The purpose of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

Andy Matuschak has a post up about strengths and limitations of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a powerful teaching tool from Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age. While I mostly agree with all of Andy’s points about what the Primer does well (and poorly) as an educational tool, I think his argument is missing an important piece about what the Primer is for and how it accomplishes that mission.

In particular, Andy is against what he sees as the authoritarian nature of the Primer. The primer isn’t authoritarian, but it’s also not meant for adults. It’s a tool for teaching children, and more importantly for instilling culture in them. Andy is explicitly thinking about a tool he would want for himself, as an adult. Because of that, he mistakenly interprets aspects of the Primer as authoritarian when they are instead meant to be enculturing.

It’s important to remember that the Primer isn’t a sketch of technology that Stephenson wanted to build. It’s a plot device in a book with a very clear set of themes. Those themes can be summed up most simply as “culture matters”. Much of the book is organized around people choosing their culture, and those cultures clashing.

The Diamond Age repeatedly shows people with certain kinds of cultures or mindsets succeeding, bettering themselves, and gaining resources and allies. It also shows those with certain other types of cultures living in relative poverty, ignorance, and self-perpetuated violence. Whatever you think of the reality of situations like these, the Primer is an argument that these are cultural issues that can be influenced through education and enculturation.

Hackworth, creator of the Primer, left his birth culture to join a new one. Finkle-McGraw, who came up with the idea of the Primer, helps to basically found a new culture in the lead-up to the books time period. When they discuss the creation of it, there’s a repeated and explicit call out of wanting to raise children who can critically engage with their culture and either choose it actively or reject and improve it. They don’t want their kids to grow up to passively accept what’s handed to them. The question that the Primer answers is just how do you do that for children?

Is it authoritarian to raise your kids into a certain culture, or with certain values? I’m writing this on the fourth of July. Yesterday I read my kids a book about the Declaration of Independence. Was that me acting as an authoritarian to choose what they learned? Or was it me sharing what I thought were the best parts of my culture with them in hopes that they grew to appreciate it? Is it authoritarian when I choose to read my kids books about history or science or math, or is it me giving them enough of a foundation that they can later choose what to focus on in an informed way?

Andy says the primer chooses what Nell learns, what she does, makes goals for her. As he says,

Nell is manipulated so completely by the Primer, for so much of her life, that it’s hard to determine whether she has meaningful goals or values, other than those the Primer’s creators have deemed “good for her”.

Andy says that this is patronizing and infantilizing. Remember, though, that the Primer is a tool for children. It consistently adjusts what it presents and how. My read is that it provided strong guiderails when she was very young, and fewer as she aged.

This is what schools and parents do now. Sometimes this is invisible, especially if the parents are choosing the dominant culture to instill in their children. Then it doesn’t look like choosing values and goals for your kid, it just looks like “raising them”.

A lot of the arguments our society has around school, church, legacy- and social-media are really about how we raise our kids. We are all trying to pick and choose the syllabus our social version of the Primer uses for our kids. Some people do call this authoritarian, but few people suggest that it shouldn’t be done at all. The question is how to balance a child’s goals with the goals their culture has for them.

Andy is also wrong when he says the Primer chooses all of a child’s goals. This is most evident with Nell’s friend Fiona. She has her own primer, and uses it to pursue and explore her dreams of being an artist and author. As all good parents know, we can’t choose what our children love. We can support what they’re interested in while simultaneously trying to give them the tools to thrive. The Primer definitely has a very strong ideology for what tools and ideas a kid should learn, but it does incorporate and support the goals the kid comes up with on their own. That’s better than some education systems we have today.

Perhaps Andy is responding to a real phenomenon of people wanting to build the Primer for adults. If so, he’s right that the enculturation aspect is unnecessary and disruptive. But the Primer isn’t for adults. It’s for children who still need that kind of guidance.

This is clear in the Diamond Age as well. The book is given to Nell when she’s about 4 years old. In her late teens, she finishes the final puzzle in the book and basically breaks the Primer. The interactive aspects become a featureless plain, and all that’s left are the informative books it’s based on and the tools for thought Andy loves so much. Nell then rebuilds the world of it to suit herself and the people she’s responsible for. Upon reaching adulthood, the Primer turns into exactly the kind of “non-authoritarian” tool that Andy is asking for.

The symbolism couldn’t be clearer. The Diamond Age is claiming that children need the structure of enculturation, implicitly or explicitly. As we age, we gain the tools to evaluate our culture on its merits. We also gain the intellectual self-defense mechanisms to prevent ourselves from being coopted by malevolent cultural memes. When we have gained these tools, we effectively become adults and no longer need that pedagogical structure.

Most people recognize that children don’t have the same forms of intellectual and emotional tools as adults. They need different media, different types of stories, different educational guiderails than adults. I notice myself constantly making decisions about these questions, and the answers I come up with are vastly different than if I were choosing for myself or for an adult friend. I don’t claim that I get this all right, but I do think that my kids are having a much better life than if I didn’t provide any guidance at all for them.

If I were to reframe Andy’s criticism into something that I agree with, it’s this: Children need different types of structure for learning than adults. If you’re building an Illustrated Primer for adults, don’t. Adults have already had their priming, and are ready for the real deal. If you’re building a Primer for kids, keep in mind the cultural impacts that even seemingly benign decisions may have.

What do I want from the Primer

I’ve read the Diamond Age several times, first as a teenager and most recently as a parent of toddlers. The parts of it that appeal to me have changed dramatically as I’ve aged.

As a teen, I wanted my own Primer. Not just to help me learn, but also to keep me on track. To act as an angel on my shoulder, encouraging me in the culture that I most wish myself to exhibit. Assuming that I could have had this, I would not have found the Primer to be authoritarian for modifying its pedagogy to align my short-term incentives with long-term goals. On the other hand, if teenage me hadn’t been able to choose the expressed culture then I would have chafed at it.

As a parent, I’m not sure I want a Primer for my kids. I certainly think that a Primer would be far better than the worst schools in our country. I’m not sure it would be better than our best schools. Part of the appeal of the Primer is that it can democratize the high quality school option, as it does in the Diamond Age for thousands of orphan girls.

While I think Andy missed the importance of the Primer’s enculturation, I also think he was very right with many of his other concerns on its design. The Primer is highly isolating. To some extent, that’s recognized in the Diamond Age itself, where the voice actor reading lines to Nell becomes as important to Nell as a good mother. This human element was unforeseen by the original creators of the tool, something I think is echoed by many real life technologists building learning tools.

It’s also worth considering another of Stephenson’s works: Anathem. In this novel, a modified version of universities (called Concents) takes in children from birth and trains and educates them. The result is a very monastic life focused on a community of discovery. The book has similar cultural themes to the Diamond Age, but the educational method is vastly different. In Anathem there are no high-tech tricks for learning. Simple lectures, books, and interactions with local experts are enough to teach people as well as Nell ever was taught by the Primer.

In Anathem, the students inside concents are given a culture very different from the dominant one outside. While I don’t know how Andy would see this, I suspect it comes off as less authoritarian than the Primer. I don’t think it is; rather, I don’t think the Primer is more authoritarian than the concents. I just think it seems that way because the interactions between students and teachers at a concent read as allo-parenting and mentoring. They read that way because that is what they are, in a way that the Primer tries to mimic.