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Did societies that placed children in hereditary professions from childhood outperform societies that allowed adults to choose their own path?
...parents do not intend for him to work at that Chinese restaurant when he grows up.
But more to the point, we've seen the results of childhood specialization in sports, and while it has lead to improvements in technical quality among youth players, we also have to question the impact on the broader society of all the wasted potential of the failures and burnouts. What do we do with the mathematical equivalent of a Ballerina who gets too fat?
Or consider the crisis of young baseball players getting Tommy John surgery on their elbows.
The children may long to identify only with the thing they like and are good at, but that doesn't mean it is good for them, any more than letting a kid eat only a single favorite food is good for them.
Personal anecdote, I dated a girl twelve years ago, her family of three siblings all specialized in different Olympic or non-school sports from middle school, to the point that they did alternative high school classes to avoid attending high school which would have interfered with training and competing. One figure skater, one skier, one cyclist. None made it. All are very fat now. The figure skater at least still looks more or less like herself, the skier and the cyclist are both so fat that one thinks of their health immediately upon seeing them walk across a room. By contrast, I've always been a mediocre dabbler, as a kid I played three sports at a mediocre level, and I kept picking up new ones as the specialists left me behind at each stage; my athletic career topped out competitively in undergrad with our club boat finishing dead-last at the Head of the Charles. At 33, I'm probably in the best shape of my life. Not good enough at anything for anyone to care, but I look good naked and man can I ever help someone move.
You don’t need to make it hereditary, or fully hereditary, as you can test the child’s own aptitude and interest. But I also don’t know if we have evidence to compare “hereditary profession in meritocracy” versus “free choice in meritocracy”. In American history, choice and “hereditarian influence” coexisted, as elite children historically pursued a similar field as their parents, with slots always open for talented newcomers. (Consider the Founding Fathers, or our presidents, I suppose). When Britain was dominant in history, there was a hereditarian aspect, as well as when the Ottomans were dominant, or Rome, or France. I can’t really think of a “free choice” nation in history that was dominant, can you? Artisans produced artisans, unless the kid was precocious and gifted.
If the child who is on the math specialty regimen simply isn’t good, then they should be pushed to something else, and this can occur before the age of 8. We could feasibly design a national index to ensure we don’t raise up too many mathematicians. But if the student trains in math and then randomly begins to hate math, well, that’s a problem that occurs today already. It occurs today because our training environment (school and university) is divorced from the work environment (reality), so we produce doctors who realize they like studying rather than practicing medicine, teachers who realize they hate dealing with children, etc. A rather dumb system. But anyway, if the math-trained realize they hate math, they work somewhere else; we say “that sucks”, and give him a less skilled job somewhere else, perhaps where counting is involved. We want this to occur as early as possible though, and today it occurs quite late.
Those kids aren’t getting injured because of some cosmic law thay you ought to diversify activity. They are getting injured because they overtrained a particular muscle through an unnatural repetitive physical movement. There’s nothing to generalize here. Practicing a skill every day is still the rule of thumb for mastery. While that kid is resting his ligaments from the unnatural pitching maneuver, there are still many ways they can be practicing baseball: watching tapes, jogging, improving endurance and diet, or just resting really deeply. But personally, in my ideal world there would be no serious competitive sport, definitely nothing subsidized by schools and the state — sports should be something you do for fun with friends, like a game of Call of Duty, lightly competitive but not neurotic. Sports should be a game about improving your health and having fun, not stats-maxxing.
I think it’s possible that the physical training was so intensive that it left a long distaste for exercise after the fact. I think this is possible. But that has more to do with the training being coercive. There’s lots of people who ran track in high school who now love running as a routine. (Two great books I loved about running, “the loneliness of the long distance runner”, and “what I talk about when I talk about running”, depict a more indulgent and purely positive type of running). It’s also possible they they have an addictive personality and substituted competition for food, or that genetics are involved.
We absolutely do. No society free from nepotism has ever existed, but societies with proportionately less nepotism have consistently outcompeted societies with proportionately more nepotism.
The United States of America. Not only is this literally true comparable to other cultures throughout history, it's our national creed.
I brought up TJS, because it's super direct and easy to follow cause/effect. What about the injuries in Basketball? In youth soccer?
Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them. I should be clear: if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five, I support you doing so. But I expect that if we apply such a theory to the mass of people, we'll start to see the same problems crop up.
