Loose Change #2

Notes on teaching my child in the age of AI

1. The time has come. My 9 year old needs to start studying. The dining table, which was once confined to housing Amazon parcels, finally has purpose. It now bears - and bears witness to - the family’s combined efforts towards cracking 3rd standard science, maths, english, history, geography, hindi and tamil. It’s a lot - for him, for me, and even for the table.

   
   We go over the lessons, we write, we memorise, we learn, we take the tests. The results aren’t always what one expects but for now, the focus is on sitting in one place for 30 minutes without dramatic sighing. It’s on effort. Ma phaleshu kadachana.

2. I find myself constantly conflicted between sticking to the syllabus and poking my child into slightly deeper thinking. Siddhartha Gautama saw 4 sights which disturbed him greatly, says his textbook.
   
   An old man, a sick man, a corpse and a holy man. This is what my child has to know and this is what my child will be tested on. But I also want my child to think about why Siddhartha may have felt this way. What would he do if he saw these 4 sights? I’ll share my palace with the poor man, he says earnestly. But I can’t do much about the dead man, so I’ll go to his funeral.

   
   We talk about the importance of sharing wealth, segue into wealthy footballers and how they spend their money and find ourselves with three quarters of the lesson still pending after 30 minutes. He doesn’t want to continue. After some one-sided begging, we settle on ice cream as the right reward for extension. The Buddha would’ve been proud of our non-violent resolution.
   

3. There is no doubt in my mind that what they’re learning in school is of little consequence. But I’ve also read enough pop neuroscience to know that the goal is to teach him how to think. As I find my own usage of AI on the rise, my great fear is that my child will start outsourcing the process of thinking to bots.
   
   The leap from ‘hey chatgpt, tell me what i should know’ to ‘hey chatgpt, tell me what i should think’ doesn’t seem very far to me. I want my kid to know how to collect information, understand bias, process information and decide if he needs to form an opinion - and be okay if he doesn’t have one.

   

   The Reader - Henri Matisse

4. I push my son into a lot of sports related classes. Initially it was the result of the paranoia carried over from my own childhood obesity and late pickup into fitness. But the more I think about it, the more important I believe physical skills and experiences will become.
   
   AI will never understand the joy of scoring goals, finishing a run you never thought you’d initially thought impossible, playing a piece of music, watching your favourite artist live or baking a perfect batch of cookies. At least, for now.
   

5. We are weak willed parents, which means that my son is allowed 30 to 45 minutes of YouTube in a day. One compromise: He can only watch football themed content. The other is that is I watch with him to make sure there’s no brain rot. And let me tell you - nothing ages you faster than watching youtube with Gen Alpha. The jump cuts. The phonk music. The inexplicable shouting. If their brains can tolerate all of this, I have no doubt they are neurologically capable of calculus and beyond.
   

6. What will my child be when he grows up? No idea. But I predict there will be some kind of return to Victorian era jobs where the focus will be on craft and presence. Maybe he’ll be a coach. A physician. An artist. A baker. Someone who works with his hands.
   

7. My biggest fear as a parent is if I’m raising him for a future that doesn’t exist.
   

8. My 9 year old learned how to make dosas with me last year. His spreading of batter needs some work but he’s excellent at waiting for the browning and flipping it down. The way his eyes light up every time he flips the dosa - that’s the kind of joy I want him seek, the feeling I want him to chase, in any interest that he pursues.
   

9. I find the 9 to 10 age group a tough one to buy books for. My son doesn’t have the patience for Harry Potter just yet, but has read through Roald Dahl and David Walliams. I find the Wimpy Kid series to be quite repetitive after a point. His guilty pleasure is comic books. But despite the overflowing number of books in our household thanks to parents who are readers, his uptake towards the written word has been slow.
   
   6 to 7 years ago I really thought I was raising a reader. Now I’m just glad his reading is beyond subtitles on a screen.
   

10. Maybe the real question isn’t what my child will become.
    Maybe it’s whether he’ll still enjoy becoming.