Erik Hoel wrote a series of articles 1, 2, 3 on how aristocrats raised geniuses.
The series makes for an interesting comparison to Scott Alexander's articles such as Book Review: Raise A Genius!. Scott has also offered criticism of Erik's first article. I cite Scott here mostly due to his relevancy to the history of this site.
I don't have kids, but when I do I'd like to homeschool and maximize (with restraint and compassion) for producing genius.
What I found most interesting (in Hoel's third article) was his "key ingredients" for raising an aristocratic genius:
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(a) the total amount of one-on-one time the child has with intellectually-engaged adults
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(b) a strong overseer who guides the education at a high level with the clear intent of producing an exceptional mind
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(c) plenty of free time, i.e., less tutoring hours in the day than traditional school
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(d) teaching that avoids the standard lecture-based system of memorization and testing and instead encourages discussions, writing, debates, or simply overviewing the fundamentals together
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(e) in these activities, it is often best to let the student lead (e.g., writing an essay or poetry, or learning a proof)
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(f) intellectual life needs to be taken abnormally seriously by either the tutors or the family at large
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(g) there is early specialization of geniuses, often into the very fields for which they would become notable
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(h) at some point the tutoring transitions toward an apprenticeship model, often quite early, which takes the form of project-based collaboration, such as producing a scientific paper or monograph or book
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(i) a final stage of becoming pupil to another genius at the height of their powers
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Notes -
As someone who also turned 30 this year and feels similarly, I just wanted to chime in.
I've been exposed to more and more people who had good liberal arts educations recently, mostly because of Andrew Sullivan's podcast where he always asks people how they grew up, but I also found myself jealous of Oppenheimer's education reading American Prometheus and I recently started watching old Firing Line episodes where education can come up and it resonates similarly for me there.
I think how year 30 cut through for me was in realizing how deeply rich the fruits of liberal intellectual pursuits can be, how on one hand you can offhandedly know Freud was flawed, but on the other you can read him, and other texts around him, and gain so much understanding in the process. I got a good math education because that institution seems to be doing fine, but liberal arts education failed to persuade me similarly.
I think the pernicious effect of losing out on a good liberal arts education is to invite "bad" liberal arts, which is to say, bad arts, bad media, bad values, to simplify. And I feel like my 20's were very much indulging in those things, while the media around me was saying this is good, this is fine, normal, etc. I think if you are a talented young person, "entertainment" can feed off that talent in a way, without giving much back in return.
I've landed somewhere a bit opposite from you, very much in solitude as I've removed most of the people from my life, but a few of them happened to be really toxic, and breaking from them left me with a pretty big wound I've been trying to recover from. So I've been trying to treat it as a Rilke-style isolation that I'll eventually be able to come out of stronger while I realign my values and pursue a wider and more fruitful liberal education to help me do so.
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