One of the Twitterers that I follow shared a link to a TED talk that I found very interesting. In the TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson spoke about how public education is often educating the creativity out of our students and how that is impacting the adult population. It’s a great video if you have 20 minutes to view it (Sir Ken Robinson on TED). This short excerpt comes at around 4 minutes in where he gives two great examples for one of his points.
I’ve known for many years that children have a much greater resilience with getting the wrong answer than adults do. This is even more apparent in the technology world where the joke has always been, ‘Let the child program the time on the VCR’. Today, many adults say that they don’t know how to do something and don’t have the time to learn how. I know time is a big factor, but honestly, with 4 minutes and Google, you can pretty much learn almost anything. I think that more than time, many adults have lost the ability to just try, be wrong, and try again.
Our schools teach students that being correct on exams is the main idea in school. Students who play a Nintendo DS for hours, trying to figure out the right way to win the current level, have the ability to be wrong and eventually, creatively find the answer that works. Adults on the other hand, are faced with wrong answers as failure and failure is punishable. The theory is that as we become adults, being wrong is more deadly than a temporary detour before success.
Please enjoy the full video or at least the short excerpt linked to above. Think about how we can keep the creativity in our daily lives and the lives of our children. I suggest that blogging is a great outlet for personal creativity and it also allows for the shared experience of peers.
December 3, 2008 at 5:38 pm
This is so true that kids today have so much practicing persevering in the face of failure and disappointment when it comes to video games– those same children may have difficulty finding those skills when it comes to dealing with academic or athletic disappointments. I made this very point in my new book, Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness. My point is that with computer games kids can see the other routes to take when they get stuck so they learn flexibility. If we are only showing our kids a “dead end” when they fail or make a mistake in school, we are doing them a disservice– what about linking mistakes with learning or courage rather than shame?
If you’re interested in taking a look at an excerpt of my book, you can find one at: http://www.freeingyourchild.com.
Thanks for this great post!
December 3, 2008 at 6:10 pm
I’m not sure my reply went through– so here goes again. I think that there is a great paradox that kids today are so flexible when it comes to playing video games– they persevere, fail, try and try again, but when it comes to academic and athletic challenges, when they fail or make a mistake it is a dead end, they give up. We can encourage children to develop flexibility in these other areas by linking mistakes with courage, or learning rather than with shame. We can highlight “famous failures” celebrities or people in history, e.g. Thomas Edison with 10,000 tries to make a light bulb, so that kids learn when they hit a wall, they try another direction.
These are issues that I discuss directly in my new book, Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness. There is an entire chapter devoted to the topic of teaching kids (and parents) the skills of overcome failure, losing and disappointment.
To read an excerpt, please go to: http://www.freeingyourchild.com.
Thanks for the great post!
December 3, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Tamarchansky, Yes, both got through to the moderation filter. I liked both, so you got double print time.
Thanks for visiting.