Why do we treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work"?
Plum Tree House, designed and built by Devan Anthony
On a family Zoom last Sunday, our son Devan shared some thoughts that are emerging for him and his partner Esther about the coming years for their young daughter, Evelyn. "One thing is for sure," he said, "her education won't be centered in a classroom". The same day I stumbled upon this article about the power of learning by doing projects of one's own.
"It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams.
"If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those." - Paul Graham.
It reminded me that Devan has designed and built a lot of treehouses, as well as furniture, audiophile speakers, sculpture, beehives, businesses of various scales, a commercial botanical extraction facility, and a camera-controlled security system for that facility. He does have a degree from a name-brand university, but it makes me wonder: what if his education had focused on projects rather than grades?
Article: A Project of One's Own