COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES

Teach your kids to be self-starters and they’ll succeed in life in spite of what they don’t learn in today’s failing schools—that’s the thesis of this self-satisfied collection of warmed-over advice on raising creative children.

Schank’s (The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind, 1991) two children (now adults) serve as primary examples of the success of his child-rearing method. He contends that smarter kids share six traits: verbal proficiency, creativity, analytical skill, gumption, ambition, and inquisitiveness. Parents need to take the responsibility for cultivating those qualities in their children because today’s schools, which are still grooming children to work in factories, stifle curiosity, originality, and enthusiasm for learning. What’s a parent to do? Present children with varied experiences, from playing games and solving puzzles to taking adventurous vacations. Encourage failure. Identify and nurture their special interests and talents—unless their talents are leading them in an unprofitable direction, in which case it is best to reroute them. Teach them that grades don’t matter, except when they do matter (apparently a paternal stance that thoroughly confused his own children). Parents will flinch at other recommendations, including his suggestion that children be allowed to experiment with anything, even sex and drugs. Or his enthusiasm for sports, recommended for even the “geeks, dorks and dweebs” who are not natural athletes (because sports teach children how to exploit weakness and to separate winners and losers). Leaving the playing field, the author offers proposals on how to deal with schools or teachers who make children miserable. One pointer: intimidate the teacher (a tactic borrowed perhaps from the hoodlum’s handbook of how to break the rules).

Questionable values piled atop a mound of platitudes.