The Dinosaur Effect: Rethinking What We Celebrate as Learning

The Dinosaur Effect

Yesterday, I found myself in an interesting conversation with an old school friend. He was excitedly telling me about another friend's child who had mastered an impressive feat: memorizing an entire encyclopedia of dinosaurs. This young prodigy could not only remember but perfectly pronounce names that would make most adults stumble - your Pachycephalosaurus and Archaeopteryx, if you will.

As my friend marveled at this achievement, something didn't sit quite right with me. It wasn't skepticism about the child's abilities - children are indeed remarkable in their capacity to absorb information. Rather, it was about what we, as a society, choose to celebrate as intelligence.

The Memory Game

Let's pause for a moment and consider what's really happening here. We're celebrating a child's ability to memorize information about creatures that vanished from Earth millions of years ago. Now, don't get me wrong - dinosaurs are fascinating, and there's nothing wrong with being interested in them. But when did we start equating the ability to store and recall information with intelligence?

The chances that this encyclopedic knowledge of dinosaurs will ever be practically useful in this child's life are, let's be honest, about as slim as finding a living T-Rex in your home garden. Yet, we shower such achievements with praise, creating a feedback loop that reinforces this particular type of learning.

The Praise Trap

Here's where it gets even trickier. When we lavish praise on children for these kinds of achievements, we're inadvertently setting up a particular framework for how they understand success and self-worth. The child begins to equate their value with their ability to memorize and recite information, to be "special" in this very specific way.

This creates a perpetual quest for specialness, a never-ending competition with other "special" children. Who knows more dinosaurs? Who can recite more digits of pi? Who can memorize more capitals? It becomes a race where the finish line keeps moving further away. And the only winners in this game are the so called edtech startups that brag on shark tank about how many random facts their customers' kids can remember, irrespective of the fact that they aren't going to meaningfully use them ever in their life.

What We're Missing

While we're busy celebrating role-learning feats, what essential life skills are we potentially overlooking? Consider the things that truly matter in living a fulfilled life:

Understanding ourselves and our place in the world
Developing clear, meaningful goals
Building and maintaining relationships
Navigating complex moral and ethical decisions
Learning to cooperate and collaborate with others
Developing true self-worth

These are the skills that shape us into effective human beings, yet they often take a backseat to more measurable, demonstrable achievements like our dinosaur encyclopedia.

The Competition Paradox

There's a deeper irony here. In our rush to create "special" children who can outperform their peers, we're actually undermining one of the most crucial skills they'll need in life: the ability to cooperate and collaborate. When every interaction becomes a competition to prove one's special status, the natural human inclination toward cooperation gets suppressed.

A child who's been repeatedly praised for their exceptional memory might refuse to participate in activities where they're not immediately the best. They've learned to derive their self-worth from being "special," making them reluctant to engage in situations where they might be average or need help from others.

The pattern extends into academic and extra-curricular competitions, school projects, and even playground interactions. Children refuse to share their knowledge or techniques with classmates, fearing that helping others might diminish their own "special" status. This creates a toxic cycle:

Children learn to view their peers as competitors rather than collaborators
Knowledge and Skills become currency to hoard rather than share
The joy of learning together gets replaced by the anxiety of staying ahead
Mistakes and failures become threats to identity rather than opportunities for growth
The natural human instinct to help others gets suppressed by the fear of losing one's competitive edge

This competitive mindset often achieves the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of creating excellence, it creates isolation. Instead of fostering achievement, it breeds anxiety. And perhaps most importantly, it fails to prepare children for a world whose basic fabric is collaborative effort.

Reimagining Education

Perhaps it's time for us to fundamentally rethink what we mean by education. What if, instead of optimizing for information retention, we optimized for:

Deeper understanding of the existence and ourselves
Interpersonal skills and strong relationships
Ethical reasoning and decision-making
Collaboration instead of competition

This isn't to say that memorizing facts isn't important - it absolutely is. But it should be a tool in service of these broader goals, not an end in itself. And it should definitely not be a tool for competition.

We need to carefully examine what we celebrate in our children's development. Every time we praise a child for being "special", we might want to pause and ask ourselves: What message are we really sending? What behaviors are we reinforcing?

Instead, perhaps we could celebrate when our children:

Help their peers do something
Show curiosity about the world
Do their daily chores diligently
Talk respectfully with people

These are things that every child can do - no "speciality" needed on the child's part - we might have to clean our lenses though to observe these.

The Mirror of Change

As I reflect on all these observations about education and childhood development, I'm struck by a humbling realization: we cannot hope to transform education without first transforming ourselves. It's easy to critique the system or suggest what others should do differently, but the real work begins with honest self-examination.

Consider how often we adults perpetuate the very behaviors we're critiquing. We compete for promotions, chase status symbols - larger houses, shinier cars, measure ourselves against our peers' achievements, and seek validation through external markers of success. How can we authentically guide children toward collaboration and genuine learning when we ourselves are caught in the web of competition and superficial achievements?

The truth is uncomfortable but necessary: our children are merely reflecting back to us our own unresolved relationship with success, achievement, and self-worth.

Finding Our Own North Star

Before we can help children understand what truly matters in life, we need to ask ourselves some fundamental questions:

What do we genuinely value beyond our financial achievements and social status?
How much of our own self-worth is tied to being "special" or "better than others"?
How often do we choose collaboration over competition in our own lives?
What does a meaningful life actually look like to us?

These aren't easy questions, and their answers might reveal uncomfortable truths about our own conditioned patterns of thinking and behavior.

This isn't about becoming perfect parents or educators. It's about embarking on our own journey of growth and bringing our children along as fellow travelers rather than students who need to be molded.

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, but 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 the existence the way it is, perhaps then we can help guide our children toward what really matters in human life.

Let's begin with ourselves. The children are watching, and they're learning from who we are, not just what we say.