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Crucially, a lot of the learning was directed at meaningful work. They weren’t just learning from exceptional tutors - they were apprenticed to them.
The apprentice-like nature of their learning becomes more pronounced as they enter their teenage years.
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If you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of you field.
What if we take this approach to raising and educating children?
An essay
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Over the last year, I read an unhealthy amount of biographies of people that to me are exceptional. I took notes about their childhoods. von Neumann, Pascal, Woolf, Wagner, Curie - and about 30 more.
What are the patterns in how they were raised?
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First, adults put a lot of effort into curating an exceptional milieu for them.
The children had access to highly skilled adults, whom they could observe and talk to.
They were taken seriously.
They had massive libraries. Etc.
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And those who did not have parents capable of doing this, like Michael Faraday, set out to curate exceptional milieus themselves.
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Another nearly universal pattern is that they had a lot of time on their own. Time to be bored. Time to explore their own interests. Time to figure out what excited them.
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The interests where they would grow up to excel were usually first encountered during these hours of solitude. Their passions arose like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom.
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Another pattern, slightly less universal, is that they were tutored one-on-one. Usually at home.
When you tailor your instruction to a specific individual, you can progress much much faster than in schools.
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You can read the full piece here.
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Also, I highly recommend
@erikphoel
's piece "How geniuses used to be raised", which is a sibling to this one.
(I did some of the research for that piece, and working with Erik had a big impact on how I think about these topics.)
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We should provide more children with childhoods like these.
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Here's an audio version.
There's an audio version of my essay on the childhoods of exceptional people out now on LessWrong's curated podcast.
(Its not read by me; I think its Solenoid Entity.)
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