Scientific American: The educational value of creative disobedience

[Fumesucker]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=the-educational-value-of-creative-d-2011-07-07

This is a long article but I think it's worth reading the whole thing, some critical points about education are being made, IMO.

<snip>

Hypothesis I: 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.

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.

There are two very interesting studies recently emerging from the field of developmental psychology that address the issue of early childhood education and teaching methodology. The first one, by Elizabeth Bonawitz and colleagues, has to do with direct instruction and the limits it puts on exploratory behavior. The second , by Daphna Buchsbaum and her team, looks at imitation of action sequences—what situations and specific criteria make a child likely to imitate an act, or to perceive it as a “correct” answer.


<snip>

Hypothesis II: Teaching kids to ask questions and think about problems before receiving the solution encourages more non-linear, divergent and creative thinking, to produce better innovators, problem-solvers, and problem-finders.

[hobbit709]

1. Disobedience always spurs creative thinking.

whenever I got caught it made me think smarter the next time.

Of course I was taught at an early age to not blindly follow authority.

[xchrom]

2. Recommend

Why does this remind me of the Adam & eve story?

[catabryna]

3. Nice article...

K&R

[canoeist52]

4. Rec. for an excellent article for parents and teachers

or anyone who works with kids.

"In this age of innovation, even more important than being an effective problem solver, is being a problem finder. It’s one thing to look at a problem and be able to generate a solution; it is another thing to be able to look at an ambiguous situation, and decide if there is a problem that needs to be solved. That’s a skill that isn’t really targeted by traditional teaching methods, and in fact, it is often discouraged. In order to teach problem finding, more creative methods must be utilized. Rule-breaking , to an extent, should be tolerated and encouraged, and yes—even taught."

[TalkingDog]

5. Which is why the arts are so good for kids.

There is no "correct" answer to making a pot or a painting... only "The Most Effective Solution Implemented in the Most Effective Way."

That requires a lot of critical thinking and problem solving.

[WatsonT]

6. What about not teaching them at all?

That's the experiment we're trying now.

Both have their value: you can't learn math or spelling creatively. So force kids to memorize many of these facts.

But then give them assignments that as much as possible force them to use these facts in clever ways to solve real problems.

[rucky]

7. This paragraph could/should lead to a teachers' revolution:

“On average, the students in the test group (the ones taught using creative methods) received higher final grades in the college course than the control group (taught with traditional methods and assessments). But—just to make things fair— he also gave the test group the very same analytical-type exam that the regular students got (a multiple choice test), and they scored higher on that test as well. That means they were able to transfer the knowledge they gained using creative, multimodal teaching methods, and score higher on a completely different cognitive test of achievement on that same material.”

In other words, teachers could produce better test results by not teaching to the test, but by ignoring all the test prep bullshit and support investigative and critical thinking.

[hootinholler]

8. Yes and that has been clear for some time

Look at the alleged 'captians of industry', Gates, even going back to Edison, there seems to be a nonconformist bent.

-Hoot

[Fumesucker]

9. Kick ..

:kick: