I don't think it would be ranting to give your full opinion, but it might be just repetition of what you've said before and a waste of your time. I would read it with interest, though.
Children are of course self-directed if they are raised properly, but that doesn't mean that they are not influenced heavily by their environment, or that they shouldn't additionally be somewhat directed in learning. To say that a child is self-directed or self-determining means to me that they have resulted in being self-sufficient, not that they have taught themselves from scratch.
"Learned inspiration" means to me, in part, inspiration that's passed along from a parent to a child. My four-year-old loves the Pixies, for instance, partly because he originally noticed me listening to them. In the moment of seeing me enjoying them, he learned that I considered there to be much of value in the music; and since he not only wants to be like me at this age but considers my opinions to be valuable, he decided to focus on the music to the point that he liked it too, even though I think the dissonance in a lot of the songs initially puts off a lot of people. Similarly he learned to like jazz, even though in his early times we gave him mostly Western twelve-toned classical music to listen to.
Inspiration can begin with a purely internal realization that something is beautiful, powerful, etc.-- like noticing a beautiful flower and spontaneously deciding to draw it, then later developing, in a purely self-directed way, recurring motifs or what have you that develop into a body of great work. But there's no reason that someone can't communicate the notion that flowers are beautiful in the first place, then communicate other bits of information that encourage the child to really look hard at flowers in different ways, with a resulting inspiration based on the beauty of the flower as well as the communicated ideas. At that point, it is all muddled together and the original source doesn't matter much; the child is inspired by the beauty of flowers. Additionally, one's initial notice of a flower's beauty is informed by experience; one, subconsciously or not, compares the form of the flower to things previously thought beautiful.
In fact, nearly all inspiration is the result of communication. A child raised by wolves might look up at the sun and smile at the warmth of it, I guess, or smile at a pretty flower. But you don't see cave-man drawings of flowers so much; you do see paintings of bison. Putting aside for the moment the role of religion in such paintings, the channeling of focus and inspiration was surely the result not only of individual value judgments but feedback from other cavepeople, which had a cultural effect over time.
There's no reason higher-level thinking skills are less teachable than lower-level ones. There is also no reason to suppose that things like drive and intellectual courage are not teachable, as far as I know. I think that these things are taught by caretakers of intelligent children, but in almost unnoticeable ways much of the time. Each smile at something a child does is a validation. Shaping is a quite powerful training technique. In the absence of things tending to stunt one's creativity and mental growth in other areas, simply providing gentle encouragement at small discoveries, which all children make, will teach them quickly to value making discoveries.
I do know that there are plenty of dull children out there who come from average biological backgrounds. I think if I were given a chance to teach them from birth-- and this includes loving them, holding them, etc.-- they would turn out differently. I just see too much evidence of it in the way my kids respond to me, and others' kids. And I'm a complete layperson, with just a particular set of knacks in a few areas.
Last edited by Iucounu; 06/04/10 09:31 AM.
