This is similar with people. Many people are quite intelligent, just not in a way we value or understand.
I have a relative who does well at poker, despite not finishing school. A drainage guy I know has a good understanding of the business and where the opportunities are. In general a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it". I've run into a bunch of these people who you don't think of as being intelligent, but if you frame something as a game, they know how to play.
None of these people could be taught high school calculus, for instance, but they are still intelligent in a way that's useful to them.
If we're talking about kids, from about the age of four they learn to trick you. "Dad, you have to give me ice cream. Mom says so. Don't wake her up." And it gets more and more sophisticated as they get older.
I think this is a few things:
- The people in the trades who get to running their own business have (by nature of survival bias) developed two skills at a good level: doing that trade and running a business
- Trades, because they involve material output and safety, have relatively little tolerance for the kinds of bozos who can slip under the radar in the white-collar and service sector worlds.
Intelligence is largely related to STEM and memory in most instances. But there are a vast number of other ways to be intelligent. Perhaps you excel at emotionally connecting with people, maybe you're really good at cooking or tooling approaches. All of these are ignored in school.
School is nothing more then a checkbox along your path, you need to be able to read, write, do math, etc. But we ignore a large amount of our populace who may excel at grunt work, or maybe they are really good at leadership.
Just because you don't know y=mx+b or struggle at reasoning/logistical challenges does not mean you are not valuable to society. Maybe your 300lbs of rock solid muscle and in a past live would have been a top tier hunter. We do appreciate some amount of sports, but even that stops unless you're in the top 1-2% of the country.
This is myopic almost to the point of satire. You really can't think of a single other benefit of social intelligence?
It's incorrect to think that's limited to America. Humans are mostly powerless against the charm of narcissists and other sociopaths.
You see it over and over throughout human history all over the world.
But you get graded based on your ability to read, write, do math, memorize data points. Not on your ability to lie to your teacher in a believable manner.
You may excel later in life, but it's not like you can enter Yale because you can manipulate people.
You also need a certain level of other intelligence to properly manipulate people, or at least a certain level of self narcissism.
I mean you kind of proved my point, perhaps we should be teaching/discussing social skills.
I completely agree that social skills should be emphasized in school-not to reward the people who are already adept, but to impress on the others that they're the primary determinant of success.
American public schooling is and has been broken for awhile.
And the notion that private schooling (in general) is better is hard to believe. When we looked at private schools for our son, test scores and college admittance were only marginally higher and much of the gap was simple selection bias (private schools are not legally required to take all students, so don't deal with disabled, disadvantaged, or otherwise non-exceptional students). The only time private was substantially better was hyper-elite, hyper-expensive schools (Sidwell Friends, DC vs Paul VI, Fairfax vs the publics in FCPS).
Also, America do tend to be country of extremes, so it has some very good public schools and some bad ones. Bad ones being in poor place. And it just so happen that the countries doing better tend to have less poverty and less issues related to it.
Blaming the parents and kids is just a scapegoat.
But yes, the kids that succeed are the ones that the parents are involved, because the teachers are useless.
The quality of teachers has gone way down, especially since federal student loans.
Anyone can become a teacher, it's a default path, and it shows.
I've seen good schools crumble due to terrible policies and teachers.
You're enabling the problem by apologizing for these poor performing teachers.
Literally all of 8th grade was learning how to count to 10 in other languages and some stupid cross-stitching art. In Math!!!
Luckily I learned through programming on my own time, but once you're behind from one shitty math teacher, it's hard to catch up.
Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them?
This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.
Public service has to be unprofitable in many cases, its first mission is to bring a service to the population, not to compete with the private sector. I once visited Maripasoula, a <10k pop town in the middle of the Amazon only accessible by river or small (10-20 passenger) propeller plane. I was fascinated to see it has: a post office (that doubles as a bank), a modern high school with dorms, firefighters and a police station. No private sector actor is going to provide any such service to this population in these conditions. These services do not improve by competition, because there can be none, yet they exist and work well. Crazy, that.
Where there is a mix of private and public, the private sector only services where (be it location or target population wise) it is most profitable and leaves the rest to the public sector to fend with. That does not in itself indicate it functions better, only that it only goes for the lowest hanging fruit by essence of why it exists: to maximize profit. The private sector is not in the business of making its life complicated, the end goal of any company is to provide the least possible for the highest price possible.
