The following is an archive entry from a chat with Talha where he had asked me how I had learned English as he had done it by consuming media in English. I mentioned the same along with mentioning how my mother sometimes used to make us write about random things such as some character from the cartoons we were watching and so on. He later mentioned how internet-era kids are so better at English comprehension, on which I objected on the ground, although their English is better, overall today's content is mostly slop and it has made kids dumber. I then explained that by slop means how the context for the videos or the kind of content kids watch is fake. Kids continue watching baby stuff and that's also because parents want to continue thinking their kids as babies. During the chat, he had shared a sample video for what his nephew watched when he was <1 years old which was this.
The next day, I replied to the message with the link to this video and wrote the following which makes this blog entry.
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I just watched it now.
I am not well-informed about the topic to form any opinion for now about if it's good, neutral or bad for babies to watch this.
But in a broader context, my point is this:
These kinds of videos that are made around educational context (language in this case) get wrong about learning just as what Duolingo gets wrong. It's kind of like baby version of Duolingo.
Duolingo's philosophy is that social media use different tactics to addict people to consume slop there, but we could use the same tactics to addict people to learn things. There hasn't been any consensus, but I think there's a lot of people who disagree with this philosophy including me. It's same as how some ideological groups claim to "liberate" people's thinking, but what they do is to get people out of one dogma, but put them in another dogma. True liberation is to make people think for themselves. Similarly, true education would make people safe from unhealthy habits and addictions, not use same techniques to make them "learn" things.
In the video, you could see that words were matching with the visuals which is good, but what is bad is that babies also understand what's happening, and what's happening is that a bus is going somewhere and people in bus are doing weird actions while singing a rhyme. The situation was based on reality, but with an artificial/fake context.
This should not make you think I am against purely imagined worlds. Doraemon is something I have watched a lot, like too much in my childhood. A lot of things were imaginary, but there was some real context around it. Cat robots don't exist in real, but friends do help each other. What I mean by context is the story -- what is actually happening. And this is what babies and kids naturally pay attention and what they should pay attention to. While, the learning would happen automatically. For this reason, I think Doraemon is an excellent cartoon for kids, because the un-intentional learning in it is way huge.
Now, this was a bit tangent because Doraemon isn't for babies, and you'd agree that Doraemon is suitable for kids older than babies. But check out this cartoon that I used to watch when I was a kid (not a baby, or I wouldn't remember 😂) : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJuI8TslmruBKI-b0R3InlY7gW17b-U_J
Now this world is purely imaginary, but the context is real.
Also, if you watch this cartoon, you will realize how slow it is, which I think is very important thing. The main issue with YouTube kids video is that kids won't want to stop watching these videos, because they get kind of addicted to them, which is because how fast-paced overly-colorful these videos are which hyper-activates kids' brain in a wrong way. I don't remember exactly where, but it was maybe a DW Documentary where they showed that experiments were done with rats who were shown constantly blinking colorful lights on a monitor, and they noticed observable anxiety or hyper-activity in these rats. This thing might not be as harmful for adults, but for children's brains, this is very bad.
But apart from that, I also don't buy the assumption that kids can't understand adult stuff. Maybe try showing space videos to your nephew and he might not get as bored (getting bored is also a good thing btw, that is when all creativity happens), or he might not dislike them. Now, I don't mean to suggest an extreme view of this (any extreme is bad), but the reason I'm insisting on this is because there in a complete consensus on the opposite extreme that kids are dumb by default and thus, they should only do childish stuff.
This is a point that Aaron Swartz hated when he was kid. He used to do interesting real stuff from very young age and hated it when his environment assumed that kids are dumb by default (See this essay he wrote when he was 14: https://web.archive.org/web/20020819014933/http://www.aaronsw.com/school/2001/01/21/ . He had similar thoughts when he was even younger). Henrik Karlsson makes same point in his Apprenticeship Online essay. Actually, this is also what my mother used to believe and thus she did not treated us like kids the way people usually do.
People would look at kids and babies, and notice the childish stuff and how dumb they are and think that children are supposed to be like this, but they fail to notice that precisely because they think this, they themselves create such an environment which actually makes them childish and dumb.
Tangent thought, but this is a pattern I have noticed so many times, that if someone what's the most fundamental truth I have figured out in life that other people don't get, it's this. Most of human behavior is stuck in re-inforcement cycle. We see people, we notice they act in a certain way, and create models and systems according to that way, without realizing that people act that way because the previous systems or environments encouraged that kind of behavior. These systems are self-fulfilling prophecies. If on mass level, people have an assumption about human behavior, that assumption will become true, because everyone would be behave as if it was true, actually prompting people to become that way even if they originally wouldn't.