The ideas I had been studying these days come from Carol Sandford. I am not sure how to summerize her work. In the case of developing a person’s (be they children, teens, or adult) capabilities, it comes in a couple ways:
1. First, linking intrinsic motivation with something meaningfully contributes to something outside of them. The catch? This is something the person chooses for themselves, based on what Sandford calls “essence”. Rewards and incentives are still external. Whatever is chosen may be beyond the child’s current capability.
2. A framework (a way of seeing the world and self) is given so that the child can grow his own capability in order to accomplish what he set out to contribute. Those things like observation, problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking are developed by the child, and driven by the child’s intrinsic motivation.
There is a lot more to that, and I am still learning and applying this myself.
Something like this does not require a child to have genius level iq.
She has a lot of resources that sprawl all over, including numerous podcast interviews and blog posts. She had been doing this for 40 years now. If you ever heard of things like “regenerative growth” from the business world, it came from her.
The biggest thing about what she teaches is a different way of viewing the world. How to identify the paradigm, epistemology, and frame, including your own patterns of thinking. The kind of problems she is addressing cannot be solved through the paradigm that generated those problems.
I would say start with _Regenerative Life_ unless you intend to try applying this in business first. I think she has community somewhere specifically for educators and homeschoolers, but it is radically different because it is developed from a regenerative paradigm.
But it wasn’t until I started trying to examine paradigms, or heard Sandford’s approach to growing people, that I understood why it works for indigenous families, or how it can work in the modern world. Those toddlers want to contribute something meaningful and the indigeous parents let them, growing their capacity. When the scope of the contribution expands from helping the household to helping the community, helping the society, helping the world, such a kid becomes powerful agents of meaningful change.
1. First, linking intrinsic motivation with something meaningfully contributes to something outside of them. The catch? This is something the person chooses for themselves, based on what Sandford calls “essence”. Rewards and incentives are still external. Whatever is chosen may be beyond the child’s current capability.
2. A framework (a way of seeing the world and self) is given so that the child can grow his own capability in order to accomplish what he set out to contribute. Those things like observation, problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking are developed by the child, and driven by the child’s intrinsic motivation.
There is a lot more to that, and I am still learning and applying this myself.
Something like this does not require a child to have genius level iq.