Tuesday, February 19, 2013

"A Zigzag Streak of Lightning in the Brain"

"Greatness is a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain." - Herbert Asquith

A few years ago I was walking down the street early in the morning when for a reason I don't remember I ended up talking to a boy about 11. He was going to school.

"You like school?" I asked him.

"Nope," he said.

"I didn't like it, either," I told him. "Boring, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said.

After a few minutes we went our separate ways, and I thought, school never changes. Then I thought about The Diamond Age, a novel by Neal Stephenson in which there is this quote:

“A typical school day for Finkle-McGraw consisted of walking down to a river to study tadpoles or going to the public library to check out a book on ancient Greece or Rome.” And when he finally made it into a public high school: “The coursework was so stunningly inane, the other children so dull, that Finkle-McGraw developed a poor attitude.”

A poor attitude, like that boy had. And me. And a lot of my friends.

Then I thought about Einstein said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." He didn't say knowledge wasn't important; he just said that imagination is more important. After all, knowledge is worthless unless you can do something with it. And it takes imagination to put all those pieces together and make something useful of them.

I've given what Einstein (and others like him) said a great deal of thought and I've decided he's right: imagination is essential to any kind of discovery. And to be imaginative, there must be the ability to concentrate, and all if it must be considered play (Einstein also said, "Play is the highest form of research").

When I look back at my time in public school, I found I daydreamed a lot, mostly because I was bored. I was very imaginative, and even then I considered it play. I could concentrate to the degree that someone could say something to me and I wouldn't hear them.

As far as I'm concerned, I learned nothing beyond the fourth grade.

Play, in fact, is essential to our health. Dr. Stuart Brown, a physician, psychiatrist, clinical researcher and the founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent his career studying the effects of play on people.

He reviewed more than 6000 life histories and found that play is enormously significant for both children and adults. He said he began thinking about the role of play in people's lives while conducting a study of homicidal males in Texas. What he discovered was severe play deprivation in the lives of these murderers.

He started with the life of Charles Whitman, the infamous Texas shooter who got on top of a clock tower and murdered 14 people and wounded 32 others. He founded Whitman had been chronically abused by his father and had lived a very regimented childhood with very little play.

It clear that at the minimum children and adults must play to attain some degree of well-being and health. When they can also attain imagination and discipline (concentration), they they can create and discover.

Or as Brown said, "When I later studied highly creative and successful individuals...[h]ighly successful people have a rich play life."

Play, imagination, curiosity, the ability to concentrate. When you have those things, and enjoy what you are doing, then you can achieve what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called "flow," which has been defined as a "mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does."

The purpose of education is to develop your inherent talents. As the philosopher Brand Blanshard has said, "I'm inclined to think the person does the most for the world by being his own self in the fullest measure." (Spinoza, hundreds of years before, said essentially the same thing).

The public schools are overwhelmingly not set up to encourage play, imagination, curiosity and concentration. If they were, there would not be a 50% drop-out rate. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with boredom.

The public schools were originally set up along factory lines on purpose, in the hopes of creating good workers and good consumers. It backfired, which many predicted.

As John Taylor Gatto wrote, "I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us...I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."

The public schools at one time weren't that bad, but that was when there was local control. You could play at recess and roughhouse, as I did. We even played sometimes in school, such as drawing violent war scenes on the back of homework in class (too bad I didn't the dozens of mine). You can't do any of that today without being expelled or maybe even arrested.

With more federal control, and federal 'standards,' the worse the schools are going to be. The schools in fact have gotten so bad parents have pulled out their kids and are home-schooling them. I've know some parents who have moved into rural areas, including into trailers, to get away what they consider a decaying society.

Believe me, I understand. After all, where are all the polymaths we had in the past? How could a tiny, underpopulated country like Scotland produce the Scottish Enlightenment? Liberty, imagination and play, that's how.

The more the schools, and businesses, and society, crushed curiosity, imagination and play, the more all of the former are going to go backwards. I guarantee you this.

I do not believe the public schools can be reformed. So all I can say is: get your kids out of them.

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere." - Carl Sagan

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