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AABoyles comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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LW/CFAR should develop a rationality curriculum for Elementary School Students. While the Sequences are a great start for adults and precocious teens with existing sympathies to the ideas presented therein, there's very little in the way of rationality training accessible to (let alone intended for) children.
There's this book series.
Cool! Who is this Kris Langman person?
I think the General Semantics folks have some of this.
http://www.generalsemantics.org/the-general-semantics-learning-center/teaching-materials/
Specifically this one seems useable.
EDIT: There is also a version for kindergarten. Rationalist parents, take note!
Around the age of pre-k and kindergarten, a rationalist parent can probably do best by modeling and responding to learning and exploring the world -- responding to all those many why-questions, along with carefully narrowing down their appropriate use; building vocabulary; and modeling that you expect to find answers to questions (let them see you Googling!).
Young kids learn a lot from the modeling of their parents, and treating the world as explorable and knowable is a very good thing to model.
Unfortunately, they will get a lot less of this sort of modeling, and a lot more formal curriculum, in the average elementary school. YMMV, of course, but in general the best academic thing you can give to a young kid is your knowledge-seeking personality.
Curriculum for very young kids might be better used as a guideline; for example, the tasks demonstrating tone might remind you do say "oh, he sounds angry" either when reading aloud or when someone really does sound angry. But the odds are if you are playing with your kid, you will already hear them make their toys talk in angry, sad, scared, etc. voices. Likewise with the vocabulary; your kids should be picking up synonyms from regular conversation (at this age, more understanding than using), and are primed to learn best from natural conversation, not guided lessons.
Which is not to say that if you do find the curriculum beneficial that you are doing something wrong (in fact, using additional resources for better results is doing something right -- as long as you are checking that you do get better results). My point is only that curricula generally gains value as kids age, and is usually more valuable in a classroom environment than in a home one.
from 1966! but the curriculum is awesome. I will definitely use some of that for my children.
Awesome is probably bad news, because it means the "great filter" of rationality is still far ahead of us.
If we imagine General Semantics as a Rationality Movement 1.0 and LessWrong/CFAR as a Rationality Movement 2.0, the outside view seems to suggest that even after we publish a successful and influential book, create an organization, inspire dozens of famous people, and create easy-to-use textbooks for elementary schools and kindergartens... still the most likely outcome is that half a century later someone will dig in history to find our remains and say "oh, shiny!".
Yes and no. I think lots of advanced stuff (for a suitable def. of 'advanced') will just not be 'common knowledge' for multiple generations until it 'fixates'.
Most movements fail. Most ideas die before they get momentum. That doesn't necessarily mean the ideas were bad, just that they had bad luck or the circumstances around them weren't just right.
And/or a video game!
It'd be neat to maybe see something similar to Socrates Jones: Professional Philosopher but for rationality-related stuff.