In the case of schooling, private schools' only merit is being inaccessible to the poorer populations, hence giving kids a network that sits higher on the social ladder. Generalize this and you find that it no longer brings anything worthwhile to the table, except for those with arbitrary educational constraints such as religious ones. Not that this "benefit" is particularly defensible to begin with.
I am not a conservative. The monopoly and consumer term is applied correctly whether you find it loaded or not. The police have a monopoly on legal initiated violence yes, although for instance many towns have had private fire trash etc that fulfilled needs well. I did not call them companies, I think this is a straw man attack. On roads, miles around me the roads are publicly accessible private easements, you cannot even get to my town on a tax funded road.
You also presuppose competing schools must be for profit which is absolutely false. In many cases they are non profit.
>This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.
No need, I'm only claiming the voucher system, which isn't even my ideal system (again I am not a conservative), lets parents make a choice without first and foremost having to chase the almighty dollar as the conventional public system forces them to do before sending their kid to another school. It's not just competition but diversity of options giving the poor options where before only the rich had them .
Terms such as "monopoly" = exclusivity or "consumers" = users come with certain associations similar to "parasite" = dependent. I didn't say sentences using those terms are not understandable, I said they are loaded, and I stand by that.
Just like paying programmers for each bug they fix, which will drive the production of bugs to fix, paying schools for grading children will earn you a lot of highly graded children.
What we need is a respect for the profession. Treat good teachers with a lot of social respect, pay them well so they don't need to think about anything else, and give them a lot of opportunity to educate children as best they see fit. Just like we do with the best doctors.
Conservatives do want to privatize them tho, mostly so that selected few can get richer.
- There are some students with disabilities that are extremely expensive to serve. Private schools don’t want them. Small public schools don’t want them.
If you take the pool of education dollars, divide by the number of students, and issue vouchers for that amount, you’ll get private schools siphoning off the highest margin kids, and public schools in a death spiral. That may feel more “fair” to you as a parent of a low-needs kid, but we live in a society, not a Mad Max-style dystopia.
I have two low-needs/high-performing kids. Vouchers would definitely benefit my family. Public school frustrates me to no end. But I want to make it better, not retreat to an enclave and let the plebeians eat each other.
- Schools in many ways look like a “natural monopoly”. Duplicating facilities (playgrounds, cafeterias, gyms, etc.) is economically inefficient. Ditto for specialty instructors (art/music/PE). You don’t want 10 schools competing for 300 kids, just like you don’t want 10 electric companies competing for 3000 homes. The goal is to craft policies that avoid as many of the downsides of monopolies as possible. I wish I saw the opposition to public schools digging in on the reasons they’re performing poorly. I do think there are viable reforms if the political will materializes.
There’s a lot of good in modern schooling. It’s not perfect, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater as is so frequently proposed is not the solution here.
Let's look at a few counterpoints:
- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.
- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).
Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.
Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.
But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
Aristocratic tutoring works. The whole issue with it is that it's not affordable except for some kind of extreme super elite, hence why the rest of us have to make do with mass education, supplemented with some very limited individual tutoring and "tiger parenting".
I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.
Thank you for this. It is appreciated by me, if no one else.
So yes, I’d say people woefully underestimate the abilities of children.
We seem to have a very very strong bias towards assuming less/no intelligence in anything that isn’t an adult human.
And people ascribe intelligence to Eliza, a 200-line Basic program.
OTOH there are plenty of animal behaviors that can only be explained by intelligence: seeing-eye dogs perform a task which is economically useful for humans yet far beyond the ability of AI (even if the robotics mech eng issues are resolved). But it also doesn't really make sense that one of my cats is "instinctually" able to understanding my words while the other cat is "instinctually" able to outsmart me when we play with toys. The more sensible explanation is cats are intelligent and intellectually diverse.
He gasped in shock and exclaimed: "How will they get back home to Earth?"
That was impressive enough, but then he concocted a rescue mission where a rocket would rendezvous with them and refuel their ship so that they could get home.
That's pretty much the current NASA plan for humanity's return to the Moon!
It sounds like the author effectively spent a day at a children’s museum grocery exhibit and wrote a paper about it.
Is there more to the underlying paper than the summary suggests?
Anyone who has watched a 4-year-old for any length of time would conclude that at least some of them are capable of classification.
And there are many people who believe that children under 7 can't truly reason, so it's not even as obvious as it seems.
For what it's worth, I have a 2- and 5-year-old, so I'd love to know more about how their brains are developing.
There's subtlety to this, high demands are not high expectations. If there's consequences for not meeting some high standard you set for children, you're going to create a very life-destroying kind of learned helplessness. Kids shouldn't be punished for failure.
