To do well in our education system you do not need the ability to think. Our education system favours those who do as they are told, and can remember almost all of what they are told, or more usually, what they are told to read.
Our schools have traditionally turned out "idea consumers" wandering around in metaphorical malls of ‘facts’ and ideas. Our children’s ideas and much of their experience of life is provided by text books, television, and other shallow data pools. They are brought up to believe that collecting ‘facts’ will make them educated and competent, and all their narrow experiences reinforce this belief. They have been educated to believe that ideas come from somewhere else, from magical persons, geniuses, leaders, but not from themselves.
Being an ‘idea consumer’ closes off a vast area of human experience, streamlines the equations of life and makes one's existence simple – all one need do is find out what views it is acceptable to hold, and adopt them. For the ‘idea consumer’ consulting an “expert” is a more efficient way to solve a problem than simply working it out for themselves, and increasingly in all areas of life people are consulting experts to tell them what to do. I have a very wealthy friend who pays a personal stylist. - Someone to tell her how to do her hair, her make-up, and what clothes to wear!
Some ‘idea consumers’ go to ‘experts’ so they can be told how to be happy, or how to have better sex lives, or what to do if they are over average weight!! Increasingly parents are seeking ‘expert’ guidance on how to deal with their children. Some parents are so distrustful of their own ability to think that they seek out experts in parenting and pay them for ideas on how to bring up their children. These experts are paid to tell them how to get their children to do home-work, or pass a nursery interview, or simply what time the child should go to bed.
Obviously being an ‘idea consumer’, and not having the ability to create your own solutions will lead to stress, unhappiness, and a belief that somehow modern life has become far more complicated than it actually is . When this happens, the solution for a dedicated idea consumer is to buy some more ideas. A therapist/counsellor or even a magazine is engaged, and the ‘Ideas consumer’ pays for ideas to overcome depression, obsession, or even how to hold a dinner party and so on.
A few schools are swimming against the tide and trying to encourage children to think, and not be simple idea consumers. They feel that children are better off creating personal solutions to problems than searching for existing solutions. They argue that by solving the problem themselves, children will increase their index of self-reliance, and hopefully this will become a theme in their lives. In learning to solve problems, they may or may not create a more efficient solution than anyone has before. What is definite, is that by solving the problems themselves they will become less dependent on teachers, experts, authorities, technical super-beings, and even personal stylists. Adults who can figure out for themselves what styles of clothes and make-up suit them is the minimum we should expect from education.
Abha Adams is an Education Consultant working with international organizations and progressive schools
