I am not a very rational person. I don’t know if it was in my DNA or if I just was left alone for too long growing up. I have always thought out of the box. I have never been extremely logical, having to drop out of Logic 101 in college because none of the rational, logical arguments made any sense to me.
Thankfully, my irrationality has been vindicated. If you remember back to your Aesop’s fables, there was the story of the crow and the pitcher. The thirsty crow found a pitcher that was half full. Not being able to reach the water, the bird dropped pebbles into the pitcher until the water rose to the level where it could take a drink.
Turns out that isn’t really a fable. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found that this little problem solving exercise is fact, not fiction. Crows can not only figure out how to make and use tools, but plan for the future and even know what other birds are thinking.
So what do crows and I have in common, besides being both a bit birdbrained?
Well, it turns out that humans are a lot like the crows. We can learn through trial and error. Try, try again really is true. Children, like crows, learn through problem solving. But only up to a point.
In the experiment, children and crows solved the first two problems in virtually the same way, through simple trial and error. The third test, however, was one that involved several tubes of water, but the one that was obviously the easiest to drop pebbles into wasn’t accessible. You had to drop pebbles into one of the other tubes to get the water level to rise in the third.
The crows couldn’t figure out that one. They simply gave up. Children, on the other hand, weren’t about to be defeated by the problem, even though its solution was almost magical to them.
And that is where the fanciful mind trumped the rational mind.
Children, it seems don’t understand that something is impossible. They believe in magic, that anything can happen. When faced with a seemingly impossible task, they simply kept trying new ways to do it, until they found the solution.
And here’s the kicker. While crows and children both have good knowledge of the how physical relationships work in the world, children have farther reaching causal learning abilities. As one researcher put it, birds “are beautifully adapted to learn about this world,” but “children are beautifully adapted to learn about many possible worlds.
Unfortunately, we slowly beat this out of children. School does it. The system doesn’t reward fanciful thinking, only right answers. 1+1=2, 2+2=4, etc. And with our increasing emphasis on math and science, it’s just getting worse. These disciplines don’t really reward creativity. Just ask any accountant who’s gone to jail for their creativity. Science allows you a little more latitude, mostly because you can hypothesize. Engineering doesn’t exactly reward you for being creative either. If you’ve looked at the bridges and walkways that have collapsed over the years, then you know that a creative engineer is not necessarily a successful one.
This is a crying shame, in my estimation. Rather than celebrate the problem solving skills of children who believe anything is possible, we punish them for their unique answers and tell them that there is only one answer, the right answer.
I know that some teachers will argue this with me. And I’m not blaming them for the current plight of education. They are caught between a rock and a hard place, having to teach to the standardized tests that only make future generations more assimilating and less likely to come up with creative answers to the world’s problems.
We don’t need to become a country of mathematicians, scientists and engineers. If you want to be one, great. But don’t force my children to become one of “them.”
I have always taught my children to be free thinkers, to challenge the status quo, to think “out of the box,” to question those in authority. But in today’s educational world, that is becoming harder and harder to do as we force teachers to teach to the test and forego anything that may be perceived as frivolous, things like music, art, and even the language arts.
We have lost sight that we aren’t all the same. We don’t all fit into neat little boxes. We all don’t want to be engineers, math nerds and scientists. Some of use our noggins to further our culture, not our technology. But more and more, there seems to be little room in our educational system to accommodate the dreamers, those children who grow up to be adults who still believe there is magic in this world and that nothing is impossible.
There’s some seriously sinister minds at work in this country. They love to wave the American flag and tell us we’re falling behind, that we need to be the masters of the world and that the path to this is math and science. To accomplish this, they emphasize the importance of standardized testing, falsely assuming that everyone is the same, that everyone should be the same.
Me? I was lucky to live in a time when you learned all sorts of things in school, some of them more useful than others. To this day, I still suck in math. But it never held me back in my career. In fact, I think I could have used that time in school to become an even better writer than a failed mathematician.
Perish the thought that our school system will ever emphasize such a silly thing as writing in the years to come. Let’s face it, writing is dangerous; math and science aren’t. This nation didn’t rise up agains the British because someone put forth a new math equation. It was words that incited the masses, words of sedition. Perhaps that’s what the plan has been all along. To turn us all into the crows who can only solve simple problems, not children who believe everything is possible, if we only stretch our imaginations.
In the Emerald City, thinking there’s not much to crow about these days,
– Robb