This started as a book review, then turned into random musings on education. Be warned that it’s less well-researched than average.
I first read Scott Alexander’s review of Raise a Genius four years ago, before my wife was pregnant. It was interesting, but mostly from a theoretical perspective. We didn’t have kids yet, and I knew I had at least five years before I had to worry about school for prospective kids. I read the book review and moved on with my life.
Now I have two kids. Now my feeds are all full of people talking about how terrible school is. Now I’m worried about my kids being left unprepared by failing schools, and there are things I think I could do about it.
I went back to Scott’s review looking for actionable information. What can I be doing with my two year olds now to prepare them? What can I do when they’re in school to keep them happy and learning well?
Scott opens his review by saying that Lazslo Polgar, author of Raise A Genius and parent to three chess masters, doesn’t have any secrets. As Scott phrases it, Polgar “starts young (around the time the child is three), focuses near-obsessively on a single subject, and never stops.” The rest of the book, according to Scott, is just Polgar whining about the government, esperanto, and the nature of genius.
Scott then goes on to give some very long excerpts from the book, which he summarizes as “excellent-but-not-that-different-from-common-sense educational advice”. Those quotes don’t strike me as being common sense educational advice. It’s certainly not advice that I ever heard about how to raise my own kids, or saw in practice when I was in public schools.
This is especially true when Polgar talks about things like peer groups (age-match is less important than ability-match) or grades (there’s no need for them). I began to distrust Scott’s summary, and downloaded a copy of Raise a Genius to go through myself. It was a lot more useful than Scott’s review indicated.
How happy are genius kids
One thing Scott gets right about the book is how much time Polgar spends defending “Genius Education”. Most of his time teaching his daughters was also spent trying to convince his government to let him do it. Hungary (at least when he was teaching his daughters) had much different rules about home-schooling than the US does. While much of the text is very specific to Hungarian politics, it’s also useful for understanding the impacts of his method.
To be honest, I was very reassured by his descriptions of how well-adjusted his kids were. Home schooling genius children has a bit of a sketchy history. Norbert Wiener, for example, was tutored by his father and became an amazing mathematician at a very young age. He also was intensely socially awkward for his entire life, and infamously incapable of handling day-to-day tasks. John Stuart Mill is another towering figure raised from birth to be a genius. He fell into a deep depression and almost killed himself when he was twenty. Both these people did great things, but I do wonder if they had good lives.
I want my kids to be capable and successful, but maybe not at the expense of their mental health and happiness. Maybe I would accept my kids struggling a bit more with school, or earning a bit less money throughout their life, if it meant they had an easier time making friends and feeling good about themselves.
Polgar does a pretty good job arguing that you don’t have to trade off between genius and happiness. He claims that raising kids the way that he did doesn’t hurt them, either emotionally or socially. It obviously leads to them being very capable and skilled (at least in a few areas). From what I’ve seen, his daughters (now adults) agree that they weren’t hurt by their education.
When you look at what Polgar did, it’s pretty different than what was done during Norbert Wiener’s childhood. Polgar emphasizes games and holding a child’s interest. He says that chewing a kid out is detrimental. Wiener’s entire childhood was being quizzed until he failed, then chewed out for it. John Stuart Mill’s childhood seems pretty regimented, and it seems he thought that he was denied a normal childhood. His autobiography does talk a lot about things he enjoyed in his childhood, though mentions that amusements were carefully regulated.
For Polgar, the right way to teach children is to make the lessons playful. Keep it rigorous, but also keep finding ways to engage kids in the lesson. Make them fun or useful to the kid. And usefulness is key. He talks a lot about how language learning in particular can instill a love of learning, because kids can see it’s useful as soon as they can talk to new people in a new language. kids want to do useful things, so make education useful and they’ll want to do it.
Genius education also focuses on meeting the kid where they’re at. It’s no use to teach a lesson that’s too hard or too easy. You need to teach each lesson at exactly the right level for the kid’s current expertise. That definitely puts it out of reach of modern public schools, and requires either very good software or a very high teacher/student ratio.
