One of the greatest challenges we face (as I have talked about earlier in this blog) is that of education for a flourishing future. Scholar Sir Ken Robinson makes a big point about how our educational systems are not designed for fostering creativity or critical thinking (I recommend any of his TED or RSAnimate talks), let alone for meeting the challenges of living sustainably in the future. In a nutshell, our educational models are designed to make us conform to a culture that came out of the industrial revolution. If you are reading this blog of mine you will be aware of my message that we need to create a transformation to a new paradigm of living well on this planet. Thomas Jefferson was noted as a founder of the idea for public education. Of course what Jefferson advocated as education is not what we have today, except in isolated pockets of education that survive outside the standard format of constitutes public education in most of the world. Several scholars agree that young children are some of the most creative geniuses we have. That is because they haven’t yet been crushed by the dogmatic expectations of an educational system that is designed to mold them in to workers of service to the system we call civilization. It’s not that children are all Einstein’s able to manipulate calculus, but that they are amazingly creative if allowed to be. They have as yet no fear of failure and can come up with all manner of apparently crazy ideas based on merely how they feel about something. Robinson says, “Our educational system is modeled on the interest of industrialism and also in the image of it – factory style education focused on the production of children as batches.
I know from personal experience that the standard educational model did not serve me well nor engage me fully. I was always in awe of some of my school pals who could so easily rote learn and pass standardized exams so easily. I really wanted to do well in school but I simply struggled. I talk about this in a previous post (Education and Steady State?) and I would bet that many of the readers of this blog feel similarly. As a kid when books where the only outlet for reading, I read extensively on all manner of subjects. My imagination soared as I read classic books and science fiction and I conceived of ideas that made no sense back then but sounded good – interestingly, those ideas I had as a kid are now validated. I was not and am not special. Despite all of this I did eventually go on to get a lot of qualifications and have a career in academia, yet even there I did not fit the mold. I don’t think my story is unusual – I’m sure many of you out there have a similar story. What I was able to do that did not get quashed by my ‘education’ was to continue to use what psychologists call ‘divergent thinking.’ It actually served me well when I became a technician after I left school – (definition: Divergent thinking refers to a way of problem-solving issues where there are lots of possible solutions as opposed to convergent thinking, which relies on focusing on a limited number of solutions, with one being the expected one). I also believe that divergent thinking also allows one to intellectually synthesize lots of data and ideas and to see points of connection. It’s one of the reasons that years ago I connected spirituality with sustainability and saw the void that our educational systems – and society in general – have in regard to this connection. Readers of this blog know that I bounce around topics a bit, but I always strive to make the connections obvious. Link this to my Pyrrho of Elis style Skepticism (See post Skepticism) and I am open to review all manner of esoteric information as I strive to connect real ideas of consequence. My point here is that I could have let my education squash my preferred style of thinking, but I managed to keep it open. For you reading this, you can rekindle that uniqueness you have by being willing to ‘unlearn’ much of what you take for granted as absolute.
Many studies show divergent thinking and the brilliance of children from 2 years of age. It was found that very young children scored at around 98% genius level on divergent thinking tasks (i.e. how many ways can you use a paperclip, or a pencil eraser?), but as they got older the genius scoring declined sharply – the best interpretation is that standardized education stifled this ability. It is related to lateral thinking (the solving of problems by an indirect and creative approach, typically through viewing the problem in a new and unusual light) which younger children also do much better than older children and adults. Creativity is the product of imagination, and very young kids, allowed to play freely, have very active imaginations. It is this capacity to think way outside the box, not be constrained by expectations of correct answers, and not to be afraid of being wrong that allows new ideas to flow. We can relearn how to think as we did when we were toddlers and have that belief that anything is possible if we simply let ourselves go back to that place of innocent before our minds got conditioned by our upbringing. I shall get more into how we do this in posts coming up, but to finish the immediate idea at hand – getting to a flourishing future.
It is why I talk about transformation and not reformation (lookup transformation tag in various prior posts on this site) as the solution to creating a future society in which all people and nature flourish. I do understand how this kind of visioning seems just a pipe dream to people caught up in this dystopian world we call ‘normal.’ Yet, if you can accept that the way we live is anything but normal then you can begin to embrace something very different and more in tune with who we really are as we move forward. The wonderful news is that there are many places where flourishing systems are already enacted.
TBC….
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