Teaching and encouraging kids to learn by rote memorization and imitation shapes their brain and behavior, making them more inclined towards linear thinking, and less prone to original, creative thinking.
Kuszewski goes on to critique the school system as the main culprit behind restriction of creative thinking:
Let’s take a look at our typical education paradigm: From the earliest days of school, we hammer specific scholastic values into our students: pay attention, watch the teacher, imitate what the teacher does, stay in your seat, don’t question authority, and receive praise. But instead of teaching children to think, we are teaching them to memorize. Instead of encouraging them to innovate, we expect them to follow the outline and adhere to rules.
This resonated with me. I was always told to 'face the front', stay in my seat and pay attention to my teacher when I was in school. You see, the 'front' was where the teacher was, where the blackboard was located, and the front was ostensibly where all the action was. Learning whilst 'facing the front' was supposed to make me more attentive, focus my mind, enable me to grasp what the teacher was saying, and memorise the facts. It was all very much a 'mug and jug' education. I was the mug (in more ways than one) and the teacher was the jug - filled to brimming with knowledge which s/he imparted by pouring it into my empty mug. Yet in the words of the poet William Butler Yeats - "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." This is the essence of engagement. It's a shame I was forced by my schools to be a pail.
Later that academic year, I was expected to sit down, again facing the front, and regurgitate all I had learnt before I was allowed to progress to the next stage of my indoctrination - sorry, education. But facing the front didn't work for me. I was too easily distracted by the butterfly outside the classroom window, or the jet aircraft screaming by overhead. I was too interested in catching the eye of the pretty girl sitting across the room from me, or the card games that were going on under the tables next to me. Instead of taking notes, I was more intent on creating cartoon characters, writing stories and poems and drawing fantastic scenes in my exercise books.
I was also a fidget. I didn't want to stay sat still in my uncomfortable chair, facing constantly in one direction. I wanted to move around and face other directions, because in doing so, I was less bored, I could see the rest of my classmates, and it gave me much more freedom to explore what I was learning, to experiment, to ask the 'what if' questions, and to take risks. I liked walking around as I was learning. My teachers frowned on this, and insisted that if I couldn't sit still, stay in my seat and face the front, I would be punished. Punishment in those days was something to be feared - the cane (in my English school) or the strap (in my Scottish school). So I reluctantly sat and faced the front, and became more and more bored and frustrated with school and sadly, more disenchanted with learning. School was something to endure rather than enjoy.
It was only later, when I left school and began my career that I eventually became switched on to learning and began to enjoy formal study. It took me many years to shake out of the school induced learning lethargy. I was in my late 30s when I successfully completed my first degree with first class honours. I achieved this because I was interested, I had discovered my own creative and intellectual abilities and was able to think for myself. I could move around while I studied. I had found my own front to face. I wonder how many other people experienced (and continue to experience) this same situation?
As Richard Merrick recently suggested 'People need to change. Organisations don't'. And there's the rub - schools, colleges and universities are organisations that change very slowly if they change at all, but the people in them, the teachers, lecturers and professors, do need to change. Teachers need to find their own front to face. We need to realise that everything we do changes the structure of our brains - and that goes for our students too. We need to encourage our learners to do things and experience things that change the structures of their brains positively. We need to avoid imposing the 'face the front' syndrome which is largely responsible for conditioning learners to blindly obey the rules, submit to the status quo without question, and follow instructions rather than thinking for themselves. We should move away from the ludicrous idea that 'one size fits all' and the tyranny of homogeneity. We must provide creative freedom and room for individual expression in the classroom. Let's provide students the space to decide where their own front is.
Image by James Wilkinson
Facing the front by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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