Polgar stays pretty far away from recommending that everyone use his system. He wrote his book to say “it’s fine to do it this way if you want” not “this is the best way to raise kids”. That’s a big difference, and it’s one that he emphasizes a few times. It’s a difference that makes me trust him quite a bit more.
Social concerns
It’s pretty common among people advocating for genius education (at least on the internet) to also advocate for genius rule. You see this a lot when people want politicians (or worse, voters) to be required to pass science tests. You even see this when people advocate cloning one million John Von Neumanns to solve all our problems (yes really).
I don’t like this idea.
It’s not that I don’t want my political leaders to be competent and informed. I really really do want that. The tragedy of covid has been a stark illustration of what happens when your politicians aren’t competent enough.
It’s also not that I think having competent people in a society doesn’t improve that society. Geniuses, researchers, and inventors help improve the world in profound ways. I do want my society to be full of smart, well educated, competent people. I do think that would make life better for everyone in my society, even ones who might not be as competent.
The problem I have is that ways to explicitly put geniuses in power are easily gamed. I don’t like explicit plans for formal genius-based leadership for the same reason I don’t like enlightened monarchy. Sure, if your leader is highly competent, smart, and selfless then your country will flourish. But your next leader may not be as smart (or worse, as selfless). The one after that maybe less. History has taught this lesson over and over.
Similarly, the strong forms of eugenics from the early 1900s were a travesty, and I loathe the thinking that led to them.
Polgar doesn’t want to install geniuses as the leaders of the world. In his own words, he wants “to democratize the notion of genius”. This really comes through in his idea of who could be a genius.
Polgar thinks that, at birth, almost every kid has the capacity to be a genius. Through poor nutrition and bad parenting, the fraction of kids with “genius potential” degrades pretty quickly. Later, schools do a pretty good job of squashing genius potential in the rest of the kids.
If you really believe this, the current way we raise kids is a disaster. It also means (and I think Polgar believes) that we don’t need special programs to insitute genius-leadership. We just need to improve child rearing and education and the rest will take care of itself. I lean a bit more on the nature end of the nature/nurture debate than Polgar does, but the ethic behind his education system seems good to me.
This is important because I want to raise my kids to be competent, but also to be a positive influence in the world. To be moral and just. I think a part of doing that is teaching kids in a way that encourages moral thinking, which is something Polgar has put a lot of thought into.
What to teach
One thing that Scott Alexander really got right in his review was how important Polgar thinks it is to focus on one topic. Raise a Genius emphasizes, over and over, how important it is to focus on one thing at a time. In practice, Polgar does this in two different ways.
The most visible way Polgar focuses on one topic is by choosing to make his daughters into chess masters. He basically says you can choose any topic, but you have to focus on that. Then he allocates 4 hours a day, every day, to studying that one topic. He explicitly encourages parents to choose the expertise their children are going to have.
The second, less visible, way that Polgar emphasizes focus on one thing at a time is how he starts his kids on new topics (like a new language). New topics should be introduced intensively. Polgar says that new topics should be done for 3 hours a day, and time should be taken away from the main specialist study (chess in his case) for those hours.
This is the exact opposite of what public schools in America do. When kids are going to learn a new subject, they spend around an hour a day on it. It’s slotted in with all the other things they’re learning, with no special emphasis.
My take is that Polgar thinks incrementalism is good for improving knowledge of a subject you already know a bit about, but sucks for learning a new subject. This may explain why so many kids come out of public school not being able to do basic math. The one-hour-per-day schedule never gives them the push to get over the initial difficulty.
Based on my own personal experience, I one hundred percent believe the second form of focus Polgar likes is worthwhile. In the future, when my kids are starting to learn something new, I’m going to try and have them focus on one thing at a time and put a bunch of effort into that one thing.
One the other hand, I’m a bit less sold on Polgar’s primary form of focus. Choosing the expertise that your child will have growing up just feels a bit skeevy to me. This is probably a pretty common reaction (especially in modern western cultures), so Polgar spends some time on justifying the idea.
