. You just have to be very patient and, you know, bit by bit by bit we get there. So yeah, I thought it was good to— because there will be parents where their kids are just like, blah, blah, blah, just like Ethan.

Yeah, no, I think that's right, especially if the idea is to get more people to try this with their students or with their children or stuff like that. It's good to show that it is a process and it is something that you have to figure out. And just like as an adult, you get days of high energy and late days of low energy, much more with children, and that's completely okay. But Alana, on the other hand, right away with the very interesting distinctions to the questions that you asked, I was I was not surprised, but I was very, very interested in right away making the distinction of the question— of the answer to her questions. It was very good.

Totally. And so before going more deeply into Alana, which does have a lot more this time around, I want to do point out— I do want to point out that even Ethan, despite the movement, I think he clearly got there's a realm of knowledge he knows, another realm of knowledge he doesn't know, and something in between, and this expanding thing. And so just in terms of kind of mental models of knowledge. I think it's really useful for, you know, metacognition is a fancy word in pedagogy and so forth, but it's just thinking about what you know. And so I would say despite Ethan's lack of focus, I think he was thinking through some things. And then, then with Alana, right, she goes, she's obviously 3 years older, and she goes much more deeply into it. Yeah, very cool distinctions.

Yes. Yes, on that line of questioning, then let me ask you how the importance of this particular question that you asked, it seemed like the way you were talking about, and what seems very true in Socratic conversation is that knowing the limits of your knowledge is foundational in just developing your project of meaning. And can you say a little more about that or how that particular question is is very important.

Absolutely. Well, to start with, just the genesis of today's conversation is originally I thought, let's try— I want to get Alana doing text-based conversations soon. I did one. I did a Vygotsky text with her some time ago, more than a year ago, I believe. And I'm going to go back to text-based conversations at some point. But I was going to give her the Scott Buchanan quotation on knowing what you know. And then I decided maybe that's a little bit too advanced. Let's have a preliminary conversation about knowing what you know. And even though a lot of what we've been doing is philosophical in a sense, I thought she's ready to really begin thinking about this. She still is a little bit kind of concrete about it, but she's also extremely reflective. So as you say, I love the fact that when I talked about 75 times 75, she didn't acknowledge that she simply didn't know it. You know, she's confident enough in her own mastery of the mechanics of mathematics to think that in principle this is something that I could know. And I did— I thought that was a fabulous distinction.

Oh, that was a, that was a great moment. The moment she realized that she wasn't willing to put that particular, particular question into the category of things she doesn't know because she, as she says, I know the equation, so it's something that I could easily know. Uh, so no, it's not, it's not the, the things that I don't know. That was a very, very great moment.

Yeah, exactly. And so one of the things I want all children to get, but as they get older, is this clarity about— she didn't get deep into knowing, you know, again, we philosophers, we go deep into how do you know what you know. So initially it was just kind of simple categorization. One of the things that I thought was fascinating was that she acknowledged the uncertainty, that there are pieces of her knowledge that are uncertain. I'm actually glad that, that didn't bother her. And yet, she's very willing to acknowledge that there are— even the most trustworthy source may not be completely trustworthy. And, you know, that there's this category of knowledge that we believe we know, but that we don't actually know. And so, that's kind of a foundation. In some ways, I see a lot of this as sort of setting foundations. So, rather than think, you know, this is the agenda for today, this is the lesson for today. You know, I want kind of to set these layers and layers and layers of foundations for bigger picture projects. And it's certainly how you know what you know is an infinitely big picture project. So we kind of go as far as we can with Ethan, we'll go as far as we can with Alana, and maybe 3 months from now, 6 months from now, whatever, pick it up again, we'll go a little bit farther and just gradually make them more aware and more sophisticated about how they to find knowledge, what they don't know, the boundary cases, the acquisition of knowledge process, the uncertainty, you know, yada yada yada.

Yeah, and that, as you speak, brings up a thought for me, which is the importance of having an awareness of the detachment in the project of knowledge between your ideas, which are in a sense your ideas, and the process that you do when you try to make sense of the world, right? So the, the moment Alana, for example, is aware that there are all sorts of things to it that she is uncertain about or that could be proved wrong in the future, that— and that's okay because the process of knowing is different from your ideas. And your ideas, in some sense you own them, but in another sense you don't. There are something that you can analyze and change whenever you think it's necessary.

