I resolve to

• believe that my child and I are always on the same side.
• trust that my child knows what’s best for her.
• remember that children model better than they listen.
• assume that if an activity is valuable to my child, it is valuable for my child, if I can only see why.
• ask “Why not?” more than I ask “Why?”
• believe that my child will do it if she can do it.
• believe, even in the face of short-term evidence, that my support and approval are among my child’s most important goals.
• look at what’s right, not what’s wrong.
• defend my child when his instincts are right; take a stand against any system that is looking more to its goals than to my child’s.
• take a flame thrower to every unworthy homework assignment that crosses my doorstep.

Happy New Year!

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m fascinated by Wikipedia, and would like to think it is a bellwether of some larger changes in the world.

But is it accurate?

When we go to an encyclopedia, say to the magisterial Encyclopedia Brittanica, we know we are getting the Truth, right?

Wikipedia has recently been getting a “pros and cons” press – entries were vandalized and warped, which led to accusations of gross and widespread inaccuracies. But while that brouhaha was still developing, Nature reported that Wikipedia’s entries, at least in the sciences, were almost as accurate as the Brittanica’s. (It turns out that both sources had quite a few errors in the articles surveyed.)

In What is it with Wikipedia?, BBC News Technology commentator Bill Thompson reviews and comments on the interlocked stories. He concludes:

No information source is guaranteed to be accurate, and we should not place complete faith in something which can so easily be undermined through malice or ignorance thanks to its open architecture….

One benefit that might come from the wider publicity that Wikipedia is currently receiving is a better sense of how to evaluate information sources….

An educated audience is the only realistic way to ensure that we are not duped, tricked, fleeced or offended by the media we consume, and learning that online information sources may not be as accurate as they pretend to be is an important part of that education.

I use the Wikipedia a lot. It is a good starting point for serious research, but I would never accept something that I read there without checking.

Mr. Thompson and I are both fans of Wikipedia. I agree with him about the necessity of an educated audience. I agree that we shouldn’t entirely trust Wikipedia because it can be so easily undermined. But I don’t like the implication when he says he would never accept something he read there without checking.

From what single source would you accept information without checking and evaluating? From the Britannica, since it’s a few percentage points more accurate than Wikipediai? From our trusted elected leaders any time after Watergate? From which one of our news sources? When you get right down to it, how much do you trust your mother’s opinion of you?

I’d suggest a reworking of the quotation above, as a mantra for all of us, to be repeated whenever we fear there may be information lurking nearby:

No information source is guaranteed to be accurate, and all can easily be undermined through malice, ignorance, or hidden goals. Our only defense against the information we consume is to evaluate it warily and skillfully. At any moment, it’s best to assume someone is hoping to dupe, trick, and fleece us. (I don’t imagine anything can protect me from being constantly offended.)

In short, raise your hand (the sinister, of course) and repeat after me: I solemnly swear that I will never, ever accept uncritically any information provided to me. (Unless I really, really want to believe it.)

In the model of intelligence I present in Grow With the Flow, two tributaries help us to help our children learn to protect themselves from the misinformation that assails them. As part of “The Director,” (the third tributary), we want them to become observant and thoughtful problem solvers, who can think logically and clearly, and avoid hasty judgments or conclusions. We want them to actively search for data to test their existing knowledge, and check the compatibility of old and new knowledge; to gather information and evidence with an eye for what’s important, to evaluate information both intuitively and reflectively, to incoprporate emotions as a part of their analysis, even while they manage their own emotional response; and to check the in-the-world performance of everything they think they know. As part of their “Knowledge, External Intelligence, and Information Management” (the fifth tributary), we want them to learn to actively seek knowledge and information, to access a wide variety of knowledge realms, to be able to organize what they know in a way that suits the needs of the situation, to know what information is missing from what is presented to them, and to come to have an intuitive feel that someone is trying to hoodwink them.

Fortunately, the world will give us ample opportunity to help them hone these skills!

I see educating our children in these strategies as a kind of inoculation. We can’t possibly shield them from misinformation, manipulation, and untruth. But we can teach them to cope.

