The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

Now we all love having happy kids, and we all love it when they play in the sandbox and create these wonderful cities or villages. And how can we encourage that even more? How can we prime the pump of childhood creativity? And with me today to discuss this is Dr. Eric Daniels. He has his PhD in American history from the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Daniels has taught at the University of Wisconsin, and he is currently a professor at Duke University in the program on values and ethics in the marketplace. Dr. Daniels is currently working on a book discussing how moral ideas have shaped the course of American political life. And I want to welcome you again to the show, Dr. Daniels.

Thank you.

I loved when I brought up my kids. I loved reading them stories about Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin and Henry Ford and Wilbur and Orville Wright. And you mentioned that in your research, the vast majority of books on inventors are not written for adults. They're written for kids. Why?

Yeah, you know, that was interesting. When I first started doing research on the American inventors, I thought, oh, there must be hundreds of books out there for me to consult. But in fact, when I started going to the library and I started checking out books, I realized that a large number of books were aimed at children. And I started thinking about this, why could this be? And I realized that it's because kids are usually more receptive to inventors. They like the idea of creating new things. They like the idea of breaking through boundaries and changing the way people think about things by developing new devices. And they're really receptive to that because that's the stage in their life where they're experimenting. They're trying out new things. They're playing with their toys and parts of the house, yeah. And sometimes parents like to stifle that. They like to say, No, you know, that could get hurt, or this could be, you know, that's not the way things are done, or, you know, that's not going to work. But really, kids love this type of thinking, this creative thinking.

Interesting that you're focusing on thinking, because what's at war there are the parents' thinking methods versus the kids'. The parents are saying, don't make a mess of my kitchen. I remember with my kids, I used to let them crawl in and out of the cupboards and take out pots and pans and take out dry spaghetti and mix it with dry rice and figure out what fits through a colander and what doesn't. All right, come home, and they'd have big pulley systems rigged up to the loft, and they'd be pulling their stuffed animals up and down, or their blankies up and down. And I remember one babysitter's mother came in and was shocked and said that her child could never babysit for my kids again, because everything was so chaotic and loose and that things should be neat and in their place. And that it's a war going on there, because it's a war in thinking methods. Tell me about that.

Well, children and inventors typically, inventors throughout their lives, exhibit these types of thinking methods. But basically it's a willingness to try things out, a willingness to get information, get experiments that show one in reality, what's working, what isn't working. It's children's willingness to actually gather information that might lead them to some new idea, as opposed to their parents' thinking method, which is often very rigid and very much defined by only following what they already know. Let's keep things neat around here. Don't make a mess, yeah. And a lot of times, kids and the story of the inventors coming up with some of these inventions, would show them to their parents, even at very early ages, and their parents would say, that's not going to work. You know, that's not that doesn't.

Can you give some stories about Edison and worms? I remember you have a wonderful story.

Edison had. Knowing Thomas Edison as a child must have been a real, a real joy for anyone that can see the value of this thinking. Edison was a constant experimenter. He loved to toy and to tinker and to try and figure things out. And as a very, very young boy, I think about at the age of five, Edison set himself on trying to figure out what it was that allowed birds to fly. The great at the time, the great problem of human inventiveness was to try to figure out what humans could do to fly. And so Edison, who had a very, very great thinking method. His method was observation and experimentation. So he observed birds. He watched birds for hours, and he tried to figure out, what is it about birds that allowed them to fly?

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And he tried to figure out what is it about birds that allows them to fly? Of course, remember, this is a five-year-old, and so the primary thing that Edison noticed about birds was that they ate worms. So Edison figured there must be some connection. People don't eat worms, and thus they don't fly. And so he collected a bunch of worms, he mashed them up in a kind of a paste, and then he convinced a friend of his, a little girl, to try and eat it, to eat these worms, to see if she could fly. He didn't want to do it himself, and so he fed this worm paste—if you believe it, this worm paste—to his friend, and she tried to fly. She'd jump off a rock, or she'd jump off, you know, a little stoop, and try and fly, and she couldn't fly. And Edison, curiously, he wasn't frustrated by this. He simply checked it off and said, Well, that's one thing that they do that isn't the cause of their flying. I just need to find what it is.

Right? And interestingly, with Edison, he was told that he had an adult brain, a bad brain, and that he would not be able to learn. And what happened then?

Well, Edison, when he went to school, was because of this creativity. He was so almost feverish in his activity, he was distracted by school. The schools at the time in the 19th century, he was growing up in the Ohio-Michigan region, were very much keyed towards very basic learning. And Edison was far advanced from this, but he was bored by it. And so he would stare out the window. He would become distracted, and the teachers thought that he was behind the other students. And so they told his mother, and they told him that he had an adult brain, that he was unable to keep up with students, and that education—and if you can believe a principal saying this to a mother—that education was basically worthless for him. And fortunately for us, fortunately for everyone, Edison's mother didn't accept this. She thought this was an outrage. She knew that her son was incredibly bright because of some of the things that he had already done by that point, right?

So she didn't put him on ADHD drugs or kill his ambition.

No, no, she didn't. She didn't say, Well, look, you know you're stuck, you're going to be a day laborer for the rest of your life because you can't think, or, you know, here, let's medicate you. What she did was she cultivated his interests. She took it upon herself to educate him at home. She homeschooled him, essentially, and she gave him books. She found out what he was interested in, and then found readings or found materials that he could use. And one of the early things that he picked up on was Michael Faraday, the great scientist in electricity, Michael Faraday's experiments. And in that book, Edison was able to read about what Faraday had done and to reproduce some of the experiments.

I think that's fascinating that he went to reality and he reproduced them. He didn't just read them passively.

That was his favorite thing to do. He tried to—I know this is hard for me to get my mind around, though—when he was a young teen, he tried to read Newton's calculus. Even he was just—he was a voracious reader. He loved reading, but the books that he loved the best were the ones that he could take examples from and do them himself. He would do these experiments because it was the knowledge that he gained from the doing, and that's where really the childhood inventiveness, or the childhood creativity comes from. We watch children doing all kinds of crazy things, and what we don't sometimes understand as adults or as parents, is that even as crazy as it seems, some of their schemes and some of their attempts to do things—what they're doing is they're learning. They're learning, and they're adapting their thinking.

And I hope, I hope parents listening will loosen up on their kids and let them experiment and let them have a lot of fun. And I want to thank you so much for joining us today. This is Dr. Eric Daniels, and you've written—or actually you've written two courses—the history of American moral thought and the inventive age in American history. I highly recommend both of those. Thank you for joining us today.

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