Great Advice from Feynman

This is wonderful advice, all the more poignant for coming from Richard P. Feynman.  Some of you are cautious about whose advice you take—only to be expected after so much gaslighting—so read up about Richard Feynman.  He was brought up in Brooklyn, and eventually found himself working at the Manhattan Project.  He cracked the safe in which the reports of the several research groups were kept, left a note saying "Guess who?" and locked up the safe again. 

He wrote a 3- volume work that encapsulated all his notes, called The Feynman Lectures on Physics. 

To get back to the advice in the photo, his main trust (to young people) is:  find what you like to do, and really get into it. 

There is a message here for parents.  The kid who finds something she is enthralled by in their core curriculum is very fortunate.  You have to hedge your bets by providing a wide variety of activities for your kid. 

If your family is suspicious of higher education, your child can learn to downplay it.   It seems as though being well-educated is something a person should be proud of; and indeed he or she ought to be proud of it.  But in these times, a person can often be more effective as "an influencer," but not a cheap commercial influencer who has a huge following on social media, for the sake of getting rewards from companies; but to encourage people to think in rational ways, that science isn't bad, that vaccination is usually good; that politicians don't always do as much as they claim to do.  And maybe he or she (your child) could be a better influencer if her or his academic credentials are down-played.

Regrettably, once a youth gets into college, getting more and more qualified often depends on focusing on less and less, until people with the highest qualifications often know just a huge amount about a very narrow number of things.  This does not have to be the way it is.  Richard Feynman himself knew a huge number of things; he was widely read, he certainly knew how to crack a safe.  When he was alive (he might still be alive, but I think I remember hearing that he had died) people in society respected educated people.  People with wide knowledge and experience (that doesn't automatically come with a college degree; you have to go out and get that sort of knowledge and experience) were respected.  But we didn't know how resentful certain sectors of society were, and how suspicious of, college-learned people.  Bank loan officers, people with whom farmers had to do business, were often college educated, and these people did not usually have the customer's interests at heart; it was no wonder that many people thought of educated folk as ripoff artists. 

Well, we could be, I suppose.  When I looked in the eyes of certain of my students, I could see a certain question taking shape: "do we need to know all this, just to rip a few people off?"  I had been thinking how helpful they could be, with the additional information.  But some of them were focused more on knowing just how little they could get away with.  Being other-directed is something one absorbs from one's parents.  Unfortunately, some parents would just as soon their kids did not learn to be too altruistic. 

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