Elas são livres, almas puras que tentam voar, não ficar de canto, amarradas ou com algemas.
Uma criança não nasce para estar sentada, vendo televisão ou brincando com o tablet. Uma criança não quer estar calada o tempo todo.
Elas precisam se mexer, explorar, encontrar novidades, criar aventuras e descobrir o mundo que as rodeia. Elas estão aprendendo, são esponjas, brincalhonas natas, caçadoras de tesouros, terremotos em potencial.
Elas são livres, almas puras que tentam voar, não ficar de canto, amarradas ou com algemas. Não as façamos escravas da vida adulta, da pressa e da escassez de imaginação dos mais velhos.
Não as apressemos ao nosso mundo de desencanto, potencializemos a sua capacidade de se surpreender. Precisamos garantir que tenham uma vida emocional, social e cognitiva rica de conteúdos, de perfumes de flores, de expressão sensorial, de alegrias e de conhecimentos.
O que se passa no cérebro de uma criança quando brinca?
Un libro puede ser escrito por una razón y entendido de otro modo. Este problema lo encuentras en el escolasticismo y en la reseña de libros. Un crítico puede ver a un libro de una forma diferente que otro reseñador. No me refiero a que a un crítico le gustará un libro y otro lo odiará. Me refiero a que la experiencia actual del libro será diferente de una persona a otra; y esta quizá sea meramente una obra de entretenimiento. En el caso de un libro escrito para transmitir ciertos significados, la influencia sobre el lector puede ser otra de la que este realmente piensa.
¿Puede que sea influenciado por un libro sin saberlo?
At first glance, Quiet Time – a stress reduction strategy used in several San Francisco middle and high schools, as well as in scattered schools around the Bay Area – looks like something out of the om-chanting 1960s. Twice daily, a gong sounds in the classroom and rowdy adolescents, who normally can’t sit still for 10 seconds, shut their eyes and try to clear their minds. I’ve spent lots of time in urban schools and have never seen anything like it.
This practice – meditation rebranded – deserves serious attention from parents and policymakers. An impressive array of studies shows that integrating meditation into a school’s daily routine can markedly improve the lives of students. If San Francisco schools Superintendent Richard Carranza has his way, Quiet Time could well spread citywide.
Our natural creative genius is stifled from the time we are born.
At TEDxTucson, Dr. George Land dropped a bombshell when he told his audience about the shocking result of a creativity test developed for NASA but subsequently used to test school children (see the full video below).
NASA had contacted Dr George Land and Beth Jarman to develop a highly specialized test that would give them the means to effectively measure the creative potential of NASA’s rocket scientists and engineers. The test turned out to be very successful for NASA’s purposes, but the scientists were left with a few questions: where does creativity come from? Are some people born with it or is it learned? Or does it come from our experience?
The scientists then gave the test to 1,600 children between the ages of 4 and 5. What they found shocked them.
This is a test that looks at the ability to come up with new, different and innovative ideas to problems. What percentage of those children do you think fell in the genius category of imagination?
A full 98 percent!
It gets more interesting
But this is not the real story. The scientists were so astonished that they decided to make it a longitudinal study and tested the children again five years later when they were ten years old.
The result? Only 30 percent of the children now fell in the genius category of imagination.
When the kids were tested at 15 years the figure had dropped to 12 percent!
What about us adults? How many of us are still in contact with our creative genius after years of schooling?
Sadly, only 2 percent.
And for those who question the consistency of these results — or think they may be isolated incidences — these results have actually been replicated more than a million times, reports Gavin Nascimento whose article first alerted me to this amazing study and its shocking implication: that the school system, our education, robs us of our creative genius.
“The reasoning for this is not too difficult to apprehend; school, as we plainly call it, is an institution that has historically been put in place to ultimately serve the wants of the ruling class, not the common people.
“In order for the so-called elite to maintain their lavish life styles of overt luxury — where they contribute the least but enjoy the most — they understand that children must be dumbed down and brainwashed to accept (and even serve) their rapacious system of artificial scarcity, unending exploitation, and incessant war,” writes Nascimento.
What now? Can we recuperate our creativity?
Land says we have the ability to be at 98 percent if we want to. From what they found from the studies with children and from how brains work, there are two kinds of thinking that take place in the brain. Both use different parts of the brain and it’s a totally different kind of paradigm in the sense of how it forms something in our minds.
One is called divergent — that’s imagination, used for generating new possibilities. The other is called convergent — that’s when you’re making a judgement, you’re making a decision, you’re testing something, you’re criticizing, you’re evaluating.
So divergent thinking works like an accelerator and convergent thinking puts a brake on our best efforts.
“We found that what happens to these children, as we educate them, we teach them to do both kinds of thinking at the same time”, says Land.
When someone asks you to come up with new ideas, as you come up with them what you mostly learn at school is to immediately look and see: “We tried that before”, “That’s dumb idea”, “It won’t work” and so forth.
This is the point and this is what we must stop doing:
“When we actually looking inside the brain we find that neurons are fighting each other and actually diminishing the power of the brain because we’re constantly judging, criticizing and censoring,” says Land.
“If we operate under fear we use a smaller part of the brain, but when we use creative thinking the brain just lights up.”
What’s the solution?
We need to find that five-year old again. That capability that we as a five-year-old possessed, never goes away.
“That is something you exercise every day when you’re dreaming,” Land reminds us.
How do you go about finding that five-year-old?
Land challenges us all: Tomorrow, you take a table fork, turn your five-year-old on and come up with 25 or 30 ideas on how to improve on the table fork.
The curriculum needs to move away from rote learning to critical thinking to deal with the AI challenge
Each generation needs to reinvent itself and that cannot be done by mimicking other societies
Subhash Kak, who was recently awarded the Padma Shri for science & engineering-technology, says India needs to move from rote learning to critical thinking. Each generation needs to reinvent itself, says the Regents professor emeritus, Oklahoma State University, US, whose research covers the fields of neural networks, cryptography and quantum computing.
Kak, who has written 20 books, including six books of poems, says what sets humans apart from intelligent machines is awareness, and it is “wrong to assume that consciousness is just a computation”.
“My research has led me through various pathways, some of which touch on ancient wisdoms and others on modern science,” writes Kak, who is also a Vedic scholar, in his book The Circle Of Memory: An Autobiography (2016).
¿Eres feliz cuando vas a clase? Esta es la pregunta que solemos hacer al comienzo de nuestra asignatura Educación para la Felicidad.
Hace cuatro años detectamos un hueco importante en la formación inicial de los futuros profesores de Magisterio en Educación Infantil y Educación Primaria. No habíamos incluido un espacio de reflexión interdisciplinar acerca del sentido de la educación.
Para eso, creamos una asignatura que llamamos Educación para la Felicidad, y uno de nuestros pilares es lo que podemos denominar la Educación Soka.