And if it's something dangerous to try, then of course it's gotta be something you limit.
But beyond that, just don't assume kids aren't ready for something without evidence. Let them try.
At least I find that works when motivating myself. I didn't expect that I would finish this big skirace this year. But having it as a bonus goal made it very rewarding when I actually did finish it.
Every one of my kids has a name that is hard for a baby to pronounce so they have a baby nickname, but we let them grow out of it.
Depending on the noun, it may not the most idiomatic way of expressing the sentiment it intends to communicate, but that is a different issue. (On the other hand, idiom is context dependent, and the objection here seems to be that it is idiomatic in at least one context, but that people prefer that children exclusively learn some other preferred idiom. But if you don't have this diversity, children don't get to learn and practice context switching as early, and that's an important skill, too.)
I'm going to need some examples here because I'm filling in nouns to that structure and it does not sound correct. "I did [a] water." Huh?
I did a presentation.
The reason I’d suggest not to is because speaking in this way will, in fact, cause people to think less highly of you.
It’s not a matter of principle and “formal correctness” is pretty meaningless in human language, but “don’t speak in a way that a substantial number of people regard as incorrect” is a meaningful goal!
Your claim is really based on fairly absurd notion that a sentence normally used in relation to the kids will somehow set the kid apart from their peers ... who listen to the exact same sentences. As in, the problem of kids speech somehow damaging kids long term is literally non existent in real world.
Miniscule percentage of parents takes offense on it and nobody else cares.
“Aww cute!” responses to incorrect language is how kids develop speech impediments.
Not idiomatic for all nouns, esp those for which there's a more applicable verb.
* I did a puzzle.
* I did a bad thing.
* I did a backflip.
Or, since this is just normal English, it's exactly the kind of thing that ChatGPT is good at, so here's a dozen more examples if you want: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e6d457-5ff4-8002-a5c7-15040f3d2290 .
Is "an ouchie" a thing that someone performs or does?
And specifically for expressing you hurt yourself, we teach children to express that they're hurt far earlier than they learn actual speech. So from ~1 we teach them to say "Ow" (or some variation), but then the words change from that to "hurt", and into a full sentence "I hurt myself", which is also redundant (myself and I imply the same thing, so why do we use both in that sentence in English?).
Anyhow just a thought as I'm feeding my son breakfast. "Would you like some breakfast" in English turns into 2 words in his second language.
“Oh how old are they, 5? Nope, just turned 3. They speak so well!” shrug
The second language must be biasing you somehow, it’s not hard to talk to your kids.
It's about the perception of how children speak in English.
"Do you want breakfast?" is perfectly grammatical, and "Want breakfast?" would be a totally normal phrasing, even if some might argue that eliding the subject isn't technically correct.
"Ow" and friends, by the way, are interjections to express sudden pain, functioning analogously to an adult's swearing. They're not full sentences about the pain and its source.
It's kind of hilarious that you assume I'm not a native English speaker because I speak more languages... I'm a native English speaker who just happens to have grown up with 2 other languages and have a wife that speaks 4+ languages. On top of that I've taken a bunch of university level English courses.
Yes, I'm aware that people shorten sentences into statements when speaking to those they're familiar with. I do it as well.
Here's a thought experiment:
- If a toddler speaks in short statements it's "baby talk"
- If an immigrant speaks in short statements it's "broken English"
- If a native speaker speaks in short statements it's vernacular or slang
Or:
- If a toddler makes up words it's "baby talk"
- If an immigrant makes up words they're uneducated
- If a native speaker makes up words it's a dialect
Let’s be nice to each other and ourselves when try..and learn.
I know it doesn't always work that way, but a lot of times our failures aren't just "on us", but affect others.
It may not be the audience here so much, but average folks out there?
I feel children's programming is reflecting those low expectations.
Daniel Tiger's fine, but an episode tends to be so focused on some narrow little thing. The older Mr. Rogers show it's based on tended to be much more wide-ranging, and often had segments introducing parts of the real adult world to a kid.
And there's stuff like Blippi, where you have a man engaging in extremely literal and unimaginative play, being "educational" by teaching colors over and over.
Like you said, set the bar high, but keep in mind they're still kids and failure should never be punished. We found that doing that for some time results in them setting the bar high for themselves _all on their own now_. Their confidence is beaming, and they're never afraid to try new things, or try again after failing.
