Tom Morello Taught His 9 Year Old Son How To Play The Guitar. His Son Wrote The Song “The Children Will Rise Up” With 11 Year Old Nandi Bushell.
Give children the skills. They will flex their superpowers.
Tom Morello is a power guitarist with Rage Against The Machine and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. He is also a political activist. As a struggling musician in Hollywood, he taught guitar to make ends meet. He would ask his students to “write” a song before knowing a note or a chord. Just making sounds in a pattern. Do that a couple of times, and there’s a newly minted songwriter, just like McCartney and Dylan.
So it came to be that during the endless days of lockdown at home, he taught his youngest son Roman the first three notes to “Stairway to Heaven.” Encouraged by the fact that those three notes sounded just like the song, Roman came back to learn a few more notes.
By building on small successes, Roman began to take pride in his ability to master a Led Zeppelin standard as a beginner.
A song is but a series of notes and chords. Instead of getting Roman to learn to play an entire song, which would probably have been too intimidating even for an adult, Tom showed Roman learning the first couple of notes is achievable. John Hattie calls this the Goldilocks principle of “not too hard, not too boring.”
Writing works the same way too. Throughout the Ship30for30 course I’m currently doing, the instructors emphasise the idea of writing atomic essays (250–500 word essays like the ones I’ve been putting out) and stacking them into longer-form essays. If you can write atomic essays, you can write long essays. Stack those long essays, and you have a book.
Instead of music theory or fingering techniques, Tom Morello allowed Roman to let loose and have uninhibited joy on the guitar.
Learning should be joyful. Tom tried hammering home some point about music theory or fingering techniques a couple of times, and each time Roman would put his guitar down and threaten to walk away. Instead of sweating the details, Tom decided to try improvisational solos with Roman, playing rhythm on the guitar while Roman shreds across different genres.
I’ve noticed the same thing in Saturday Kids classes. Kids are not interested in computer science theories or computational thinking methods. They just want to create. What excites them is turning the ideas in their heads into games and animations on Scratch. I call this creative expression.
Together with 11 year old Nandi Bushnell, Roman wrote an anthem proclaiming that only the courage and fortitude of their generation can stop the impending environmental catastrophe facing humanity.
A 9 year old and an 11 year old stirred not just by their shared passion for music but also their belief in kids‘ ability to change the world. Adults underestimate kids. Kids are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. Because we mollycoddle kids and insist examiners need two advantages and two disadvantages to everything, they don’t get the chance to express themselves and show adults what they are capable of.
By forcing kids to focus on exam techniques rather than sustainable development goals, teachers and parents are missing the wood for the trees. What good are perfect scores if our kids cannot stop forests from burning up and glaciers from melting away?
The article “How I Taught My Son to Shred Like Crazy and Change the World” by Tom Morello appeared in the op-ed section of The New York Times on 27 October 2021.
