Young children have little of value to say on some topics. Allowing them to go through life thinking that Generals and CEOs are eagerly waiting to hear what they think, is not doing the children any favors.
Some kids have too much self-esteem. Reality smacks them in the face and they fall apart.
--in the Las Vegas area the teachers have the brats propose signs and other means to warn people of ten thousand years from now of the "dangers" of the Yucca Mountain nuke storage facility--
"Young children have little of value to say on some topics. Allowing them to go through life thinking that Generals and CEOs are eagerly waiting to hear what they think, is not doing the children any favors."
While what you say is true, discouraging kids from putting their opinions into words is not a good idea. While children may well not have ideas that are of actual value to Generals and CEOs, adults do.
Teaching children that opinions have no value leads to adults keeping their opinions to themselves. That's a very bad idea.
A worse idea is companies that shrug off these kids' letters like Apple did. This kid's idea is actually not a bad one, if simplistic. A nice thank you from Apple would have been good PR, even if the idea is so basic that it's already in the works.
Back when I was a 13-year-old boy, in 1959, I got very interested in the electronic musical instrument, the Theremin. The web didn't exist, but I found a reference to the original maker of the instrument, RCA. So, I wrote a letter asking for more information, stating that I hoped to build one.
About two weeks later, I got a large envelope from RCA, with a letter written by an engineer who had worked on the RCA Theremin in the late 1930's, along with a photocopy (not a xerox) of the original schematic, owner's manual, and a bunch of other information.
I never built the thing until transistors were affordable for a young high school kid and someone published a Theremin schematic using them, but I always kept a warm spot in my heart for RCA, which took the time and spent the money to provide all that information for a 13-year-old boy who wrote them a letter.
Quite a difference in how they responded to me and the way Apple responeded to the kid in this article. Which one do you thing was better?
This is just about the dumbest thing I've read all year.
If taking a nine year old down a notch or two is your idea of a proper response, I pray you have no offspring.