Polgar sees two ways of smoothing a kid’s path to a good adulthood:
- let the kids sample everything, and decide for themselves very near to adulthood what to do
- decide early (even in the kid’s infancy) what the kid will specialize in
Seeing Polgar break it down like this was enlightening for me. My experience as a kid, and looking at child-rearing advice now, is entirely about letting kids sample everything. The common advice to follow your passion takes for granted that this is what you’ve done, so that you’ve sampled enough to know what your passion is.
Polgar’s method is completely centered around the early-specialization option. He decided his kids would specialize in chess, so they did. This is also pretty much what Wiener’s and Mill’s parents did. Their parents both had specific ideas about how their kids should contribute to humanity (math in Wiener’s case and utilitarianism in Mill’s case).
While this feels weird to me and my wife, it also makes some sense. By default, kids have a natural leg up in job areas that their parents know a lot about. This is mainly because their parents live and breath their own work, so the kids learn a lot of the basics without even realizing it.
I am an engineer. My dad was an engineer. The uncle that was most involved in my childhood was also an engineer. I farted around a lot in college, but it seems like a foregone conclusion that I would always end up in some form of engineering. That’s what I saw was valued when I was a kid, and I also had a lot of engineering related books, games, and tools from my family. My parents may not have intentionally chosen my profession for me, but they sure smoothed the way towards the path I’m on now.
My best friend is a musician. His dad is also a musician, and his dad talks a lot about his time with the Beetles and other famous musicians in the 60s. I think my friend’s dad would have been fine if my friend hadn’t ended up being a musician too, but it sure is a good way for them to connect with each other now that they’re both adults.
My brother-in-law is an engineer. My brother-in-law’s dad is an engineer. My brother-in-law’s grandad was an engineer.
One of my uncles has a construction business, and several of his kids work there. They are explicitly following in his footsteps.
These things happen. Family helps family, and if you’re in a given career then one of the best ways you know how to help a younger family member is telling them what they need to succeed in your career path.
I’m not sure how much I can reject choosing my kids profession. I very much want them to appreciate and respect the work that I do. I want them to know how to do it, because I think the work I do is cool and useful. I would be fine with them choosing another job/career/passion, but some part of me would find it easier to connect with them if they went into the same specialization.
Polgar’s method just formalizes this. Instead of incidentally inspiring my kids to be engineers, Polgar would have me explicitly choose it and prepare them for it. They’d be better engineers if I followed Polgar’s advice.
Family and Children
The idea of choosing your child’s expertise when they’re only three years old is strange to WEIRD sensibilities. That idea is just one part of a larger question of how a family should function. Polgar has a section specifically on family, and asks questions that I would never have thought to ask.
The two main questions of how a family relates that stuck with me were on education and on marriage. Education is the whole rest of his book, but his thoughts on marriage were pretty surprising to me.
Polgar starts with this question: how much should parents be able to influence who their kids marries? This question ties into how much parents should have a say in what their kids do for a job, where they live as adults, etc. I understand that there’s a lot of variety in how that question is answered across cultures, but I have to admit that before reading Raise a Genius I thought America’s answer to that question was obviously best.
When I got married, my only living parent had no say in it. It didn’t even occur to me to ask my mom if she was ok with it, or if she thought it was a good idea. If I had asked her, I don’t think she would have felt comfortable giving me an honest answer.
In hindsight, not having any input from my mom about who I was marrying feels… alienated? Like I wasn’t actually connected to my birth-family, and they didn’t care about who I was marrying?
It’s interesting for me to have these thoughts now that I have kids of my own. When I was younger, it was obvious that I didn’t want to have my parents making my life decisions for me. Now that I’m a parent, it seems obvious that I could make my kids life easier by putting my finger on the scale for certain decisions my kids may face.
It’s honestly funny to me how much my internal feeling about the issue changed when I was the parent instead of the kid. I remain uncertain where exactly I’ll fall in the guidance vs total freedom tradeoff, but after reading Raise a Genius I’m much less certain about the total freedom model I grew up with.
