Raising them near this

At the top of the street, when I was a child, was the grass where the football was played.

But it was also concrete, on the bit before the grass started, where we played tennis with lines drawn in chalk that washed off in the first rain. And it was also a particular lamppost, a little further down, that was the wicket for cricket.

Nobody had ever decided the lamppost was a wicket. Older kids used it. Younger kids watched. By the time you arrived at the age where you were playing, you knew which lamppost was the wicket without having been told. The knowledge of which lamppost, on which street, was the wicket for which generation of boys, was held in the bodies of the boys who used it, and passed on without ceremony, and would be gone the moment the generation stopped using it.

Nothing in any archive recorded that it had ever been a wicket.

My daughter will not have that lamppost.

Her grass is different. Her grandmothers are different. The tribe she grows up inside is the one she will pass on, or not. The machines will be part of her tribe in a way they were never part of mine.

Whether the tribe survives the machines being in it depends on whether she, and the ones like her, can hold the old knowing while holding the new tool. Whether she is one of the held, and can become a holder.

I am not worried that children will use the tools. They will. I am worried that they will never learn to design. Because design is learned by doing the construction first, badly, for years. If the machine does all the construction from the start, the capacity to design may never grow.

I do not know if this is true. I suspect it.

Make them lay some bricks — not all of them, but enough that they know what brick is. Let them feel the weight of a paragraph that took three days to get right when the machine could have produced a competent version in thirty seconds.

The generation after my daughter will have known these tools since infancy.

What they design will be what we taught them to want to design. That responsibility is now.