When I was in first grade, the teacher told my parents not to let me read ahead in the textbook because it would make me non-conforming. Imagine: here is a whole book full of excitement and education, and the teacher said don’t read it! Of course, today the reply from most parents (including mine) would have been a flat out refusal of that idea, or even a more coarsely worded version of “Get lost.” But back then teachers were on a level with superhuman demigods whose words were law, especially if they wore the impenetrable mantle of tenure. It didn’t mean they were right: a few years later we all fell victim to the black hole of New Math, from which it seems the education system and millions of children have never recovered.
Curiosity is usually held back from our children. Sometimes it saves lives to step in and stop something like stepping into traffic or touching that nice red stove burner, but if we aren’t curious, we don’t discover anything. We don’t evolve. We go stagnant.
For a time, I was so afraid to read anything that might cause a life-altering event like removal from school, I didn’t read much beyond what I was instructed to cover for assignments. What I didn’t know was that some other students were reading on their own time and the teacher ignored it. But I’m digressing. We should not be afraid to inquire, explore and ask questions. A man once looked at mold on bread and wondered what it did, and had my first grade teacher intervened, we would never have had the benefits of penicillin. Sure, we would have conformed: we’d have all been wiped out by disease, and dead bodies all look alike in the grave.
Why are students not enrolling in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math)? They are not being encouraged to be curious. They’re being plucked not only from music–which teaches math skills–and sports which keep the body (including the brain) in great shape, but from the laboratories and shops and taught how to take tests which measure nothing. In New Jersey, some forty percent of students did not do well in the current version of proficiency tests. Why does that not seem surprising?
I was in a think tank meeting recently, to determine what to do about some website content which is referenced by departments across several areas. A participant indicated that nobody knew what was in much of the linked content on a particular page by its label. Having worked on the content as a project participant some years ago, I was ready to reply that we had been restricted by content size, page capacity and approval issues, so labels were not particularly wide-ranging, but all it would take was a click on a link to see what was in the content.
Don’t look any further than you have to. Conform and don’t make waves.
Conform, my white middle-aged posterior!!! Conformity has its place, but not in human discovery. It doesn’t mean to lock up the brain and close the door on knowledge itself. I’ll be damned if I’ll not read ahead, go ahead, plow ahead and take the head of anybody who stands in my road and ram it into the cream pie in my other hand and call them whipped cream face. I will not stop learning until the brain hits the off button.
What did you learn today? Did you read ahead?
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 