Exactly. Paul Graham, the entrepreneur who founded Y Combinator, likes to— he has a short essay called "Keep Your Identity Small," and he's focusing on this issue of, you know, often people with a particular political or religious identity can be very brittle in their beliefs. That if somebody disagrees or questions their beliefs, they become, you know, kind of angry and tribal. And part of this is if your identity is based on being a certain kind of person who believes in a certain kind of thing, then one is more likely to respond to different arguments or information kind of defensively. Where one of the things I was impressed by is my sense was that Alana is so confident in herself. And I do want to give her parents, you know, she is just one of the most confident young women I've ever met. And I really hope she sustains that throughout adolescence. But she is just so confident. She's perfectly at peace with Yeah, maybe some pieces. And, you know, maybe even the most trusted— where do you go if you're not sure? I go to the most trusted person. I ask, what if they're not right? You know, she's not dismissive, but she's also— I think she has such self-confidence, she's okay with this process of gradually learning more and becoming more confident. So I didn't get the tiniest sense of my worldview has to be this way kind of thing. So, you know, and this is where the boundary between emotional confidence and intellectual confidence becomes sort of interesting and interrelated.

Yes. And I wonder how you would react to this idea that came up as you were speaking, which is in— recently read it in Emile, which I know we both have read— that counter-intuitively, confidence can come not from believing you can do anything and everything, necessarily, but from really understanding everything that you are completely, uh, ignorant about. So the more you are aware of everything you can't do or can't do yet, the more confident you become because you know the limits of yourself, in a sense. And I think that's very connected to just inquiring about the world, having conversations, and the whole foundation of a Socratic conversation.

Yeah, it's been many decades since I've read Émile, so I can't comment specifically on Émile, but what comes up for me when you bring that into the conversation is that both Ethan and Ilana did seem to be kind of confident that where they were in their life process and their learning process was okay, that, uh, it was— that they acknowledge and they understand themselves as learners with this sort of expanding realm of knowledge And the fact that there are vast amounts of knowledge they didn't know was okay, and they feel secure in the notion that as they, you know, grow and live year to year, that they will continue to expand their sphere of knowledge. And I thought that was just, in both cases, I was struck by just how, you know, kind of simple and confident and serene. Maybe most kids, I haven't done this particular conversation with a lot of kids, but It just felt like they were both coming from really kind of a healthy and good place emotionally and intellectually in terms of that serenity on that point. Do you think most kids are? I know certainly by adolescence some kids become very defensive when, you know, one questions the solidity of their knowledge. And I guess I'm used to working more with adolescents, and so even beginning the Socratic process with adolescents, sometimes when it runs into teenagers, teens whose identity and confidence are dependent on holding on to certain things. And so it can be frightening to them. So it's wonderful to see that they— this wasn't frightening in the least bit to these two.

Yes, I think I agree. I as well, when I taught, I mostly taught adolescents, middle schoolers and high schoolers. And I thought at that age it was the beginning of a big drop in confidence. And I, I'm sure some of that must be developmental, natural, but I think a lot of it is not. I think a lot of it is, uh, encouraged by the environment of in which they grow— traditional schooling, the social environment, which in many cases unfortunately is not the most healthy. And this awareness of the process, the place that you have in life, I find is most apparent with people at the two extremes. So children who are just beginning to discover the world and know their place in it and their size in it, and people who have reached a point in self-knowledge where they have accumulated so much that they know the, the vast amount that they really haven't touched. So they're also comfortable in their place in life, but everything in the middle often, uh, is where insecurity comes in, I think.

