Inciting Revolution - Or, Why We Cannot Teach Creativity in Schools

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell

Like all institutions, education helps to ... preserve the status quo. It is necessarily conservative.

A basic requirement of moving into a new age is creative thinking. But schools stifle creativity, particularly in children, by insisting that they conform to standards of behavior and belief, and by teaching them to respond to questions with answers that are expected of them. Answers that are expected cannot be creative, precisely because they are expected. Creative answers are necessarily surprising, unexpected. The current American educational system can be characterized as having students memorize known (expected) answers to predetermined questions. ….

Students are also taught that certain questions must not be asked; for example, Jules Henry, a cultural anthropologist who argued that a human’s foremost evolutionary task is to learn how to learn, wondered what would happen “if all through school the young were provoked to question the Ten Commandments, the sanctity of revealed religion, the foundations of patriotism, the profit motive, the two-party system, monogamy, …. and so on. … such questioning would produce more creativity than a change-resisting society could handle.

All quoted from Russell Ackoff and Sheldin Rovin's Redesigning Society, pp. 83-4.

Picture from Sandi's 2nd grade class last Valentine.

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Transforming Education: Step Two

In conversation, my Sandi commented on my last post about education. Along with her education in education and child development, Sandi got certified in Montessori. She said that regardless of what is taught, we have to think about how it is taught. What is usually lacking is a context, or purpose, for what is taught

Montessori pre-schools are hugely popular. One of the many concepts underlying her teaching methods is the notion that children learn better if they start out manipulating things and then extract from these things (beads, say) the abstract notions of numbers.

Montessori high schools are rare. One of the key concepts behind her design of learning for teenagers is the notion that they need a context for what they are learning. She recommends, for example, that they actually run a business part time, extracting from that day to day operation more abstract notions of math, value, and translating ideas into action, into product. Lacking such a context, it is hard to engage students. Those who learn in traditional classes do so in spite of the design of education, not because of it. (Imagine a road designed in such a way that it was in spite of, and not because of, the design that cars avoided collisions.)

Russell Ackoff, one of my heroes, made this profoundly interesting point about our application of the analytic model to our world. If you analyze a problem, you break it down to its constituent parts and then work with those. The problem we analyzed about 500 years ago was the problem of life. We broke it into pieces - learning, work, and play all made separate. We have playgrounds and coliseums for play, schools for learning, and factories and offices for work. If you are in the classroom, you ought not to play and you are not going to work, to do anything productive (teenagers running a business as a way to learn?). If you are on the playground, you are not going to learn anything.

Ackoff is a systems thinking advocate and pioneer. For him the next wave of progress will come from adopting a worldview that looks at wholes and the relationships between parts instead of using analysis to break our world into parts seemingly easier to manage and solve. Instead of institutions that separate out our different selves, we should be designing institutions that accommodate our humanity. Why should we live our lives as tools of our tools or institutions? Why not make these tools adapt to us?

And taking such an approach may well have a more profound impact on the transformation of education than adopting or emphasizing any one new subject of study.

[And no, I am not turning R World into an education blog. But sometimes, thoughts just come in clumps, no?]

Chapter 7 Change in Thinking Video - Leadership

In this final chapter, I simply declare that just as it would be good for a person living in Itay to speak Italian, so it would be good for a person dealing with systems to adopt systems thinking.

Systems thinking will be to the next economy what reductionist, or analytical, thinking was to the industrial revolution. It's time to begin taking a systems perspective.

Transformers - Box Office Smash & Sign of a New Reality

Toys matter. The little girls who first played with Barbie dolls became the first generation to finance the cosmetic surgery industry. The little boys who first read Buck Rogers's comic books became the first generation to finance Star Wars missile defense programs.

So what can we learn from the success of Transformers at the Box office?

Michael Bay’s giant freakin robots movie debuted with a massive $27.4 million on Tuesday, making it the biggest ever take ever brought in by any movie on a Tuesday. You might think the competition isn’t very fierce there, since Tuesday’s aren’t exactly prime movie going time, but the previous champ was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest with a very distant $15 million.

There are a variety of lessons to be drawn from this. One, the generation that first played with Transformers are now old enough to drive to theaters. Two, nostalgia is a huge draw (how long before someone puts out a Captain Crunch movie, ala Pirates of the Caribbean?). But there is also a prediction in here.

Transformer toys were very clever. A car becomes a monster - a plane becomes a monster - a vending machine becomes a monster. Okay, they weren't so very clever because everything unfolded into a monster. But the concept was clever - something that could be one thing until it was folded into another thing.

Kids who grow up playing with Transformers are less likely to take the form as fixed. This generation is unlikely to see the school as a place for learning only and not a place for fun or work. They are less likely to accept a work place as a static place where only work can be done and no play or learning is expected. This is a generation unlikely to conform to institutional norms, expecting these institutions to transform instead.

Toys become the building blocks of social invention, the stepping stones of social evolution.

[I first heard Russell Ackoff make the point that with our analytical world model, we've set up very distinct places for work, play, and learning. Schools are places for learning but not fun or work, for instance.]

The Need for Systems Thinking, Part of a Continuing Saga

Norman and Vladimir have made some really great points in response to my "Time to Upgrade Civilization's Operating System" post. I was going to respond in comments but realized that a proper response deserved its own post.

First, there is the matter of technology to facilitate systems thinking. Vladimir points out that we can't hold too many things in our head at one time. This is true, but it doesn't mean that we can't create technology to enhance our ability. For instance, if you want to cross the room, you use your feet. If you want to cross town, you use a car. If you want to cross the continent, you use an airplane. Depending on the scope of our ambitions, we use different technology. Yet if we want to plan lunch, we talk. If management wants to plan next year's goals, they talk. If legislators want to plan budgets, programs, and laws that impact the next generation, they talk. This is, ultimately, about as effective as walking across the continent.

In order to promote systems thinking we'll need to develop and popularize tools for systems thinking. In my mind, these tools include econometric models, project planning software, statistical quality control tools, and other tools as varied as mind maps and systems simulation software. (Look here, for instance: http://www.pegasuscom.com/gallery.html). Along with these tools we'll need to grapple more with the implications of systems thinking as explicated in the thinking of people like W. Edwards Deming, Russell Ackoff, Donella Meadows, and Peter Senge.

Finally, the consequences of these systems thinking tools need to be institutionalized. I like Norman's notion of creating "hardware" to go along with civilization's new operating system. Part of the genius of Adam Smith is that he saw in specialization of labor a means to translate Descartes’ analytic thinking into institutions; the resultant capitalism transformed the world. What we now need are entrepreneurs who take on the task of creating institutions able to become a vehicle for systems thinking in the same way that factories were a vehicle for analytic thinking.

One last note. Russell Ackoff, a person who has probably done as much as anyone to popularize and pioneer systems thinking, has just come out with a new book, Management f-Laws. You find information about the book here. The publisher describes it as “easy to read and accessible - setting out the uncomfortable truths about how organizations really work, what's wrong with the way we design and manage businesses, what makes managers tick, and how we can make things work better. Russ himself comments on the book here.”

If you decide to order the book, enter “triarchy-ten” in the promotional code field on the order form to get a ten percent discount.