Rage to master
Dr Ellen Winner defined the rage to master as a child's obsessive focus on enjoyable activities, such as playing violin. Those obsessions lead to mastery over many hours of practice. Rage to master is based on a healthy and abundant learn drive. Learn drive can be fostered. We tend to think that kids are born with a rage to master. Instead, many kids fail to maintain their learn drive for psychological reasons, which often come from not-so-conducive environment. Instead of praying for a genetic endowment with a rage to master, we should provide kids with best conditions for growth to foster the learn drive. The biggest childhood enemy of the learn drive is chronic stress. Daycare and early schooling are main sources of stress in kids from non-pathological families. In addition, schooling provides a warped reward system that recondition the brain away from the incentives of the learn drive. At later ages, school leads to a gradual withering of the learn drive for most kids. Thus, rage to master is a privilege of a selected few by the time of adulthood. At that stage, it will be equivalent to inducing the state of "flow" (as defined by Mihály Csikszentmihalyi).
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This glossary entry is used to explain "I would never send my kids to school" (2017-2024) by Piotr Wozniak