To be classified as a genius you
must think about 200 possibilities of answer. And a study showed that 98% of
kindergarten children tested are genius at divergent thinking. What about you?
How many answers could you think about? Why?
- By Bárbara Godoy -
In his book called “The school which
I always dreamed of without imagining it could exist”, the pedagogue and educator Rubem
Alves affirms that forgetting is to break free the ways of being that have been consolidated and that make us think things must be the way there
are. No! Things do not have to continue to be the way they have always been.
And maybe many of the problems related
to the education structures lie on our fear of forgetting and changing. Our
actual educational system was designed during the Industrial Revolution and it
was based on the Enlightenment ideals. More than two thousand years have passed
and we still have almost the same kind of school, based in a close relationship
with the industries needs. Our schools are producing workers since their
creation.
In other words, our schools were
constructed according to the model of the assembly lines. Rubem Alves defines
the school as a factory organized for the production of bio-psychological
unities carriers of knowledge and capabilities. The unities that at the end of
the educational process are not in accordance with the model defined by the government
are discarded – repeat a grade.
The problem of this selection is
that brilliant people cannot develop their potentials. So, in this context, we
could ask ourselves: what is intelligence? Maybe we may have different answers,
but one of these considers the intelligence as the capacity that makes creativity
possible. In summary, intelligence is related to the divergent thinking.
A research with children showed that
they are geniuses of the divergent thinking because they can give different
answers to the same situation. On the other hand, the exactly experiences were
proposed again to the same children when they were older and the result was
scary: they were not classified as genius anymore. That way we can conclude
that the influences children receive during their educational process repress
this fantastic capacity of seeing different possible ways, and instead they see
only what is straight ahead.
Rubem Alves affirms that
intelligence develops when the body faces practical needs. It means that
intelligence is extremely practical and it serves life. If the school
stimulated the students to learn what is closely related to their present
experiences, would’t we have much more inventors?
With this scenario, maybe the
solution is to forget. And, just then, think about new alternatives, like
Escola da Ponte in Portugal. In this school there are no grades, no classes,
and no classrooms. Learning works like that: children make small groups with
common interests and then meet with a teacher. Together, the group decides a
working program of fifteen days, and the teacher orientates about what to
search and the places to do so. At the end of the two-week period, the group
joins again and evaluates what they have learned. If what was learned is
appropriate, the members of the group look for new groups to study a different
subject.
With this learning structure, the
paradigm of the teacher as the producer of knowledge is broken; children help
each other instead of competing; it ends with the disinterest related to the
school; and the established educational program is transformed into one that
contains answers to the children’s questions.
The book starts
with this quotation by T. S. Eliot:
“In a world of fugitives, the person taking
the opposite direction will appear to run away”.
And we end our reflection with
this, because we are already practicing how to forget and in the end this
quotation is just the start.
“We must be the change we want to see in the
world” - Gandhi.
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| Bárbara Godoy Senior Student at Colégio Piracicabano |
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