Schools and Children
If my culture is leaning away from making any explicit decisions for kids, the schools available to us are doing the opposite.
Public schooling in America actually does make most of the decisions for kids. Until high school, I had to take exactly the classes that I was assigned. Even in high school, I had to choose from among nearly identical english classes, nearly identical math classes, and so on. I couldn’t just not take english (not that I’d wanted to skip it in particular).
The freerange kids movement is pushing against this by encouraging parents and educators to let kids figure things out on their own. Years ago, before reading Raise a Genius, I was very sympathetic to this idea. Then Polgar had me thinking that we need to carefully guide our kids. Then later I read Hunt, Gather, Parent and became convinced that I should let my kids be more independent (though being careful not to let them be isolated).
The huge variety of parenting advice and education advice makes me think that individual techniques are probably less important than the underlying philosophy of connecting to kids and giving them agency. Even Polgar sees the importance of this when he describes how important it is for kids to see the use in what they’re learning.
This is probably one of the main worries I have about our education system in America: that it denies any agency to kids. It removes any purpose from what they’re learning aside from grades.
I really like math. I think it’s an intriguing subject. I used to excitedly agree with my teachers that “when are we ever going to use this?” was a terrible question because learning was its own reward. Now I don’t. Conveying to kids that the thing they’re learning is useful is maybe the most important part of teaching. But intriguing things are useful in their own right. Young kids know this instinctively (at least mine do, as they’re happy to get engrossed in things and spend hours on them).
If a kid asks a teacher how something is useful after the teacher has taught it, I now think that teacher has already failed in their job.
But really, what to teach?
My kids are almost three, the same age Polgar’s daughters were when he started intensive training for them. What would he say I should be teaching them?
Here’s where Scott’s original review of Raise a Genius gets it right. Polgar pretty much just teaches the same topics that our schools teach here in America. He teaches them differently (with the focus, playfulness, and usefulness as discussed above), but the topics are the same with only a few surprises.
Polgar requires the already mentioned four hours of specialist study, and then spends time on social studies, science, computing, psychology, gym, etc. It seems he doesn’t do all of these every day. For example, some days he’ll do social studies, some days science.
One thing Polgar does every day is humor lessons. He mentions that he takes 20 minutes out of every hour of humor lessons for joke telling. I would have loved more insight into this one.
Polgar also sees physical education as being critical, but he doesn’t emphasize it as much as he emphasizes the other topics. Instead of “teaching” it, he just says that kids can do any “freely chosen” activity outside of school for an hour. Given the modern tendency for everyone (kids and parents alike) to sit around on computers or phones all day, I think gym (or at least recess) is probably one thing I’d want to explicitly make time for inside of school.
Polgar doesn’t say anything about this list of topics changing with age, so my guess is that the level of the topic is adjusted to the kid. No matter the age, he’ll still advise teaching computing, social studies, etc. No matter the age, he’ll still hold humor lessons.
How will I educate my kids?
For Polgar, the education of his daughters was his life’s work. They were his project, his day-job and his passion. Educating his kids, to prove that his form of education worked and that girls could be good at chess, was his mission in life.
I love my kids, but they are not my life’s mission. I’m not going to quit my job next year to homeschool them 9 hours a day. I want to build robots, and giving up my life’s work of awesome robots would also not be a fair burden to place on them. I want to demonstrate to my kids that they can dream big and work hard and go far, and then give them the tools to do that. Dropping out of my dreams to raise them won’t do that.
So I won’t be using Polgar’s genius education. I basically knew this going into the book. I wasn’t looking to follow Polgar’s Raise a Genius like a manual, I was looking for tools I can fit into my own family life.
There are a few concrete things that I’ve decided to do based on the book. These are:
- play more games with my kids
- humor lessons. This one seems awesome for them and for me.