Yeah, big time. And just going back to developmentally, a lot of attention has been paid to, you know, the 0 to 3 as the sensitive period in terms of, you know, brain development, learning. A second sensitive period that has not received as much attention is puberty. And, you know, puberty is this kind of huge, you know, hormonal biochemical storm where all sorts of things happen. And so, you know, I think just to speak to that a little bit and then going back to kind of Ilana and Ethan, and this is in preparation for adolescence, You know, I think at puberty, you know, every, every child faces mostly subconsciously, occasionally consciously, this awareness that their sort of position in the sex and status hierarchy matters in a new way. And so I think that's where a lot of the insecurity of adolescence comes from, especially in contemporary society. I'm extremely interested in traditional societies and how they had rites of passage and more of a structured, coherent universe. And they had much less adolescent dysfunction, almost none. Whereas our, certainly our American society is full of adolescent dysfunction. Actually, I'd be interested to know if there's less in Mexico. But, you know, my hypothesis, and actually I've seen this with a lot of kids, is when, you know, young people like Ethan and Alana have, this goes back to the conscious development of personal identity, where they're intellectually comfortable and confident and fluid, One can't speak to the social hierarchies they might face in particular, say, middle schools when they get there. But just having this foundation of intellectual, moral, and spiritual confidence, I would say, will make them stronger even when they hit the storm of puberty than they would have been otherwise. Does all of that make sense and resonate for you?

Just so I understand it, let me say, are you saying that that maybe some of the, like you say, the awareness of a place in a hierarchy that comes in, uh, in puberty, that that is something that is developmental, that in, in some senses you can't help. But what we can control is how, uh, a teen reacts to that and an adolescent reacts to that. And an adolescent that has a, a strong foundation of a personal identity will react to it in a much different way than the adolescents we see today, right now.

I might not be saying quite as much as that. And maybe to go to particular situations, um, you know, I think if somebody is bullied, that's painful, you know, verbally, physically bullied, that's painful regardless. So I'm not suggesting there's any kind of a magic pull vis-à-vis bullying. Likewise, if an adolescent really struggles to kind of find the kind of partners or mates that they might aspire to, this is not also not a magic bullet against that. But insofar as another challenge in adolescence is a conflicting sense of identity vis-à-vis the politics, religious views, worldviews, I would say this is a protective force against the those sorts of additional destabilizing influences. So for instance, an adolescent who enters the maelstrom and maybe is only having mild bullying and mild challenges with respect to partnering, but whose whole worldview is attacked or put into question or doubted because of new information. You know, that's a whole new destabilizing influence. And so, I think that having this kind of intellectual, and I would say moral confidence in terms of I know who I am, I know what I believe, I know what's valuable to me, you know, and I do think it's not just intellectual, but it's also social-emotional that, you know, I expect Ethan and Ilana both are in the habit of talking to their parents about all kinds of things, you know, and so there's this sort of source of stability such that kind of, you know, disappointment, bullying and disappointment in the hierarchies of especially early adolescence may not be as disabling as they otherwise might have been. Does that nuance kind of make it seem more realistic?

Yes, that helps out a lot. And even your question of wondering whether it's the same in Mexico, I think, implies that it can be different across cultures, or there's, there's different foundations that happens across cultures. And obviously, the moment we become conscious of the culture that we impart on the people around us, especially our children, then that's the degree of, uh, maybe not control, but of influence that we might have, that we can become conscious about the culture that we belong in and we impart, and then make a difference there.

Well, exactly. And, you know, my wife's from Senegal, and in Senegal they just don't have the scale of adolescent dysfunction we have here. It's a completely different feeling. You know, occasionally there are teens who misbehave a little bit, but, you know, if on a scale of, you know, 1 to 10, U.S. adolescent dysfunction is an 8, 9, or a 10, you know, in Senegal it's maybe a 2 or a 3. It's just totally, totally different sorts of situations. And I would kind of expect that Mexico is somewhere in between, and maybe urban Mexico might be closer to US standards, and maybe rural Mexico kind of closer to Senegalese standards in terms of all of these destabilizing influences have not yet hit as hard, at least in rural Mexico, as one finds in the US. And does something like that resonate a little bit?

Yes, I think that's right. And I think maybe there's— I'm sure very many different variables at play, but one that I have observed that I think it's true is that the kids that have a stable foundation and do not— that are not often subject to this destabilizing force is— are those teens that are thrust into real responsibility early. And in many cases in rural Mexico, that's not a conscious choice, right? That is a product of necessity because they are forced to maybe work early and study and stuff like that, or maybe just work, unfortunately. But then because they are thrust into real responsibility, they have a sense of who they are much quicker, and they're much more quickly, and they are, they have a stronger foundation, I think, as a result.

