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It’s no secret when we look at the history of Western education that part of the purpose of secondary school was to make sure that adolescents learned the skills needed for the factory floor and the office desk – things like respecting authority, staying on task and an ability to follow instructions. Schools and learning activities were structured accordingly.
But the context for education has changed radically. And with a changing economy and changing world, we need to reassess what skills our schools are fostering – not only in what is taught, but in the actual structure of education and the learning opportunities students experience. Given what we now understand about the teenage brain, and adolescence as a crucial period of synaptic restructuring and brain ‘customization’ in response to the surrounding world, we have to ask what schools are customizing brains for. There are attributes and abilities that will be at a premium in an increasingly interconnected and uncertain future – qualities like creativity, curiousity, problem-solving skills, collaborative abilities and synthesis. Is it possible that education itself is helping to prune these out through lack of consistent use? We fill adolescent days with rote memorization, subject separation, formulaic solutions and a focus on the ‘right’ answer. Many of our current structures and methods would seem, in fact, to be strengthening neural pathways for all the wrong things – complacency, compliance and linear thinking. Is this really what we want to foster in our youth?
Researchers have found, for instance, that “as children spend more time in structured learning environments they, not surprisingly, become successful in navigating and excelling in such closed environments. They quickly learn the rules to success and as long as the rules don’t change, they do well. They feel comfortable in settings where things are structured and controlled. In contrast, a more open and risky environment intimidates them; they have learned to play life safe1”.
At a time when our world desperately needs people able to think outside the box, make new connections and problem solve in new ways, our education system may be feeding ‘The Ingenuity Gap’ – an emerging divide between our soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly limited supply of the skill2. For young people to thrive in highly flexible, changing environments, they need to have grown up in open and challenging environments that stimulate their ability to be creative and thoughtful3“. School, home and community must come to realize that what adolescent brains experience will shape who they become and how their brains will function4. We have come to value specific academic abilities that can be reflected in higher standardized test scores – at the detriment of fueling creativity5 and other key skills. Furthermore, we have attempted to constrain the natural curiousity, unbridled creativity and outside-the-box thinking that is innate to adolescence – instead of nurturing the these time-limited predispositions as strengths to be developed6. Effective and powerful education must promote non-linear thought and the ability to question, and provide opportunities that foster the synthesis of diverse areas of thought. For in the future, it is at these ‘intersections’, the intellectual spaces where far-ranging fields of study overlap and are linked together, that new and innovative ideas will emerge7 and from which the seeds of solutions for our current (and daunting) global problems will take shape. We must begin to take advantage of the opportunity of adolescence as a critical evolutionary adaptation that can help us survive and progress as a species. Supporting or Breaking-in our Youth? : John Abbott Looks at Schools
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Programs at Work
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1Terry Ryan, The New Economy’s Impact on Learning. The 21st Century Learning Initiative, September 2000.
2Thomas Homer-Dixon. The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future. Vintage Canada, 2001.
3Terry Ryan, The New Economy’s Impact on Learning. The 21st Century Learning Initiative, September 2000.
4Eric Jenson, Teaching With the Brain in Mind. Association for Curriculum and Development (ACSD), 1998.
5Ken Robinson. Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative Capstone Publishing Ltd., 2001.
6John Abbott, Crazy By Design: Adolescence, A Critical Evolutionary Adaptation. 21st Century Learning Initiative.
7Frans Johanson. The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach us About Innovation. Harvard Business School Press, 2006.
2Thomas Homer-Dixon. The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future. Vintage Canada, 2001.
3Terry Ryan, The New Economy’s Impact on Learning. The 21st Century Learning Initiative, September 2000.
4Eric Jenson, Teaching With the Brain in Mind. Association for Curriculum and Development (ACSD), 1998.
5Ken Robinson. Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative Capstone Publishing Ltd., 2001.
6John Abbott, Crazy By Design: Adolescence, A Critical Evolutionary Adaptation. 21st Century Learning Initiative.
7Frans Johanson. The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach us About Innovation. Harvard Business School Press, 2006.
