Fresh Start Brainstorming Part 1 ("a totally different approach")
My absurd idea was a time machine of sorts to look into a teen's future. So they could see if they took a certain path what that self might look like. Literally "trying on different hats" and seeing those versions of themselves down the line.
I was thinking about your concept, and yes, having a window that peers into what my life could be like takes the zest out of it. People need to have the opportunity to make their own mistakes and learn from them. However, instead of this experience being for teens, what if it was for parents?
No one judges teens more than their parents. They are critical of their friends, their clothes, their music, and especially their personality. There is no malice intended. Parents care, but it tends to come out in a negative way. Anyhow, is there any value in profiling various types of successful people but starting their journey from when they were teenagers? It could be interesting to show someone's journey through the choices they made, and what impact their parents had on their lives. Did they feel encouraged, understood, alienated?
Another thought I had was how does having immigrant parents affect a teenager growing up in America? I don't have an answer for that, but I just started to think back to my childhood in comparison to my neighbors who are white.
Also, I wanted to share this. It's might be relevant:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/grow
I definitely didn't think it was a good idea because it took the agency away from teens. It could potentially make them more worrisome and afraid of every next step they make. Kids today tend to be more risk adversed and so seeing into their different futures might affect them negatively.
I also definitely agree that perhaps my invention came come with the parents of teens. I know from experience that my parents were the first to instill fear in me, of course only to protect me, but as I grew up as my own person I was able to make my own choices outside of my parent's bearings and stop the vicious cycle of fear.
His comment also made me think I should look into the dynamics of an immigrant's family dynamic, and can personally attest to the many differences there.
Leroy's feedback made me think of this TED video:
And from the KidZania article, I found these passages quite insightful:
López believes that his young visitors are getting ready for a better world, whether they realize it or not. “We are empowering them to become independent,” he said. “What they love most, on the second or third visit, is their independence. They have their own kidzos; they can make their own decisions. This is their world, where they are not being told what to do. Even if you go to Disneyland, you are guided—you are supposed to walk a typical way. But here children are by themselves. We don’t tell them anything. Just cash your check, get money, and start spending money—that is the only thing we tell them.”
A key tenet of much education theory is that children’s play is not meaningless fun but, rather, an important developmental process that serves as a preparation for adulthood. In progressive kindergartens, building with blocks or dressing up is often referred to as “work.” Maria Montessori was so struck by the preference shown by children for practical activities, like sweeping, over playing with toys that she remarked, “In the life of a child, play is perhaps something of little importance which he undertakes for the lack of something better to do.” Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, who argued that play was an essential element of children’s social and moral maturation, identified several developmental stages. In the preschool years, play is often symbolic: a child might pretend a box is a car that he or she is driving. Later, children introduce rules into their games, which accounts for the byzantine variations on tag that emerge among third or fourth graders.
They all agreed that they loved getting paid for their work. One girl withdrew from her handbag a thick wad of bills: five thousand kidzos, she said. They all carried iPhones—“my social-media folder has over a thousand notifications,” one eleven-year-old boy told me, with affected weariness—but insisted that they would much rather be at KidZania than in a virtual world. “On the phone, you can’t really feel your happiness,” one girl said. “What a boring thing, just touching a screen,” another added.
They said that KidZania gave them what they desired most of all: a sense of autonomy. “Whenever you’re at home, your parents say, ‘You need to do this, this, and this,’ and you say, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ ” the boy with the overwhelming social-media presence told me. “But, when you’re in KidZania, you feel like you’re an adult, and you say what you want to do.” His favorite activity was the karaoke bar, because he wanted to be a singer—a quite different career from that of his father, who works for the al-Sabah family, Kuwait’s ruling dynasty. But KidZania also helped him to better understand the challenges his parents face. “In Kuwait, parents and adults have responsibility for everything you do,” he said. “But in KidZania it’s different—it’s like kids rule the world. That’s really fun, but you can also learn how hard and complicated it is, and how adults feel when they work. I have learned that being an adult is actually hard.”
