When confronted with a problem, most of us are trained to look for answers and solutions. Very few take the time to look at the problem itself.
For example, if I were to present the problem: Pedro has 8 oranges in one hand and 10 oranges in the other, what does he have?
Most people would straightaway answer 18 oranges. One clever student however, answered, “Pedro has very large hands.”
Or how about this: Julie has a pile of 100 chocolate bars and 200 candies. She eats 52 chocolate bars and 112 candies. What does Julie now have?
Again, most of you would start computing and say, Julie now has 48 chocolate bars and 88 candies.
But then this smart aleck answers, “Diabetes. Julie now has diabetes.”
In school we are trained to ask, is that the right answer? But in real life, in business, and in many other areas, I more often than not been forced to ask, is that the right question? How you frame the question is more crucial than finding the answer. The right question puts you in a state of mind that is open and creative while the wrong question can make the situation seem very limiting and constrictive.
These days, educators are asking all the wrong questions — How do we raise test scores? How do we increase our school’s college passing rate? How do we get kids interested in our lessons? How do we get them to sit still and listen and take notes? What are effective teaching strategies? What topics need to be added to the curriculum?
What we ought to be asking, instead, are the following: How do children learn? And how can we best support their interests? How do we continually make ourselves relevant to them? What can we learn from them? How do we help prepare them for a future we may not see? How do we help them make difficult decisions?
What do you think?
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.
Over time I’ve spent alot of time with alot of different kids, raised in very different environments, but the kids are surprisingly all similar, telling me it’s the culture raising them, and not their individual teachers or parents necessarily. An older lady who’d been a teacher all her life made a similar point, saying that just when you think you understand the kids todya, they all change, about every ten years.
In Davao I used to come over to my friend’s house and try to teach a specific topic to his 5-year-old, but the kid resisted by talking over me till I’d give up. I came back with a list of ten different topics I’d been reading about, briefly introducing each, until we found something that he was interested in, and then we’d research it together, and there was some real intensive learning going on.
My nieces and nephews crave learning, they want to use every ounce of free time to go to you tube, and learn new skills or be exposed to things they don’t see in their daily life. Formal public school seems to be a chore, beside the point; like most kids that age, their one objective is to avoid anything “boring”. At that age, “goals are open, coals are smokin’”.
So I can see the wisdom in what you’ve been talking about in your series of articles on education, critical of what I had been calling the military-educo-industrial complex.
But I don’t find that I resent that system as heartily as you do, silly as I think it is.
I think that my perspective is like the story of Jesus who was asked about paying taxes to Caesar, the taxes in this case being putting up with the core curriculum and its requirements, or for that matter my putting up with a cubicle job in the IT world. The answer Jesus gave was “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s”. So I tell my older nieces and nephews, the ones about to pick a college, ‘take what they’re offering you, the scholarships and the training in specific, technical fields, but don’t stop there, imagining that a good paying career is all you’ll need, but figure out how to help other people, listen to them, think far outside the box of your field and what they’re teaching you, they’re unlikely to be able provide everything you’ll need, contrary to what the culture tells you’. Kids think that being rich and famous is what they’ll need to be happy, but we know statistically that rarely maps to happiness, or life satisfaction. Instead, it’s the depth of interpersonal relationships that makes people genuinely happy.
And it isn’t how good they are at math, reading, science, or sports or art, that matters, as much as how secure and loved they feel, and so of all the kids I meet, the ones that are the best adjusted are the ones whose parents, extended family, and mentors, simply spend time with them, not necessarily teaching them an agenda, as much as listening to them, respectfully, treating them as real human beings, and genuinely caring about them.
What I got from my parents growing up, who were also teachers, was something like ‘here’s how I did things and if you don’t do them the same way I did you are a failure and I am angry about that’. What I wish, looking back, is that they had had the insight and humility to say something more like ‘here were my ideals throughout my life, and here are the ways I tried to implement them, and I hope that I can pass down to you some of these ideals and that you can find a way to implement them in your world’.
Your articles seem to include a worry that all this core curriculum stuff, all those Caesar taxes, are a waste of some limited resource, so much wasted time and effort. I tend to see it more as a xesturgy, a world of struggle to polish ourselves within, to keep us on our toes, keep us challenged, as otherwise pointless as a crossword puzzle or boot camp in the military, the only problem being if you think that’s all there is and expect to find your fulfillment within that.
I don’t think any government or educational system can have the right answer for all people. I’m less a democrat or republican than an anarcho-syndicalist, thinking any of us are only qualified to help ourselves and the families or small groups of friends around us, so I just try to spend time with the people I meet. the people around me, and their kids, and I listen, and maybe even offer the occasional insight when appropriate. But I have no curriculum for anyone, much less for a state or a nation or a world.
I also think we all get to vote. I think that every kid takes a survey of, not only his parents and teachers, but of other kids’ parents, as well as clowns on YouTube, and the culture that the Disney channel and superhero movies push to them. And so when I meet a kid, home schooled or public-schooled or charter-schooled or private-schooled, from strict parents or lax foster homes, my only job is to submit my vote: this is me, this is how happy I am, this is how I live my life, these are my values, and these are the topics from our shared world that I’ve decided to put my own time into, many of them rather unique among all those others you hear from. And maybe my most important goal, spending time with you.