Don’t Project Your Mountain Town Envy Onto Your Kids

“The easiest way to turn your kids into geniuses by the time they’re seven is to front load huge amounts of experience, including dangerous experience.” This is the advice of the late John Taylor Gatto, the writer and educator who is perhaps best known for his passionate polemics against compulsory schooling. For Gatto, one of the ominous signs of  “well-schooled kids” is that they are easily bored, afraid of being alone with their own thoughts, and in constant need of affirmation from authority. To avoid this outcome, Gatto recommends that parents “challenge their kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues.” The bit about turning kids into geniuses is less about molding our progeny into mini Mozarts than it is about nurturing a desire for adventure that is inherent in all children. Gatto, again: “After a long life, and 30 years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.” He is fond of an anecdote from Richard Branson: the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group claims that when he was four years…