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p. s. It’s a whole different topic, and part of that bellwether hope with which I opened, to ask whether a source like Wikipedia, with transparent and immediate public accountability, may eventually prove to get closer to Truth than the Britannica. I wonder: the errors that Nature found – have both sources already fixed all of them?

In a New York Times article, Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t, Carl Zimmer describes his daughter’s participation in some research about problem solving and imitation in chimpanzees and human children.

If chimpanzees watch someone open a box with a routine that includes several unnecessary steps, they just ignore those steps and open the box the obvious way. Human children imitate: They leave in the unnecessary steps even though they can easily see how to open the box the straightforward way.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best strategy. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn’t understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.

Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. “Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought,” Mr. Lyons said.

We don’t appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well.

Let’s speculate: Usually, imitation and problem solving aren’t at odds: A child models an experienced adult who shows the proper way to do something. (You’ll find a discussion of the critical role of modeling in Grow With the Flow, on pages 158-160. That portion isn’t online yet.) Sometimes the task is one where the child would eventually develop the same strategy by problem solving. Sometimes the task is so complex that generations of problem solving have been involved, and the demonstration summarizes what has been learned. In that case, the reason for all the steps is unlikely to be either obvious or intuitive, so strict imitation is adaptive. As the skills involved in acculturation become more and more complex, modeling may more and more often avoid errors likely to develop from strictly individual problem solving.

We know that other primates imitate. We know they can be inspired problem solvers. We know that humans have pushed both of those cognitive abilities considerably forward. From this recent research, it appears that in human children at least, the default is to imitate when imitation and direct problem solving are in conflict, and that this is likely to lead to efficient learning and knowledge transmission.

Language adds another layer to the process. Our kids often simply watch us do something and imitate. Often we don’t notice they’re doing this – we’re getting the job done, they’re watching how we do it. But when we’re in our teaching mode, adults naturally combine language with demonstration, which is usually very efficient. There are times when modeling is primary: “Hold it this way.” There are times when language does what modeling can’t: “We hold it this way because…” But usually the process is a smoothly integrated one, with language and demonstration, modeling and questioning combining to give efficient learning.

Speculating on apace: Children’s frontal lobes, primary home to our executive functioning, aren’t fully developed until the late teens or early twenties. That is to say, the research described here involves kids who don’t yet have fully developed reasoning ability combined with an ability to direct that ability towards complex goals.

The middle years – when language is well developed, but the frontal lobes aren’t – is one of the great periods of knowledge acquisition. Brains in this era seem more like sponges than at any other point in our life span. During these years, we seem especially attuned to knowledge acquisition – both declarative knowledge (like the names of dinosaurs) and procedural ("how to") knowledge. That’s important, since these are the years when children develop much of the knowledge that they will need to function in their culture. It seems intuitively reasonable that imitation – modeling – would be a preferred mode in these years. It isn’t yet time to challenge, so much as to understand what and how.

Imagine yourself doing this same experiment: demonstrating how to open a box, where the person watching could easily figure out the simplest way to do the task, but where you add in unnecessary extra steps. We know from this recent research that a child would imitate with the extra steps. I can guess how a teenager would be likely to respond. ("That’s stupid.") But what about an adult? My guess: the adult would either use language ("Why did you add the extra steps?” or “Should I imitate your procedure?") or else open the box the sensible way. That would represent another level of human cognitive complexity. But that, in turn, makes me wonder: What would young chimps do? Wouldn’t it be a kick if durng their younger (acculturation) phases, chimpanzees imitated like human kids?

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It seems to be Primate Research Speculation Week around here. I just posted a comment about girl bullies, amusing myself by wondering if they represent a remnant of primate dominance behavior, and whether that will still prove to be adaptive, or whether it may obtain short-term goals like status in junior high school at the expense of long-term goals like satisfying careers.

“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self reliance.”

Merlyn, in The Sword in the Stone
(p. 53 of my edition)

I reviewed World Wide Words in my previous post, because I think it’s a great place for kids to explore words, but also to be able to thank Mr. Quinion for introducing me to “approximeeting.” *

You’ve watched the process: A group of young people move to a meeting by successive approximations, starting with a general idea that they’ll get together, then trading messages among the group to tighten details until they’re all in the same physical space.

