In the book, Why We Drive, Matthew Crawford warns about something being lost in all the work cars now do for drivers–antilock braking, traction control, radar cruise control, and their accompanying alerts:
“Car makers have attenuated the natural bonds between action and perception, interposing a layer of representations. The problem with a word or a chime is that of arbitrariness. There is no necessary, inherent connection between the symbol and what it means. The driver has to do some work of inference and interpretation to attach meaning to it. Inference is a slow, cognitively costly activity. It is the basis for our higher intellectual capacities, but if our basic motor functions of negotiating our way through the world are made to depend on it, the result is a lack of fluency.”
Crawford explains that supports like those built into cars might be acceptable in an environment “where things happen slowly and smoothly. But driving a car in the uncontrolled environment of the street, with its sudden, unexpected contingencies, is done best if we are able to rely instead on the ‘fast, frugal’ pathways of embodied cognition.”
That sounds like real life for adults. Is your child’s education preparing them for the real world or something else?
“Be less helpful.” That was Dan Meyer’s mantra in all his math education tips. As an example, check out his old TED talk.
Being less helpful isn’t just a sound approach to education and driving. It’s also what makes life more pleasurable. Crawford writes:
“The pleasure of driving is the pleasure of doing something; of being actively and skillfully engaged with a reality that pushes back against us. Only then do we feel the progress of our own mastery. In skilled activities, we sometimes recover the joy of childhood play, that period in life when we were discovering new poets in our own bodies.”