In his critique of the traditional school system, titled Weapons of Mass Instruction, a former “Teacher of the Year,” John Taylor Gatto declared:
“The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.”
His book focuses traditional education which cripples imagination, discourages critical thinking, and creates a false view of learning as a byproduct of rote-memorisation drills. That’s a model that many homeschoolers replicate at home too, as its the form of education we received and which programmed the way we think of learning.
Escaping this trap requires a strategy Gatto calls “open source learning” which imposes no artificial divisions between learning and life. Home educators often feel frustrated when the daily challenges of life starts to “interfere” with schooling, instead of recognising that all of life is learning. There should be no divisions. The lessons from daily life are as vital as the lessons in books.
It is only when we shift our thinking that we can begin to encourage our children to pursue a different kind of education – one in which they have the freedom to tackle those “new things” that Gatto suggests.
To foster creative thinking in kids, we should encourage open-ended play, provide creative materials, ask thought-provoking questions, and perhaps most importantly, embrace mistakes as learning opportunities. All of our home education programmes, in both English and Afrikaans promote this kind of open-ended learning. Consider these strategies:
1. Encourage Free Play and Exploration
They say that “Play is the work of childhood”. Play offers more benefits than we can list here, but most importantly, play develops the part of the brain used for academic learning. David Whitebread, a Cambridge researcher from the Faculty of Education, reported that “neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions.”
We must allow children ample time for unstructured free play, preferably out of doors, where they can explore nature, follow their imaginations and create their own scenarios without strict rules or expectations. Being outside in nature provides bountiful opportunities for enquiry and discovery. Why do the clouds move? Where do ants go? How to do birds fly? Given enough time, the learning opportunities and questions could be endless. The learning will be meaningful and purposeful to the curious children seeking the answers they need.
2. Provide Craft Materials and Time to be Creative
Offer a wide variety of art materials like paints, crayons, clay, and building blocks with which children can experiment. Also provide other crafty materials like cardboard, buttons, and cotton reels for mixed media activities, allowing children to create without instructions. This encourages patience and perseverance, concentration skills, problem-solving, self-expression and it builds children’s self-confidence.
One of our children went through a season of creating intricate paper creations such as replicas of guns, dinosaurs and three dimensional decorations using origami and other paper-craft techniques. It required hours of focused attention. Another developed his interest in engineering through building and designing with Lego Technics. Two of our girls discovered their artistic talents and eventually pursued careers in graphic design. Let your children pursue these interests for as long as they like.
3. Inspire Role Play
Inspire your children to enjoy role-playing activities, which help develop social skills and encourage creativity. Encourage them to tell stories, both by reading and by creating their own, which will stimulate imagination and problem-solving skills.
We’ve seen our children re-enact historical events they learned about. A small plastic sandpit became The Mayflower ship carrying the pilgrims on their journey to America, a trench dug in the garden hid soldiers shooting with sticks at the imagined enemy in the Anglo-Boer War, bows and arrows were made from tree branches and a bolt of royal blue sewing fabric was unwrapped to become the Esther, the queen of Persia’s toga-like evening gown. Do you think our children will ever forget those lessons? Never! They have lived them!
4. Ask Thought-Provoking Questions
Encourage children to think outside the box by asking open-ended questions that stimulate their imagination, such as “What if…” or “How could we…”.
Tell them about Henry Ford, inventor of the first motor car, who once said: “If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Sir Isaac Newton searched for the answer to the question: “Why do apples fall from trees?” This sparked his exploration of gravity.
Ask them what question the Wright brothers were trying to answer when they built the first aeroplane. What other questions can we ask and then seek the answers, to make the world a better place?
Who, in history, would have asked, “Why can’t we vote and what can we do about it?“
Find ways to get your children to question and challenge assumptions, develop critical thinking and creative problem-solving. Challenge them to look at things from a new point of view. Our Footprints and Voetspore programmes encourage children to consider different perspectives when studying events in history. We don’t teach them what to think, we teach them how to think – critical thinking skills.
5. Embrace Mistakes and Celebrate Persistence
Parents absolutely must change their thinking about mistakes and convey a new attitude to their children. Children in schools quickly learn that knowing the right answers and speaking up only when spoken to is rewarded much more than asking questions, especially inconvenient questions. They spend their formative years preparing for tests, instead of finding meaningful answers to new questions and figuring out solutions to challenges they face.
We must view mistakes as opportunities for learning and growth, rather than failures. Focus on the process of learning, rather than the end-result or the end-product. This will allow children to feel safe to experiment and explore without worry about a “pleasing” result. Traditional school “punishes” children for mistakes by awarding them lower scores. We have to change our approach and see mistakes as opportunities to embrace learning. We don’t learn anything new when we get everything right, but when we make a mistake, there is an opportunity to learn something we didn’t know or fully understand previously.
Provide regular times for pausing and reflecting on challenges so that struggles and failures become a platform for new ideas and solutions.
Thomas Edison is a good example of a person who viewed failure positively. He set up a laboratory where he and his team could work on developing new technology by trial and error. He blessed the world with his many inventions, which include a telephone, the phonograph, an alkaline battery and the light bulb. In total, he had over 1 000 patents for inventions. He once said, “I will not say that I failed a 1000 times but that I found 1000 ways to fail.” That’s the attitude we should inspire.
If we stimulate them to do “new things” and achieve their goals, our children will just have to develop determination, persistence and the ability to bounce back from setbacks and failures…and just by thinking differently, they are likely to change the world!
At Footprints, we offer you a range of programmes to help you develop innovative and creative thinkers, effortlessly!
The thoughtful design and engaging content is truly making our homeschool experience delightful and enriching and it is evident that a lot of care and effort went into creating such a wonderful programme. ~ Mubena Parker