One of my main complains about my upbringing is that it didn't demand much of us, and it didn't provide opportunities to extend our wings and do and learn about cool stuff, while failures were treated as the end of the world.
I have felt similar to your sentiment as I raise my 2.5 year old, and as I investigate more, true failure was always insulated by my parent's anxiety preventing a true experience of outcomes. "Don't climb on that ledge because it's wet and you could fall" rather than a climb and tumble off a 2 inch curb with likely no consequence. "Don't eat that meat if it's still pink", etc.
The secret is to treat the kid like an adult until they demonstrate a reason(s) not to. A GF one time asked me why I talked to her nephew “like that?” and I was so confused. She said “you talk to him the same way you talk to me” (ie. the way I talk to anyone). Nephew and I were shooting free throws in the driveway. We get along great. This was very rambly but I think about it all the time.
I’ve gotten the brattiest kids to calm down and accept the situation in meltdowns in youth baseball with the same approach.
I’m not claiming this always works. Many times the situation or kid themselves demonstrates they must be treated like a kid. That’s fine too.
Some warning signs are medical illnesses where a young adult is being sheltered as if they are still in a crisis state of that illness, even though they've grown well beyond it and may benefit from being treating like any normal individual.
It’s different when one’s own kids, and it takes extra patience to have the same skill set as you do with “stranger” kids. Without getting into it too much, being in a position of “authority” with a “stranger” kid changes the dynamic as compared to one’s own kids.
I dunno if that makes sense, but I’ve found it to be true for me.
I also seemed to have figured it out with my own kids, it just takes more work and more patience.
A normal life preservation strategy is to be more neutral around people you know less, which seems baked into human instinct.
Ironically, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone I've ever met.
Children seem to demonstrate when given support to explore their curiosities as a gateway to learning (Similar to Reggio Emelia approaches).
Yes, the fact base kids have is limited due to limited experience & education, but they are able to learn and reason just as well as adolescents and adults, and should be treated like that. What they need is exposure to reasoning methods, clear explanations of logical fallacies, and necessary background information that will help them both articulate complex thoughts and set context for their reasoning.
I would argue that, in many cases, kids are "smarter" than adults because their lack of experience also correlates to increased creativity. Rather than pattern matching based on experience they'll frequently try out-of-the-box methods to solve problems -- this should never be discouraged.
When my kid was 18 months old, we had gated him off from a playroom with a bunch of toys used by his older brother that were not baby-safe. We had a DoorMonkey [1] placed up high, about 5 feet tall, so that only adults could reach. My kid gets a chair from across the room, pushes it next to the door, climbs up on top of it, unlatches the DoorMonkey, pushes open the door, climbs down from the chair, enters the playroom, looks at me, and says "Bye!" At that moment my wife gets out of the bathroom, sees the tableau, says "____? What are you doing?" and my toddler says "Uh oh."
He can recognise a lot of birds, trees, flowers (daffodils, primroses, hyacinths, tulips) coming out in the garden at the moment, only needs to be told what it is once or twice for it to stick.
Except in her case it meant "Witness me!!, as I do something exceedingly dangerous!", or alternatively "Look at the aftermath of this dangerous thing I just did, see the blood?"
When I came back he immediately knew he'd been caught. Though I wasn't at all mad, it was a wakeup-call that from then on placing things too high was probably a challenge for him, rather than an absolute protection.
The first time he went into the kitchen after I had installed it, he notices it immediately, walks straight up to it, grasps it with both hands like an adult would, and has it unlatched within 5 seconds. He then proceeds to look at me like "Is this some sort of test?"
Luckily she's only succeeded once so far, but nevertheless we're trying to figure out how to make sure the knives are safely out of reach (because she's also figured out how to climb the counter with a chair, obviously) without it becoming too inconvenient for us as well.
;-)
Susan has a great quote about showing up to a men's chess club, when she was still young. She said, "I don't think I ever beat a healthy man." Because they were always not feeling well, or whatever lame excuse they conjured up.
The other two parts of the series are on different topics, but are also interesting, but Susan's is our favorite, and I got them long before our son started chess.
And Laszlo's book on chess problems is on my son's bookshelf. It has more than 5000 "problems, combinations, and games". It's been replaced by chess.com's and lichess's puzzle games, but it is still the reference book on chess puzzles, to my understanding.
Great "achievement" for the parents, but I wouldn't personally do that to my child.
