The world’s problems demand boldness, new solutions. Nowadays children need to develop agile minds. Composer Anthony Brandt and neuroscientist David Eagleman tell us how to nurture them to be much better.
Our children spend many of their waking hours in the classroom, where their aspirations are nurtured and get their first sense of what their society expects of them. When run correctly, it’s a place where imagination is cultivated and where knowledge is imparted, but that cultivation doesn’t always happen.
Human being brains digest the world to produce novelty — but too many classrooms causes less to be digested, instead proffering a diet of regurgitation. That diet threatens to leave our society hungry for future innovators. We’re stuck in an educational system born during the Industrial Revolution, in which the curriculum was regularized, children listened to chalkboard lectures, and stick to school bells replicated the factory bells that signaled a change of shift.
That model doesn’t prepare our students well for an advancing world, one in which jobs are rapidly redefined and the prizes go to those who can generate novel opportunities. The real job of classrooms is to train our students to remake the raw materials of the world and generate new ideas. Luckily , it’s not difficult to implement; it doesn’t require tearing up existing lesson plans. Instead, here are some guiding principles to help Our kids to be effective and creative
[images.jpg](
1. Use the past to imagine the future.
At the start of the school year, an art teacher draws an apple on the board and asks her third grade students to draw their own kind of apple. The majority of class merely copies the teacher drawing. But this exercise is the jumping-off point for a semester in which the teacher teaches her students dozens of ways of drawing an apple. The kids mimic styles such as Surrealism, Impressionism, and Pop Art, using watercolors, stipple brushwork, mosaic, line drawing, melted wax, glitter, stickers, stamps, yarn and more.
If that were as far as the lessons went, they would simply be a hands-on class in art history. But the teacher doesn’t stop with imitating existing paradigms. The work leads up to the “Anything Apple” assignment, in which students are free to mix and match techniques in any way they like. In the final class, the teacher draws an apple on the board again. This time, almost no one copies the teacher. Instead, the classroom wall is a gallery of alternative apples: students have taken what they have learned and launched in their own directions. The initiative the teacher had impacted into them makes them more creative by not minding the teacher's drawing anymore compared to the the first time
As the saying goes, “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.”
An education in creativity lies in the sweet spot between unstructured play and imitating models. This sweet idea gives the students precedents to build on, but it doesn’t constrain their choices. Students learn the best of what has come before with the goal of refashioning it.
Breaking the mold of the past conveys two lessons: it shows students how to mine the past for new ideas, and it teaches them not to be intimidated by what has come before. As the editor Hodding Carter wrote, “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.”
There are several ways to mine the past for new possibilities. You could ask students to tell a story from the perspective of a different character. For inspiration, take The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, in which author Jon Scieszka retells the story from the wolf’s point of view. The wolf claims he wasn’t trying to huff and puff and blow the pigs’ houses down — it was just allergies.
2. Explore many options.
When we ask students for creative things, too often we are satisfied with a solution. But with only one answer no matter how good and inventive minded is simply getting warmed up. The best practice in a learning room is to require students to generate not just a solution to a Creative problem, but many is to be required.
Generating multiple solutions requires training, and that training needs to start early. From literature to science to programming, students lock themselves prematurely into an answer; it takes encouragement and prodding to steer students away into wider explorations. Antoinette Portis’ picture book Not a Box illustrates the concept of proliferating options for young readers. Someone asks the rabbit protagonist, “Why are you sitting in a box?” The rabbit retorts it’s not a box: it’s a racecar. But the rabbit doesn’t stop there: it’s also a mountain, a robot, a tug-boat, a rocket, the crow’s nest of a pirate ship, the gondola of a hot-air balloon. Taking their cue from the rabbit, students can create their own version of this paradigm (“not a ball,” “not a ribbon,” etc.). This simple exercise works well with students of all ages.
Two skills lie right at the heart of the future innovator: looking around and creating new solutions.
to see which ones spread most successfully.
This exercise is a powerful way to grasp the concept of natural selection and its challenges. Instead of viewing the world around them as a preexisting set of facts to be memorized, students generate new options for what could be. This skill lies right at the heart of the future innovator.
3. Encourage creative risk-taking.
Not every problem should be aimed at only one right answer, but it should have enough answer and this lesson can be illustrated by having students create a “super-font,” for example. In a standard typeface, some letters and numerals may look so alike that it’s hard to tell them apart, especially on smartphone and computer screens. For example, 5 and S are easily confused with one another, as are B and 8, or g and q. The goal of super-fonts is to alter the shapes of letters to maximize their visual differences. It’s a creative project without a fixed solution.Few capacities hold as much life-long value as an active imagination: it impacts every aspect of our experience.
Another way tO take risk is to tackle real-world issues, ones for which the answer key has not yet been written. In NASA’s “Imagine Mars” project, students are asked to think about a manual for human life on other planets. This gets them to dissect all the features that enable a community to thrive on Earth: living quarters, food and water, oxygen, transportation, waste management, jobs, and so on.
The students then have to consider what it would take to transplant those features to the Martian landscape. How do you breathe? What do you do with garbage? Where do you exercise? Using materials from cups to cotton balls to Lego pieces to pipe cleaners, the students design a community. Exercises like these can get students thinking at the cutting edge of science.
To produce a thriving society of creative adults, it is crucial to inspire risk-taking students who don’t cower in fear of the wrong answer. Instead of having our children invest all their intellectual capital in the blue-chip stocks of life, a successful mental portfolio should diversify into more speculative investments as well.