- when they’re starting a new subject, spend time with them working on it and emphasizing it in the evenings and on weekends
- enable my kids to spend time with intellectual peers, even if they’re of different ages
- find ways for my kids to be the experts in things, and to demonstrate their knowledge
The early vs late specialization question is also on my mind. I do plan to teach my kids a lot of technical concepts, just because I think it’ll be awesome and fun. My wife will likely be teaching them a lot of literary concepts for the same reason. Given the world we live in, I feel unsuited to choosing a life path for my kids that they’d be taking up 18 years from now. The world is changing quickly, and I’m not sure I could pick something that would be a safe enough bet. I’d rather give them lots of tools and let them dive deeper when they know what they need later.
Other things that I could do for them are pretty dependent on what their school life ends up being. Schooling is a hard problem, and I’m not sure we as a country are getting better at it. It seems like we’re learning a lot of ways that we can improve education, but that they rarely transfer well or they only work for certain kids. It also seems like a lot depends on the teacher, and the teaching profession in America seems totally fucked.
If my kids go to a school that works for them and they do well, then maybe the above list is all I’ll keep from the book. If they go to a terrible school that makes them miserable, then maybe we will try to move. If they’re somewhere in the middle, then we’ll try to deal with it.
Mitigations for a bad school
I expect that my biggest struggle when my kids go off to school will be to continue to trust them. From everything I’ve read and seen, they will know if they’re learning or not. I just need to be able to listen to them. Right now, I want to teach them whatever they want to learn, whenever they’re ready to learn it. If a school isn’t doing that, I want to change things.
Some people actively avoid teaching their kids, because they’re worried the kids will be bored in school. Gunnar Zarncke talked about getting his kids interested in math, but then avoiding teaching them certain concepts. That’s just one example of this trend. But if everyone is avoiding teaching things until kids get to school, that seems like it would slowly bring down the bar for all kids.
A recent Psychology Today article talks about how teaching kids at a pre-set schedule (as opposed to when the kids are ready) can lead to learning disabilities. By forcing kids to learn things before they’re ready, school can instill anxiety that then actively prevents kids from learning later on.
Polgar taught his kids exactly what they were ready for. He knew his end goals for his subjects, but tailored the individual lessons to the kids. He talks about making up games to keep things fun, and tuning the games to be at exactly the growing edge of the kids knowledge.
It almost seems that schools get this exactly backwards. They have a rigid schedule of when to teach any specific lesson, but loose and unclear ideas of what they want kids to be capable of when they graduate.
In high teacher/student ratio education, level setting for individual lessons can happen naturally. That’s hard to do in a modern public school. When one teacher has 30 kids to teach, they’re not going to be able to tune the class to everyone’s level. That is a fundamental limitation of the modern schooling model.
I’m thinking that I should be talking to my kids regularly about how they’re liking school. About whether it’s going too slow or too fast. Then trust them about those things.
If they think it’s going to fast, I can take time on the evenings and weekends to help them. I can find a tutor to help out if necessary. Get them caught up to the point that they can follow class again. This seems important to catch early, so that my kids don’t get a complex about it.
If my kids report that things are going too slow for them, the answer might actually be the same. Certainly in the short term extra tutoring and weekend projects will probably help them to stay invested in learning. Longer term, it may make sense to seek a different class or school.
Resiliency in and out of schools
There’s a common idea that school shapes your kid. It does everything for them: reading, writing, arithmetic. Also critical thinking, morals, and political thought. What if we should all expect less from schools?
What if there are things that are better taught at home, that will actually make school more useful too?
Kids who have agency, and are connected to friends and family, will suffer less from bad schools and prosper more from good schools. Those two keys, agency and connection, aren’t going to form in the school. That’s the main thing that I want to focus on as a parent.
Those keys are also crucial to what Polgar did for his kids. He gave them agency by showing them that they learned useful things. He showed them it was possible to know more than their parents; that the kids could be the experts. He also gave them community and connection. He brought his kids to groups of intellectual peers, in chess and in language learning. I wonder how loadbearing these few things were for Polgar. Perhaps moreso than the individual lessons or what he chose to teach them when.
This is what I’m trying to give my kids now, before they even start school. The understanding that learning leads to knowing, that knowledge is power. Also the ability to connect with people of various ages, backgrounds, and interests. Maybe with this, they’ll be able to enjoy school.