Are you corrupting
your kids?

My Granddad was unhappy when teachers tried to suppress my imagination. To see a happier two-some, mouse over my "X".
When I was nine he thought I could make a violin.
I did.

Kids come into this world with capacities to comprehend, learn and provide solutions for society's concerns.
    Unfortunately, when kids reach ten, this capacity diminishes because developmental milestones have been missed; their reasoning powers have been polluted; and imagination, so vital for creating and inventing, has been suppressed.
   They have been saddled with a burden of ignorance. And, if their life continues as so many lives before them were compromised by ignorance of parent's, schools and communities, they will continue this process of inhibiting our future by corrupting their own kids.
     An obsession with IQ, heritage, ethnic influences and educational institutions help cloud this issue.
     Exceptions do occur in this tale of human tragedy. Usually, these exceptions are spawned under circumstances that society would identify as perilous if pursued. Instead of finding less repugnant formulæ to accomplish similar results, society continues with its need to ignore its own ignorance as it short-changes our kids.
     Some carry this process to ridiculous extremes as they increase their fortunes and followers because they know how to take advantage of basic human ignorance. Don't look to these leaders for these formulæ – they prefer an ignorant customer base, particularly one that believes it is not ignorant.
     If more intelligent individuals emerge, they are usually in such a minority that those who have been comforted by their own ignorance, dismiss findings, messages or proposals of those who would disturb their tranquillity with truth.

      The fact remains – young kids have a capacity to learn languages. Older kids have difficulty because their language learning cells have died. We have known this neural information for over 100 years. Is there really a valid answer for delaying learning of another language until the kid goes to high school?
     Kids can learn to touch type easier than they can learn to hand write. I have found that many so-called intelligent people don't even know what touch typing means.
    At five, my daughter had access to two typewriters and two computers. I wrote a small program on one of my computers that taught her to touch type. By the age of seven she could type at 50 words per minute. (The typesetters union standard was only 35 words per minute.)
     Because she could express her “thoughts” by writing them on paper, she enjoyed the accompanying success as she skipped two grades and received a Scholar of the Year award from a large school while we were in England. At 12 she also won a silver medal in Canada's National Science Fair competition for her artificial intelligence computer program.
    Of course, my daughter's computer games were restricted to mind games like Scrabble and Tetras . She was discouraged from using acronyms and was proud that her teachers considered her letter and essay writing far beyond her age.
     My daughter was not particularly gifted. All I did was use a formulæ employed by my grandfather when he influenced my early education. His formulæ was to foster imagination – and an essential part of his formulæ required him to dismiss any claim that I was “too young to learn”.
    In future postings I will cover examples of “Kid Corruption”. In the meantime, you might consider how your imagination and development was corrupted when you were a child. You might also consider the possibility that you may be ignorant of what your kids could achieve if you gave them more than shelter, warmth, food and love. They deserve more!
     There is one lesson for which I am particularly thankful I received from my granddad.
    He taught me to live . . . without gods!

                                            Anton Kozlik 

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        *Terms and            Definitions
My articles may contain words or phrases that may infer different meanings to different readers, or my reader may be unfamiliar with a term or its definition. I feel it is important to know what writers meant when they used a word or term.

ignorance — Ignoring data that is available to process. (I disagree with most definititions for ignorance as most of them focus on an absence of education, and not on the fact that an individual chooses to ignore what is known. (See cognitive dissonance)

stupidity— Inability to process data; lack of knowledge that data exists. Unintelligent.

touch typing — Typing without looking at the keys.

cognitive dissonance —
Filtering out information that conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one’s beliefs.

Editors note: I will be repeating the “cognitive dissonance” definition for quite a while since it is practiced by so many — known by so few!