A while back, an old school friend was excitedly telling me about another friend's child who had pulled off an impressive feat: memorizing an entire encyclopedia of dinosaurs. The kid could not only remember but correctly pronounce names most adults stumble over. Pachycephalosaurus. Archaeopteryx. That level.
As my friend marvelled, something didn't sit right with me. Not doubt about the child. Children absorb information at a very fast rate. What bothered me was what we, as a society, choose to celebrate as intelligence.
The memory game
Consider what is actually happening here. We are celebrating a child's ability to store and recall facts about creatures that vanished millions of years ago. Dinosaurs are fascinating, and there is nothing wrong with a child being obsessed with them. My question is different: when did storage and recall become our definition of intelligence?
The odds that this encyclopedic knowledge will ever be practically useful in the child's life are roughly the odds of finding a living T-Rex in your garden. Yet we shower the achievement with praise, and the praise reinforces exactly this kind of learning.
The praise trap
When we lavish praise on a child for feats like this, we hand them a framework for success and self-worth. The child starts equating their value with their ability to memorize and recite, with being "special" in this one narrow way.
That kicks off a perpetual quest for specialness, a never-ending competition with all the other "special" children. (Speaking from experience here - been there done that - I used to be the "topper") Who knows more dinosaurs? Who can recite more digits of pi? Who has more capitals memorized? And my favourite - The speed of light is 299792458 m/s (Yes, I wrote it from memory)
The finish line keeps moving. The only ones actually winning this race are the edtech startups bragging on Shark Tank India about how many random facts their customers' kids can remember, facts those kids will never meaningfully use in their lives.
What we're missing
While we are busy celebrating rote learning, the skills that actually shape a life sit ignored:
Understanding ourselves and our place in the world
Developing clear, meaningful goals
Building and maintaining relationships
Navigating hard moral and ethical decisions
Learning to cooperate with others
Developing self-worth that doesn't depend on comparison
None of these fit neatly on a stage or a certificate, so they lose to the dinosaur encyclopedia.
The competition paradox
The deeper irony: in our rush to raise "special" children who outperform their peers, we undermine the one skill they will need most, which is working with other people. When every interaction becomes a chance to prove special status, the natural pull toward cooperation gets suppressed.
A child who has been praised repeatedly for exceptional memory may simply refuse to join activities where they are not immediately the best. Their self-worth lives in being special, so any situation where they might be average, or might need help, feels like a threat. If you don't believe me, ask your class "topper".
You can watch this play out in school competitions, group projects, playgrounds. Children stop sharing what they know because helping a classmate might shrink their lead. Peers turn into rivals. Knowledge turns into currency to hoard. The joy of learning together gets replaced by the anxiety of staying ahead, and mistakes stop being opportunities to grow and start being threats to identity.
The result is the opposite of what the competition promised. Instead of excellence it produces isolation, and instead of achievement, anxiety. Worst of all, it leaves children unprepared for a world whose basic fabric is collaborative effort.
Reimagining education
Maybe the thing to rethink is what we mean by education in the first place. What if, instead of optimizing for information retention, we optimized for understanding existence and ourselves, for interpersonal skills and strong relationships, for ethical reasoning, for collaboration instead of competition?
Memorizing facts still matters. It absolutely does. But it should be a tool in service of these larger aims, not an end in itself, and definitely not ammunition for a contest.
Every time we praise a child for being "special", it is worth pausing to ask: what message are we really sending? What behaviour are we reinforcing? There are things worth celebrating that every child can already do, no speciality required:
Helping a classmate figure something out
Showing curiosity about the world
Doing their daily chores diligently
Talking respectfully with people
We might have to clean our own lenses to notice these, though.
The mirror of change
I can't write all this without a humbling admission: we cannot hope to transform education without first transforming ourselves. Critiquing the system is easy. Suggesting what others should do differently is easier still. The real work begins with honest self-examination.
Look at how often we adults act out the very behaviours we are critiquing. We compete for promotions, chase status symbols, the larger house, the shinier car, measure ourselves against our peers' achievements, and seek validation through external markers of success. How do we authentically guide children toward collaboration and genuine learning while we ourselves are caught in the same web?
Our children are reflecting back to us our own unresolved relationship with success, achievement, and self-worth. That is an uncomfortable thing to sit with, but there it is.
Finding our own north star
Before we can help children see what truly matters, there are questions we have to answer for ourselves. What do we genuinely value beyond money and status? How much of our own self-worth is tied to being better than others? When did we last choose collaboration over competition in our own lives? What does a meaningful life actually look like, to us?
These are not easy questions, and the answers tend to expose conditioned patterns of thinking we would rather not see.
This isn't about becoming perfect parents or educators. It is about starting our own journey of growth and bringing our children along as fellow travellers, not as students to be moulded.
The real legacy
Perhaps the greatest gift we can give the next generation isn't a head start in the race for achievement, but the understanding that there doesn't need to be a race at all. We can show them, through our own transformed way of being, that a meaningful life isn't built on being better than others. It is built on being better together.
The change begins with us. Today. Not in curricula or teaching methods or educational policies, but in our own understanding of the world. When we truly understand existence the way it is, we can help guide our children toward what really matters in human life.
Let's begin with ourselves. The children are watching, and they are learning from who we are, not just what we say.