Moreso the aforementioned injuries from intensive training than anything else, combined with going from a highly regimented training regimen built around competition to having to steer oneself. They're an example of what happens to specialists left behind in scalable professions.
And if we're starting from age five, training will always be coercive. Many five year olds require coercion to get dressed and to eat. If you're suggesting that a child who wants to do nothing but mathematics should be encouraged, within reason sure I agree with that. But we'll probably run into the same problems we do with athletics. And we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world.
Hereditary profession is not quite the same thing as nepotism, at least that’s not how I took it. Hereditary profession could mean that a lawyer purposefully raises a lawyer and a composer a composer, and that this is expected; nepotism means that a lawyer hires and promotes his kin who are lawyers, and a doctor his kin. My proposal doesn’t entail anything about nepotism, but it would involve an element of hereditary influence on profession. I think 1 in 5 American physicians are children of physicians, and there are 3.5 physicians per 1000 Americans, so clearly the children of doctors are influenced to be doctors.
I don’t follow. Many people in history did one task repetitively for hours on end, eg farming or weaving or milling or fishing. We have cases of people focusing on one skill and they improve in that skill. They might nominally be in school, but they attend special schools that are online and not taxing. So we know that Magnus would spends hours a day on chess. We know pianists spend hours a day on piano. We know marathon runners spend hours a day running. Faker, the best strategy gamer, spent 10-15 hours per day practicing. So it’s been abundantly tried, and the results show that the more practice the greater the result. (With the right kind of practice, and with rest, and with diminishing returns).
How about you just place your kid in fun math contexts for 3 hours a day, and then an hour a day of challenging practice, and then the rest is for enjoying life and maybe some exercise? They will be better at math and they will have more free time. They won’t know about ovaries, orangutans, Ontario or Othello, but they will be better at math than anything else you could do. If they want to read a good book, they ask someone. If they want to know the capitol of California, they look it up. Seems perfect to me, just requires each specialist human to trust the other specialist humans. Adirondacks sound nice though. He can go there on vacation with the time and money he has saved up from not knowing about colonial period.
Well you haven’t really shown why that is so certain. If my beloved friend is a trucker, I know that specializing in trucking at an early age will be better for his health, reduce accidents, reduce stress, and increase his earnings. I can’t think of a line of work that wouldn’t be aided by specialization.
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Would I be right in saying that the belief "with a proper training regimen and careful attention to fit, people will organically want to do what society needs them to do" is both true in your opinion and load-bearing for your proposal? That seems like something concrete that is either provable as mostly true or mostly false.
It is true in the sense that people organically want to make money, and want to master what will make them the most money, and the most visible needs of society are (often) financially rewarded when supplied. I would also say that the right kind of training can make someone enjoy otherwise boring work — there are people who can make excel exciting, for instance. And then I would make a separate point that the education of youth should involve reality: the reality of one’s capabilities, the reality of which jobs will fit them, and the reality of what one is expected to earn according to their performance. Current educational models divorce the youth from reality whereas simply eliminating education altogether (though not my proposal) would immediately make reality salient. A 10-year-old working at the mall instead of studying at school sounds awful, doesn’t it? And yet that entire time he is learning the reality of life, that work and money are requirements and that skill and performance matter. When exactly does a kid saliently learn that in school? A 45-min documentary their substitute English teacher plays? That’s not “I am working six hours stocking a shelf” levels of salience and realization and motivation. But that point is an aside and not my proposal, but we should find a way to deeply persuade the youth about reality by the age of 10.
If I can predict your point, it’s that a kid who ought to be trained as a construction worker will opt to attend a school specializing in programming because of the possibility of higher wages. But I think you can persuade the parents + the child that this is not in their interest because reality says it is unlikely, in the same way you can persuade people not to gamble. Note that, if the quality of life for construction workers rises because they get to work earlier in life and are less stressed, then the looming threat of working blue collar is no longer a threat, it’s just a different choice. You will still make money and start a family, etc. I think also just taking money from the super-wealthy and giving it to the employed lower classes is also a great idea which would propel efficiency for a similar reason, that people will opt into specializing in this work because it’s not “the end of the world” being employed there. Classism and over-competition actually winds up reducing efficiency as people opt into chasing the prospect of higher wages when they are better fitted for lower wage professions. But that’s a totally different topic.
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