Yesterday, I announced my big idea for the upcoming decade is to draw attention to the concept of unlearning.
My chosen method for doing this is to introduce the idea of unlearning to kindergartners. At a deep level, however, I believe most children already know how to unlearn. The problem is that this vital skill is beaten out of them by well-intentioned but clueless adults.
A few months ago I came across the story of an artist who visited a kindergarten class and when he noticed their art hanging on the classroom wall he asked the students how many of them were artists. Every hand shot up in the air. Next, he visited a first-grade classroom and asked the same question. Only 75% of the students raised their hands. By second grade the percentage was down to 50% and by fourth grade not a single student felt they were an artist.
This is a damning indictment on our educational system and I would like to suggest that we may first want to begin our venture in teaching unlearning to kindergartners by adopting something similar to the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.”
One way to do no harm is to encourage children to continue to experiment. Beginning almost at birth, children will hold objects and inspect them from various angles and perspectives. They will even put a variety of objects in their mouths. This experimental approach is how they learn. They have a theory (I am hungry) and then test that theory against reality (um, that plastic toy isn’t very savory, perhaps, it won’t satisfy my craving).
This approach obviously involves a great deal of failure. But failure should not be defined as how we adults have come to define failure. Rather, we should remind children that experimental failure is simply a different — and, I’d argue, a much deeper — method of learning.
When teachers try to prevent students from experiencing failure by “instructing” them the right way to do something, we are not only inadvertently shutting off that children from experiencing learning themselves we are also doing society a disservice by denying that child the opportunity to see an old object or subject in a fresh and new perspective — a perspective which may have been blocked from us by a well-intentioned but clueless adult from our past.
As always, I welcome and appreciate your thoughts.
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