Preparing Sons: Chapter Eight - Part Two

Steven Maxwell is facing a dilemma in the second part of this chapter.   Exhortations about the importance of salvation and teaching kiddos to do chores is standard rhetoric in CP/QF families and shouldn't cause revulsion or cognitive dissonance  in his readers.   When he wades into television usage, however, he's moving into stormy waters.  CP/QF families are solidly united on the dangers of letting children (or adults) watch television shows that haven't been screened for moral purity.   Many families, however, use the television to watch movies or documentaries that have deemed wholesome,  beneficial, educational or edifying.   Other families ban television all together.

Now, Maxwell is in the "total ban" of television camp which is no surprise to anyone who has read along in his book so far.   If Maxwell simply states that he's against all forms of television, there's a potential issue.  The families who choose to let their kids watch TV would be left to made decisions on their own!  The families would need to think about their values, their goals for the family and create an action plan to suit their situation.   Maxwell needs his readers to avoid that slippery slope.  After all, people who purchase a book called "Preparing Sons to Provide for a Single-Income Family" are already more than halfway to joining Maxwell's personal cult.   Rather than risk losing adherents, Maxwell spitballs a series of rules about safe television watching for kids.

If you choose to let your child watch videos, then I have a few cautions. Only let him watch them on rare occasions such as a holiday or when he is ill. Get rid of all cartoon or humanistic videos. If your child is going to watch something, let it either be educational or devotional. (pg. 112)

I think being sick as a kid is bad enough without the threat of being forced to watch a devotional video as well. 

Maxwell has wisely decided not to wade into the terrifyingly divisive debate over whether watching documentaries that have a strong evolutionary bent - like "Planet Earth" - is allowed or not.  Instead, he's left a hole large enough for a truck to drive through.  The anti-nature documentary folk can label the videos as being "humanistic".  The pro-documentary camp can label them as "educational". 

Whew! Crisis averted.

The last theme in the chapter is Steven Maxwell's convoluted rationales for why kids should totally be allowed to use computers as long as the program is not reminiscent of a game or a video.   Honestly, he's simply labeling anything he lets his kids use as "good" and anything he doesn't want them using as "bad" and torturing the rationales to meet the outcomes.    The first part shows Maxwell's limited understanding of educational practices or developmental psychology:

We have chosen not to purchase video games because of the negative appetites they develop. Most educational programs are more "game" then educational because they are designed to appeal to the average child. Unfortunately, that means the software was created for a child who has been raised on TV. It requires a lot of "razzle dazzle" to hold their interest. We want our children to think of the computer as a tool not a toy. (pg. 113)

If educational software programmers were copying television to keep the interest of children, all educational software would be made of videos with minimal interaction with the program.  Instead, educational software uses interaction with the software to keep the student engaged while learning new material.   And, yes, this often means playing a game.  Playing games is an excellent way to increase the speed at which a person recalls facts or applies a new concept.   Most elementary school kids learn the times tables for 1 through 12.  There are lots of ways to memorize those facts, but timed games have been demonstrated repeatedly to greatly decrease the amount of time it takes students to recall the facts.   The bonus of doing this on a computer is that the student is only competing against themselves, not other students or their siblings. 

The next quote demonstrates Maxwell's slim understanding of how children acquire reading skills:

When one of our children expresses an interest and is showing some manual dexterity, we will let him begin to type. At six years of age, Jesse was mastering both reading and typing. He spent many hours using the typing program and word processor. Think about it. Here was a six year old boy having a great time learning. We have found that it does not require foolish, eye catching graphics for a child to learn new skills. If you teach your child using all of the stimulating "eye candy," then be prepared to keep it up as he grows older. Why not let him find out how good it is to learn without all of the glitz? (pg. 113)

Fun fact: people can learn to write without knowing how to read.   The process of copying a letter does not require understanding the sound that a letter stands for let alone understanding what a word means.   Unless the Maxwells are using a really spiffy typing program that makes kids learn to type from listening to dictation, Jesse was not necessarily learning how to read OR write while he was learning how to type. 

Now, if Jesse was using the word processing program to write stories or sentences, that would be an example of Jesse learning to write - but I'm struggling to see how a typing program teaches reading skills.   When I observed students who were learning to type, I would ask them to tell me what the paragraph they typed rapidly in the final part of the lesson was about.   Most students had no idea; they were so focused on typing rapidly that they didn't process the meaning of the paragraph they typed.

Maxwell shares his shaky grasp of how internal and external motivation works next:

This is a very important concept for you to grasp. The benefits in a child's life will never stop if he's able to learn on his own. Later, when he has graduated from high school, he won't have to be enticed or spoon-fed to learn. It may make the difference between your spending vast amount of money on instructor-led classes versus your son being able to dig information out of a textbook on his own. This concept is foundational and can pay huge dividends through your child's life. (pg. 113).

People rarely learn about a subject in the complete absence of internal motivation.  For example, I know nothing about the Kardashian Family because I have no reason to focus long enough for any information about the family to pass into my long-term memory.   

On the other hand, external motivators can help keep a person motivated in the early stages of a learning process when the person's skill level is too low for the activity itself to be rewarding.  I first learned how to code HTML/CSS through Codecademy.  Since the first stages of learning how to code are rather exasperating, the program gives lots of positive feedback in the form of badges during the early stages.  As I got better at coding,  I received more positive feedback from the output that I created rather than through badges and this eventually lead to finding the process of coding pleasant. 

Interestingly, Maxwell confuses motivation type with the method by which a student learns.  A student could be internally motivated to learn the statistics program R! because they enjoy statistics or externally motivated to learn the program because it's a requirement for a job they want.   When I took a statistics class on R!, I was an internally motivated student who felt that an instructor-guided method was the most effective way to learn.   When I was done, I loaned my textbook for the class to a friend.  She was an externally motivated because a project she was working on used R! and she felt that a textbook would teach her what she needed to know faster than a class.

I'll discuss it more in a future post - but CP/QF bloggers and writers never discuss the opportunity cost of lost wages or lost time when a person decides to take a longer period of time to learn a subject rather than pay a fee to take a class.

This last quote is my favorite because it sounds adorable and Maxwell works up quite a sweat justifying it.

When Mary was four she would spend hours using the "Paint" program that came with the computer. It isn't much different from drawing with " electronic" crayons, but she was teaching herself about the computer by using it. She was at ease with the computer and finding learning to be enjoyable. As long as children don't have access to games, real learning is very attractive to them. It can help build the right kind of appetite for the future. (pg. 113-114)

I have no moral objection to small children using computers for the sheer fun of it - and a four-year old playing with Paint would be great!   I'm hoping that Steve's description of Mary being on the computer for hours at a stretch is hyperbole.  Playing with crayons develops a wide array of fine motor skills that using a computer does not. 

Pretending that Mary was "learning" rather than "having fun" is ridiculous.   She learned to use a mouse to interact with a GUI on a program.  That's a good goal - but she didn't need hours of time on Paint to achieve that.  (She probably knew how to do that simply from watching siblings use the computer, anyway.) 

Well, we've learned all there is to know about preparing 3-6 year olds to work.  Next up is the age span of 7-12.