Huge. Maria Montessori talks about valorization of the adolescent, and she actually, her middle school was kind of a farm work, not very academic actually. Her ideal middle school was sort of a work, working farm and bed and breakfast where the Teens would run the restaurant and grow the crops and everything. And I think her very strong instinct was that that kind of doing meaningful work in the community— quite aside from the excesses of child labor, but doing meaningful work in the community— is absolutely fundamental to adolescent well-being. And I would agree. And I think, as it were, the war against child labor has gone the reverse direction, where now most teens feel absolutely no meaning, no value, no sense of purpose. At puberty, I think of them as biologically programmed to step up to meaningful roles in the community. And instead, you know, desks in rows and classrooms, being told what to do all day. Their only potential roles are either, you know, sports or orchestra or getting good grades in the class. So very, very limited. And the adult world mostly doesn't take those seriously. I mean, in a funny way, at least in the U.S., sports is probably the place where they're taken most seriously. An adolescent athlete is actually celebrated in a way. But yeah, I think that sense of having a role in the community is invaluable. And again, I don't want to overstate the value of the Socratic piece, but at least in a Socratic conversation, we are taking the ideas of the teens seriously. Seriously. And it's as if they're encouraged to speak in the community and to have a perspective and to defend it and to be responsible for their moral and intellectual beliefs. So, you know, I don't want to oversell it. I think there are lots of dysfunction that Socratic alone won't solve. But I do think that there's kind of a real— both an identity creation as well as a role in society function that's healthier in Socratic than in the standard school modeling. Does that resonate?

That does resonate. I wonder then if we could say something like that Socratic is a piece or is a side of the coin that does something similar to, for example, what you were talking about in the Montessori way of putting real responsibility into a teen or having them do meaningful work in that, in a good Socratic conversation then, you see in a very real way how your ideas are taken in by the community of people that you are listening to. And you then, by seeing their reactions, by seeing your reaction to your ideas, you see the limits of that, the limits of your knowledge. In the very same way that having meaningful work to do, putting out meaningful work, you understand the limits of what your body can do and what your mind can do and all these things together in the community. You get feedback, a real feedback in these in this way from both spheres.

Big time, big time. And I actually, you know, in the Socratic world, I'm thinking of Plato and Aristotle, thinking and talking about moral ideas is fundamental. I mean, Socrates goes around and, you know, young men would follow him around listening to him, you know, partly to humiliate the older, but also I think thinking and talking about moral and political issues. It's a different universe, but I recently read Facing Mount Kenya by Jumo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, who was raised in a traditional society and then was educated as an anthropologist under Malinowski. And in looking back, he wrote a wonderful Facing Mount Kenya, kind of an anthropological study of his own tribe, which he had gone through initiation rites when he was younger. But one of the fascinating things is the society is structured that the elders talk through as it were, judicial cases and the boundaries of culture, that there's a structure based on the wisdom of the elders thinking and talking and arguing about key issues in society. And then that filters downward so that sort of a core function in society is thinking and talking about how this works. And only the elders, you know, can actually be the authorities. But I think this human instinct to think and talk and argue about who we are and how our society works is fundamental. And so if we send teens to schools where that piece, that moral identity piece of their life, that kind of practice for moral judgment piece of their life is, as it were, cauterized, it's— I think it's a horrific perversion of human nature not to support and encourage moral and intellectual dialogue in adolescence.

Yes, that reminds me very much about a conversation we had last year in person that I thought of, which became— it's still very vivid to me that it can often be the case for a young American student, for example, that up to 80% of their interactions with other human beings are with people their age, and there is really no interactions with elders, with, uh, adults that are other than their parents, and not even very much from their parents themselves. And the importance of these traditional cultures, maybe one ingredient of it is that they are in the same table, right? They're in the same meetings and maybe not the same roles because there's a difference in experience, but there is a sense in which they know they're part of that same conversation.

Big time, big time. And again, I'm going to try to keep our time within reasonable boundaries because you and I could probably go on for 3 or 4 hours, maybe longer. But let's try to chop it up into week by week. So as always, so many marvelous themes to discuss. I look forward to speaking next week. Have a wonderful week, Francisco. Bye-bye.

See you next week. Bye-bye.