Teach children Personal Knowledge Management!
Not equipping children with actually effective tools to create knowledge for themselves is setting them up for deep-seated disilusion instead of personal empowerment and forfillment.
In hindsight, looking back on my education right until I started figuring out personal knowledge management in university, I really want to say — education lied to me. It lied about what makes good knowledge, and it lied about how you get it. And as it came, I was frustrated with my apparent inability to actually learn and build on that knowledge.
It was frustrating, and it cultivated a mindset that How to Take Smart Notes described as “the planner” — optimizing how to get through a learning environment rather than thriving in it, imposing structure on oneself rather than finding the flow of knowledge work, where the creation of the knowledge drives the structure.
It was, overall, a lack of control, a lack of self-actualization, and thus fundamentally traumatizing. We all want to actualize ourselves. That can mean some tough journeys and uncomfortable self-discoveries — but ultimately, we should not struggle against those externally imposed structures. The challenge of self-actualization is dealing with our old habits, especially our comfortable ones. Breaking comfortable habits can be a nasty ice bath.
There are, in my opinion, plenty of things broken in our school system, but that is not what this post is about.
Children deserve to self-actualize, especially in those precious years when they have not yet been disillusioned entirely by all the feedback to the contrary. Giving them the mental tools to actually work towards that, even in just one domain of their lives, is a step towards that and breaking one brick out of the wall of adultism that has unfortunately been growing around children. Every bit of power we can give them will help lessen the lack of respect and actualization they encounter.
That is why I think we should teach children and teenagers personal knowledge management. They can profit as much from learning to capture their thoughts and develop true knowledge that stays as adults can. And better yet, they can learn before they have to digest the large world of information that we adults find ourselves confronted with in the world of work and academia. They can be prepared.
Children have so much creativity and a willingness to discover the world.
Probably the first thing they will discover learning PKM is what can come from that creativity and that curiosity when we bring it into loops. When ideas and knowledge not only persist on screen or paper and all the mental load disappears, but evolve because you can revisit them. How idle musings can turn into entire stories and walls of fun knowledge.
There is a large challenge here. This idea does not exist outside the very large scope of how to raise children. And while I suspect the initial experience of gardening your knowledge would be full of euphoria and a rush of creativity — when it hits the boundaries of a stringent world of numbers and milestones, those boundaries may quench that spark.
But then, PKM is not a journey of simple milestones either. It is a long process of self-awareness, reflection, and growing understanding, struggling with the habits needed to make it work and the evolving nature of our own thinking as it interacts with the systems we learn. Failure is part of it all. But every time you taste that first bit of progress, you will come back to the promise.
The spark that PKM carries is potent because it can bring us mental peace and personal fulfillment. It frees our minds from the seemingly fallacious habit of not wanting to throw any thoughts away even as they claim all our working memory. Because of that effect, it is hard to quench the willingness completely.
By nurturing it early, we can only help. Every bit of preserved imagination, every bit of mental quiet, every bit of cognitive sovereignty in the face of mounting tasks and deadlines and open loops that tear at our executive function — being prepared a bit more and not having to learn it by chance but from being well-informed with all the scientific knowledge we can muster — is worth it.
And personally, for one? I dare us to dream what happens when creative minds learn to fully unleash their brains early.
This was a less conventional article than usual. I don’t like posting proclamations of theory like these, especially as a new public poster. But the frustration I find in hindsight of my own journey through learning and the school system towards academia and knowledge work won’t let me go. The What If, What If, What If, keeps on going.
I want to motivate others to think about this. How can we carry the knowledge we now have outward? How can we transport complicated and subtle cognitive theories and life experiences into simple, direct, yet resonating framing?
I have ideas for starting a series on tools like Logseq, which put some pretty hard-to-grasp ideas at the foundations of their design, ideas whose opinionated capture in the user experience can confuse the common person starting to use them. I think those bits of knowledge can be stepping stones. If we can reach the common user on the internet and the students at the university, we can reach further.
It is going to be an interesting journey. I hope to see some others garden their plots and create a beautiful tapestry together.
