Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school

James_Miller

Although my 8-year-old son likes his teacher, he is frequently bored at school. He attends a high quality suburban public school in the United States. He has a lot of traits in common with LessWrong readers, and we would like advice for what he can do to counter his boredom. Many of you must have found grade school more or less tedious. What were your coping strategies?

I don't think this is an optimal or especially good way of dealing with bullies unless the bullying is so serious that it is a threat to the child's safety. It encourages a habit of appealing to the authorities whenever things are suboptimal, instead of developing interpersonal skills to deal with the problem without an authority. It teaches the child to depend on authorities to save them when things aren't going his/her way.

In my school at least, being a "snitch" had serious social consequences. They were despised, and often bullied more, and more furtively. Someone who can stand up to a bully, on the other, was seen as brave, as a leader.

Also, there are certainly authorities who sometimes offer help in the adult world (as Desrtopa notes) but often an appeal to an authority is difficult or impossible. What do you do if a coworker verbally bullies you? Or an in-law gets nasty? A friend of friend?

Okay, why I think this is a bad idea:

1) It teaches the child that power is in the hands of bad guys and authorities.

2) It is a strategy that is dependent on having a genuine authority that is sympathetic to one's cause (which may not always be true).

3) It is unlikely to directly teach the bully a better way to behave, and is likely to get him/her in a lot of trouble that might affect the rest of the bully's life, especially if his/her identity is revealed (especially ethically problematic with a young child).

4) A person, especially a child, might misunders... (read more)

-2Decius13y

So, do you advocate Ender's solution?

4ygert13y

You know, this environment is probably as close to the Hobbesian state of nature as it gets in modern first world countries. The solution to that has traditionally been for society to create a government to hold over itself, a leviathan able to be applied to. Thus, violence is curbed, by the threat of intervention by the overseeing power. As in the world, so in this microsim. Is this a desirable state? As someone who leans more towards the libertarian side of things, I think the answer is no. But despite that, there are two very valid points. The first is that like it or not, this is how the world is. You can try to set up an alternate system of governance, but if you play in a certain society, you play by their rules. Or overthrow them and institute your own rules, but that is a task of much greater scope. Second, there has to be some rules. Life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, after all. In the "state of middle school", it's not short, but it's pretty nasty and brutish. This problem has to be overcome somehow, and the established way to do it is by government, that is to say in this case by authority figures. Have you got a better way? Many libertarians over the years have tried to hammer out alternatives, but as of now it's still an open problem.

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Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school

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Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school

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