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Chapter Thirteen
TL;DRâSchools were developed as a way to make good employees. Our education system doesnât encourage deviation. Charter schools sweep the nation. Summit Public Schools and Trellis approach the problems in education.
While I was giving a presentation on innovation and thought diversity to a group of educators, someone posed the following question to me:
âBut donât we need to teach children the system before we teach them to look outside of it? Donât they need to know the rules in order to break them?â
The question filled me with delight. It was the most amazing question.
âNo,â I replied excitedly. âNO! We donât need to give them systems to chase out their originality before letting them solve the problem themselves.â
âLet me give you an alternative approach,â I excitedly professed âŚ
Letâs say you are an art teacher, and the curriculum says you are going to teach impressionism. On the first day, you pull up a picture of Van Gogh on the board, most likely his iconic self-portrait, and next to it you display Starry Night and his sunflowers.
The way our education system is currently set up, youâd then explain the medium he used, oils on canvas. You might go into the chemical breakdown of his particular type of oils or even the method of his canvas stretching.
His technique would be analyzed. His use of color dissected. His genius and process utterly (albeit incompletely) explained, with a makeshift structure attempting to teach would-be artists how to replicate the greats in a general paint-by-numbers application.
At the end of the lecture that would last forty minutes to four hours depending on the curriculum, the assignment would be issued: take a set amount of time and produce an image in the impressionist style like that of Vincent Van Gogh.
The students would then, as taught, follow the structure as explained, asking for assistance as they struggled, and would be redirected onto the path of the structure as needed.
At the end, some would have accomplished their assigned goal, while others would have âfailed,â had their inadequacies marked, and been given direction on how to correct them.
The structure in place, the rubric established, no room for personal experimentation. No space for failure.
BUT! What if, instead, you didnât do any of that?
What if you showed them the works of the impressionists, explained generally what the impressionist movement was, and gave them a table full of supplies with the only assignment being: figure it out.
A student would look at Monetâs Water Lilies, not with the words of the teacher telling them how it was done, but with a critical eye and a goal of understanding and cracking the code. Some students would figure it out, others would fail. Not at a system explained to them, but they would succeed or fail at an approach of their own devisingâhow wonderful for both!
When the student approached the teacher with a canvas resembling a kindergarten finger painting ⌠the educator would hand them a clean canvas and say, âLetâs try that again.â
After two or three attempts, deep analysis, and studying the âproblem,â a student of any form would be primed for information in a way that they werenât before. The neural pathways would be established, and a genuine question would exist, as opposed to an assignment with a predetermined goal.
But it isnât just ART!
How amazing would the insights of the uninitiated be if instead of starting with the Pythagorean theorem or the established systems of old, we simply posed a quandary that said: how could we approach this?
Both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz nearly simultaneously developed calculus. My favorite part of that fact is that, whereas the core math and results are in fact, the same, the processes, symbols, and general structure werenât.
Both Leibniz and Newton developed the same system, but very much in their own way. For what itâs worth, Isaac Newton is largely credited for being the father of calculus, but the form that was widely adopted and is currently taught is actually that of Leibniz (#TeamLeibniz).
I have never been particularly adept at math, which is a polite way of saying that I have deeply struggled with math the entirety of my life.
However, for the most part, my hang-ups were in not understanding the...