And that’s completely fine. I was never forceful about it and they have their own deep interests in things that I just never got into or understood. I just find it surprising that in some families, these exceptional skills and interests are so readily passed from one generation to the next.
i have a 2.5 year old and its extremely interesting just how much her thinking is clearly 'logical', but it operates in what i like to call 'toddler logic'.
If you ask kids questions, and really listen, their lines of thinking are very clearly following an internal logic. It just isnt one that is entirely compatible with 'adult' reasoning - unless the adult in the room intentionally chooses to communicate in 'toddler logic' operators. Most adults are, sadly and imo, not very good at this!
I can concoct some flawless chain of logic leading to some conclusion but it’s all for naught if the premises it is based on are invalid.
An intelligent listener can listen and find where the base misunderstanding is and teach from there. Teaching from the false conclusion is a mistake.
sometimes the chain of logic and premise is grounded in a different ontology entirely (this is what i am referring to as 'toddler logic' for shorthand). this doesn't invalidate the conclusions or chain of logic used to derive them, when you (adult) is using different ontological anchors, which leads to different conclusions.
being able to inhabit the Other's (toddler's) ontological world and navigate it with them helps sharpen their reasoning skills!
they can figure out the Adult Ontology stuff later and apply those reasoning skills then. It's important to let kids be kids sometimes :) Encouraging their conclusions, and building confidence in their reasoning abilities, these are important endeavors in their own right.
My daughter who is 3 is only recently poddy-trained. She now knows to go to the bathroom next to her room. Before she was trained we had a "portable" toilet (think plastic bowl sitting in a toy-like toilet shell basically) she would occasionally use in her room.
Similarly we've recently trained her when she's done with eating to bring the plate to me or my wife to clean/put up (she can't reach any countertops).
Today she had to go and my wife was in the shower so she couldn't use her normal bathroom. She used her portable toilet, picked it up, and brought it to me to clean :).
This sort of "logic" happens all the time every day and I probably miss 90% of it but I definitely thought of it when I read your question.
Often, when we're having trouble persuading her to do something, I can tell her Eloise wants to do that thing. I'll use teeth brushing as an example.
Eloise, being an independent 'person' of sorts in my daughter's mind, accepts the premise that Eloise would want to brush her teeth, (we remind her, Eloise doesnt want cavities, and my daughter agrees with Eloise: cavities are bad!). So we go and pretend to brush Eloise's teeth in the bathroom. Once Eloise is done, my daughter is usually all too ready to brush her own teeth.
As one might imagine, this tactic would not work on most adults. but toddler logic ontology imbues her stuffed animals with a sort of pseudo-agency (sometimes daughter insists Eloise does NOT want to brush her teeth or whatever, but that doesnt happen often, funnily enough).
He always says it like he isn't sure we know about buses yet making me think it’s hard to model others as separate minds with differing information until much older. But his modeling of the world logic is very solid. He can easily use multiple tools to reach high up snacks, or build complex block forts, or reason about what will happen “we will grow up and then go to kindergarten!”
If you work with children, don't underestimate them.
This strange mental separation can only bring in bad results.
My 3 year old vastly prefers complex carnatic music to cocomelon (and its ilk). He can listen to a 15 minute, intricate song without losing interest, and will ask for it in a loop. Children can handle a lot more complexity than we generally assume.
Little humans seem to get smarter from generation to generation.
My daughter routinely remembered things, while 3 and 4, that happened a year and sometimes longer ago. She would bring them up, like "last time we were here, was before my last (2nd) birthday". Me: "wow, how do you remember that?"
My friend recalls being ~2yo and deducing how to move a chair and pull a drawer to reach the top of the clothes dresser. After climbing to the top, she recalls sitting, enjoying the view, not knowing how to get down, and crying for help.
My very earliest memory is before I was two. It involved an inflatable weighted balloon, the one's typically with a clown on it and if you bat it down, it rocks back upright. I saw one that was a friendly cop. I can recall several elements of the memory. I recall playing with one of those colorful wire sculpture things where you slide the blocks around like an abacus on drugs, went over to the the balloon cop, and thought to myself, "that is a good guy, why would you a good guy on a toy you hit? It should be a clown." Then I smacked it and went over to see my mom who was at the counter. Looking back, that feels like a lot of reasoning for a <2yo. Years later, when telling my mom that story for the first time, she said that the building where that was was for appointments we had when I was a year and a half old.
My son is 2 1/2 and making sure we know he wants to do things his own way.
