05-30-2011, 07:07 AM
(05-30-2011, 04:16 AM)DeeBye Wrote: Nah, that's a great post. It forced me to think. I think that uneducated thought is worthless. I'm not sure that my 8 year old son's thoughts stray very far from "Pokemon is pretty neat" or "Hey that car sure is blue!". I'm trying to pinpoint the part of my education where I was taught to think about things critically, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't until I started into the later stages of high school math and some early college courses.
I think I prefer my son's wasted time to be used by watching movies or playing his Nintendo DS rather than by staring out of a car window. I'm not totally disagreeing with you, but I can't seem to find the benefit for choosing passive thinking instead of interaction.
For what it's worth, almost every time my son asks me a question I like to challenge him on it. I like to say "Well, what do you think?".
Don't sell your child short. There's no reason to think that you only can start thinking critically when you reach late high school/early college. You have to start somewhere and some folks start earlier than others and it seems some folks never start at all. I started critically thinking probably around middle school because I had started reading and analyzing when I was young, younger than a lot of folks thought possible at the time.
As to the passive thinking instead of interaction, it really depends upon which movies and which games as to how much true interaction there is. You can get as much thought provoking material from just observing nature, if not more, than watching complete fluff. There's benefits to both, but ultimately, if he's not going to actually use his ability to think to DO something, to have some sort of practical application for all those thoughts, even the most profound thoughts pretty much mean nothing more than just self-indulgent mental masturbation.
Intolerant monkey.