I watched. fascinated, a parallel, conceptual tightening, when my sons, home for a holiday, ran into mutual friends. “What happened to so-and-so?” “Oh, he’s in Seattle. Here’s his number,” as the cell phones came out. In the course of five minutes, a group of high school friends tightened a network which had frayed a bit over a decade, reestablishing the possibility of contact through information carried in the devices which would also allow the contact, the next time one of them was going to be in Seattle. Listening, my image of the event was physical – I could see the network tighten.

I remember Dad, when we got a cordless phone, tethered by habit to the two foot distance “where the phone was.” I’m the same with my cell phone – tethered by habit to use it like a surrogate for a “real” phone. For twenty-somethings and teens, it’s velcroed to their lifestyle – often with artistry.

Approximeeting. “Kids are so disorganized. They don’t plan ahead. They don’t know how to be on time. If they didn’t have their phones, they’d never find each other.”

Better to say “We’re looking at new ways to be organized, new ways to plan, new ways to think about being on time.”

I talked to Penelope Brandt, from The Bean Cycle (That’s her behind the counter.) about approximeeting. She’s somewhere under 30, and got her first cell when she was around 20, but she and her friends got together the same way I did a couple generations earlier: called each other, agreed on a time and place to meet. Obviously, there are good organizational and time management skills needed to do that successfully.

But organizing an approximeeting involves an impressive set of skills. Compare these skills to the intelligences proposed by multiple intelligences theory. (See Chapter 3 of Grow With the Flow.) And consider the possible application of these skills, a decade from now, as these teens move into the work force:

* Personal (i.e., social) Intelligence to communicate appropriately with a group of people, sharing others’ plans and intentions, balancing interests and needs of group members.

* Verbal precision and clarity

* Memory for the multiple inputs from the members of the assembling group, and complex working memory tasks as a variety of diverse inputs are fitted into a plan that coordinates the (constantly changing) locations (vectors?) of several people

* A complex visual-spatial mapping of locations in relation to a planned meeting place (including likely travel times – “Well, if you aren’t speaking to him, when can your mom bring you?")

* Strategic control of problem solving – where the problems shift constantly and are frequently interlocked. (There are dozens of skills here, but I’ll grab a sample from some old notes: “includes important considerations and balances information and evidence from various perspectives.")

*Multitasking, time management, flexibility, adaptability, management of emotions, information management, use of technology – all those go without saying.

* Finally, note an important change from traditional meeting models, where one person typically is in charge – every member of the assembling group is using these skills. There are leaders. But planning is mutual and the needed skills are widely shared.

Count on it – what you see in the mall will influence tomorrow’s workplace. Dad eventually got comfortable moving through the house with the cordless phone. Maybe it’s time for me to take Remedial Cell Phones from someone a fourth my age.

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* The term is from Sadie Plant, and appeared in “On the Mobile,” an analysis of the culture of cell phones done for Motorola.

You can download Dr. Plant’s original article

or an abridged version, without the photos (shorter download)

Michael Quinion of Bristol, England publishes a lively discussion of words, delivered to your emailbox just in time for weekend reading. It’s a great site for intrepid young readers and language questers. From words invented yesterday to ones that passed out of use centuries ago, World Wide Words looks at origins, uses and misuses, and often at the history that frames and explains a word.

In his current column, you’ll find malapert, “keen as mustard,” splog, chock-a-block, fulsome, and synanthropic. That last one is a word I’ve needed for decades – I’ve had the concept but no name for it.

A caution: There are lots of words in the world, and you may prefer not to hear some of them around the house. Depending on your child’s age and your standards, you might want to glance over content, and even cut and paste.

Subscribe to World Wide Words

Missing this could be hazardous to your laugh quotient:

Goodbye,Moon

Some serious points could be made about the way we can get to worrying about our kids, or about the increased safety we have brought to their lives, but that would be to run a chocolate mousse through a sieve to make sure there’s nothing sharp in it.