But if you take time to explain a situation like an adult he backs down eventually. Or, it could be I am just boring him to death and he gives in to shut me up.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=%22Laura+E+Schulz%22&btnG=
I've a hobby interest in exploring what science education might look like if we could apply much greater expertise. For example, K-1 does descriptive material properties, but it's ad hoc and crufty. Happily, industry has some nicer descriptive ontologies. So what might it look like to adapt those instead? And how might that then be leveraged, to teach other things better?
Now rheological quasi-properties provide a way to quantify dynamic material properties. Like sticky, squishy, slimy, ...-y. Which raises the obvious question: Could we do Ashby charts[1], xkcd-ishly simple and discrete, in K-1? Like, foods sticky vs slimy?
Well, 2D sort-into-piles is a K thing, with axes ordered and categorical. But... having both axis ordered is very rare. Button number-of-holes vs color, sure. But number-of-holes vs number-of-sides, strangely not. So is this a real developmental bottleneck? Or just the commonplace "we teach it, but we don't really use it, so there's little incentive to teach it well"? Good question - I've found it hard to get feedback like that.
I wish there was an HN-like community, with education researchers and master teachers.
And sometimes I am afraid we destroy it by laughing at them for it.
Recent example, someone I know:
Parent: you have to come home
Child: No
P: It's getting late
C: Go to bed
Of course it is hilarious, but the reasoning is absolutely on point.
Also, it actually make sense to want the kid to go to sleep sooner then adults and also to go home for dinner or whatever.
Or just don't care lol. Children love pushing boundaries. Sometimes it's good (learning a sport, improving a skill, taking on the bigger, scarier feature at the playground) and sometimes it's annoying (wanting more ice cream, staying up late, etc...). I'm convinced it's just part of growing up.
> it actually make sense to want the kid to go to sleep sooner then adults
Yes, but it isn't enough if you know that, the child has to know that, and actually agree with the reasons. If the reason is "young people need more sleep, you will be so tired tomorrow" you can make the child see that reason (let them stay up once, show the consequences, hope it doesn't backfire). You still get push back, but not for it being unfair. If the reason is that the parents want time for themselves then the child is right that it's unfair, and the better solution would be "alone time for everyone. You in your room, we in the living room, internet shuts off at 9". Similarly "we eat dinner together" is a fair rule as long as everyone is held to the same standard. You still get push back, but a fair rule is much easier to enforce than an unfair one.
As a child, I often read until 2-3am, and was just fine the following day (wish I could do that now). Any actual enforced attempt at going to sleep would have felt unfair because it'd have been earlier than I needed.
What my parents actually cared about was that I was in my room, and that I got up without being cranky or letting it affect school the following day.
It's much easier to "sell" the child on that, by being honest about wanting quiet time and wanting to make sure the child isn't too tired, than convincing them a bedtime they will have secretly violated multiple times without feeling too tired is reasonable.
So from pretty early, my "bedtime" was "alone time" as you suggest, with the proviso that if I couldn't get up without being prodded in the morning that was evidence I was taking the piss, and the consequence would be tightening up of the actual bedtime for a while. That felt fair, and honest, and the rules were understandable, and meant I often stayed up way later than my parents would have thought was reasonable, but since it worked, it was fine, and I self-regulated.
However, we know lots of children left to their own devices get over-tired, they should sleep but they don't and then they're much worse for it the next day. So in practice most parents are doing the right thing by insisting that children should sleep when they were "supposed" to rather than leaving them to their own devices as mine did.
I have a friend who is an angry drunk. The sort of person who door staff may need to kick out of a bar before they start a fight. In his 20s and 30s, loud arguments about nothing of consequence and even occasional violence were a likely end to a previously enjoyable evening. But although he's still an angry drunk he eventually got good enough at understanding his own emotional state that by his 40s he would just leave. Instead of "We need to all go home or J might kick off" it's "Bye J, see you next week" because he's just realised he feels angry about nothing and he has ordered himself a ride home and is leaving, no fuss.
This ability to self-regulate is often not something children are good at, but it's important. There's a difference between reasoning that if you eat the whole cake you'll feel bad and not eating the whole cake because you'll feel bad
Instead you're inviting pattern matching - the child will have been told to go to bed because it is late, so it's a natural statement to make if you don't understand why the parent is stating it.
Explain the steps, and the consequence of failure in a way that the child can relate to, and you're likely to get a very different reaction("come home, because it's late and you need to go to bed so you're not too tired to play tomorrow").
But really, adding a "because ..." tends to improve compliance even when the reasoning isn't very sound, and even with adults. It's scarily effective as long as the ask isn't too great.