How do you balance this with the fact that kids have short attention spans, or that some kids just aren't great at making themselves put in the hard work necessary to become great at something without prodding from their parents?
From what I've seen, at least, it seems that children don't have short attention spans intrinsically; they just have short attention spans for what they find uninteresting.
All aristocrat-peasant societies socialize their population to flatter the aristocracy, including by pretending to be interested in their interests; democratic-market societies like the United States are aristocrat-peasant societies in which everyone is treated as an aristocrat. (See www.historyexplained.com for the theoretical model of aristocrat-peasant and tribal societies; but bear in mind that its model of history is wrong. Read _1491: New Revalations of the Americas Before Columbus_; had the northern American Indians only been immune to smallpox, we'd think of democratic-market societies as a shoddy alternative to the one true way of self-controlled tribalism -- which the Middle Ages, too, had been fitfully evolving into.)
So, the problem is not that children have short attention spans; it's that they haven't learned to fake interest in the manner expected in Western societies. (From your name, I'm guessing that you're American or Canadian.) When a Western child, or a member of most types of tribal societies, is bored, he or she doesn't try to hide it; by contrast, when genuinely interested in something, such a person exhibits a passionate interest uninhibited by concepts of aristocratic reserve.
In short: figure out what a child is interested in -- or rather, let the child figure that out for him- or herself -- and all the rest should come together on its own. Just hope it's not an interest that leads to graduate school in the humanities...
You seem to have started with the premise that "tribal" societies are superior in some way. I disagree.
Additionally, kids have parents because they're extraordinarily unskilled at balancing the long-term perspective against the here and now (granted, many adults aren't much better). I find it hard to believe that just letting your kids do whatever they want is really the path to greatness for most kids. I think parents should help kids explore their passions but it seems there's a balance to be found where you also don't let your kids give up as soon as it gets difficult. My parents did that too often, and my wife's parents pushed her through the rough spots. I won't go into the whole results, but it's clear to me which is superior.
What aspect of the 'tribal' spirit, as I noted above and as discussed on historyexplained.com, do you object to? I'm sufficiently fond of freedom, and sufficiently disgusted by cringing, fawning, and gossip magazines, that I find such a social structure admirable, although, on the other hand, I'm also fond of not dying over a point of honor, so there's that too. (And note, part of my premise above is that "tribal" doesn't have to mean "primitive.")
Also, please explain why you think it's important for parents to push children when they run into difficulties. I agree that there is a certain amount of basic knowledge, which everyone should acquire whether they want to or not (I've even found benefit from statistics classes). But we're talking about passions -- that is, recreations, not basic knowledge. I agree that encouraging someone to get through difficult spots -- to reassure them if they fear failure, to provide superior knowledge and skills on an as-needed basis -- is a good thing, but the whole point of a passion is that it's something that the person in question _wants_ to do.
That's a good point, but I think that that lesson would be better learned in the core-knowledge curricula (which the child's going through whether he/she likes it or not) than by wrecking his/her enjoyment of computer programming or violins or model-building or first-person shooters or whatnot.
> had the northern American Indians only been immune to smallpox, we'd think of democratic-market societies as a shoddy alternative to the one true way of self-controlled tribalism
Interesting. I don't know. But why did the Eurasians discover America in the first place and not vice versa?
Because Europeans knew that there were civilizations other than their own in the world, Europe had things it needed from the rest of the world, and Islam was in the way (and if you think the Muslims are bad now, you know nothing about the 15th century). Columbus wasn't trying to discover the Americas any more than Da Gama was; he was trying to get to China.
The American Indians, meanwhile, were basically unaware of worlds other than their own. When Columbus arrived, there were at least five distinct civilizations in the New World (the North American Indians; the Mesoamerican civilizational group, which included the Mexica; the Maya; the Peruvians; the Amazon River civilization), none of which had significant contact with, or knowledge of, any of the others -- while the West had known about China and India since the days of Darius, at the very least, and so was accustomed to the concept that there were very different, but accessible, peoples in the world.
I mentioned _1491_ in the parent post; again, read it for more information.
It's a mangled version of Marvin Harris and Fernand Braudel.
I tried to read _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, and gave up in disgust; Jared Diamond is a Green with an axe to grind. In the case of the American Indians, geography and disease did ruin them (or rather, it ruined the North Americans and the Amazonians; Mesoamerica and the old Inca Empire are predominantly Indian to this very day, and the most recent Maya revolt against the Spanish colonists was in 1911); but most of the time -- more or less all of the time, in the Old World -- ecological factors are secondary to cultural ones. Look at the history of rice: it was adopted as the basic grain of Persia before it was adopted as the basic grain of China (and long before Japan), because good Zoroastrian piety inspired the Sassanids (IIRC) to import this miracle grain and thereby ensure the prosperity of their peasants.
I think that what's wrong with Diamond is best summarized in his book _Collapse_, the only work I have ever heard of that discusses how civilizations disintegrate and makes no reference whatsoever to Rome. His thesis is that civilizations fall due to ecological mismanagement, so he doesn't mention any that don't fall due to ecological mismanagement -- even the Roman Empire itself! (He admits in the preface that not all civilizations fall due to ecological reasons, but that suggests that the title of his book -- _Collapse: How Civilizations Choose to Fail or Succeed_ -- should have been something a lot less authoritative.)
For what I think is actually the case, look up Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_, an "old-fashioned" -- or rather, newfangled -- work pointing to the importance of civilizational cohesion (Ibn Khaldun's asabiya, but not the normal Arabic definition of it) in the rise and fall of civilizations. Turchin is a population biologist by training, and tried turning his modeling techniques to history -- whereupon he was astonished to discover that a simulation with one variable and about four rules accounted for pretty much the whole range of human experience. The gory, algebraic details are in _Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall_; but _War and Peace and War_ is more accessible and has more historical examples.
One other sidenote: guns and steel were not the fates of the two societies that Diamond was probably thinking of (certainly the two that came to my mind). It's a widely-held legend that Cortes and Pizarro defeated the Mexica and the Inca respectively by attacking with massive numbers of technologically-superior forces.
In reality, Cortes was the leader of a band of adventurers that never got over 2,000 men and was normally closer to 150, most of whom carried swords and crossbows (and abandoned their clumsy, hot steel cuirasses for Mesoamerican quilted-cotton armor); he had about 30 horsemen at the beginning of his campaign, and in one of his decisive early battles was down to something like 15. He didn't win by a technological advantage; he won by his personal courage, the courage of his men, an enormous amount of luck... and the fact that the Triple Alliance thought that it was a good idea to leave a small state that hated them like poison, Tlaxcala, independent -- twenty miles away from Tenochtitlan. (This meant that they could fight the Tlaxcalans to collect a lot of prisoners for sacrifice, and give their men a lot of promotions: the _Codex Mendoza_ has a table of Mexica level-ups that would embarrass Squaresoft.) A friend of mine once quipped that any civilization that thinks that _that's_ a good idea, deserves what's coming to them.
Pizarro maneuvered his way into a badly confused war of succession, imprisoned/befriended one of the two leaders, murdered him, and then pulled the same trick on the other one -- he won through politics, not through power. Even then, it took the Spanish government forty years of campaigns with regular infantry to fully conquer the Inca Empire (I've always wondered why Spain accepted Pizarro's treacherous conquest as opposed to telling him to stuff it, but his having already shipped back an entire roomful of gold bars and two roomfuls of silver may have had something to do with it)... but, again, it wasn't technology that let Pizarro win, it was politics, the same kind of thing that let the Manchus conquer China.
See _Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest_ for details on both. You may even want to read _Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness_ -- an extremely, exuberantly partisan Catholic history of the conquest of Mexico (but still adventuresome, rousingly entertaining, and meticulously researched), which omits not a single detail except Hernan Cortes' five Mexica concubines. (Cortes was married at the time, and was a fairly serious Catholic. As a fairly serious Catholic myself, I have often tried to figure out what on Earth he thought he was doing, but have more or less given up on it.)
There's a fine line. As I mentioned above, our six year old is taking piano lessons. Sometimes he isn't motivated to practice, and there is a fine line between instilling a willingness to work hard and backing off a bit to give him the opportunity to decide for himself what he wants to do.
I'm not sure that kids are immediately equipped to understand the importance of hard work for something they are passionate about. It's certainly possible to instill this in them without being a taskmaster.
