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Anne-Marie Slaughter is the mother of two adolescent kids and a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.
She’s concerned that we may be killing the skills required for innovation by over-programming our children:
… The jam packed, highly structured days of elite children are carefully calculated to create Ivy League-worthy resumes. They reinforce habits of discipline and conformity, programming remarkably well-rounded and often superb young people who can play near concert-quality violin, speak two languages, volunteer in their communities and get straight A’s.
These are the students that I see in my Princeton classes; I am often in awe of their accomplishments and teaching them is a joy. But I strongly suspect that they will not be the inventors of the next “new new thing”.
… Author of The Creative Class Richard Florida observes that “many researchers see creative thinking as a four-step process: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification or revision.”
Incubation is “the ‘mystical’ step,” one in which both the conscious mind and the subconscious mull over the problem in hard-to-define ways.” Hard to define, yes, but not hard to foster, as long as chunks of the day or the week are left open for relatively random activity …
Creativity gurus often suggest ways to add randomness to your life. Left to their own devices, teenagers are masters at drifting from fad to fad, website to website, and event to event as their fancy takes them, but that seemingly aimless, random wandering is exactly what we are programming out of them …
… To nurture young people who are willing to persevere in the face of deep skepticism or outright opposition, we must reward them or at least allow them to be rewarded for breaking the rules, not meeting our expectations by jumping through an endless series of hoops…
… The U.S. higher educational system recognizes the value of challenging authority; that is what “teaching critical thinking” is all about. I wrote in 2009 that the U.S. was primed to remain an innovation leader precisely because we give A’s for the answers that challenge the teacher’s thinking and B’s for the answers that echo it…
… In a recent piece on the perception that the current generation of young people are slackers, Jon Gosier notes that their habit of asking for help and wanting to work with others reflects their understanding of the gains that come from teamwork, which “have been learned from the collaborative nature of their childhood activities, which included social networks, crowd-sourcing and even video games like World of Warcraft.”
The corporate culture at hubs of innovation like Google and Twitter encourages employees to hang out together, work together and explore random ideas in a collaborative atmosphere.
… to be an innovation nation in the knowledge-based, networked economy of the 21st century, we must remember that creativity and entrepreneurship cannot be programmed, and that less is often more.
Read the full post: Rebellion of an Innovation Mom
Scouting is a good place to do less, to be unstructured and investigative, to try ideas and plans and to follow the things that interest you rather than the things that interest your teachers.
Great column. I have had discussions with neighbors and fellow Scouters about the loss of interconnections between not just events and locations, but how Scouts get around now-a-days.
I fear that kids and young adults today are completely missing out on even the aspect of walking around their communities; meeting, or learning when, why and how to avoid, people on the street and generally noticing where they are, where they are going and what goes on around them along the way.
Not to diminish the need to provide safety for children, but being chauffeured everywhere they need to go while watching movies in the backseat does them a disservice and disconnects them from their community.
We try to give our boys the freedom to get interested in things (however meaningless they may initially seem to us), participate in them, explore them more fully, we ask questions to gauge their involvement, ask more leading questions to encourage them to link their activity to other events or resources, etc.
The dad of one of my scouts (who I happen to work with) told me that his son packed a small daypack and headed off into the woods behind his house on Saturday. After a few hours, he was seen behind the house stalking a rabbit. One shot with the pellet gun and then he got out his copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys and proceeded to skin the rabbit. He made a stew and has the pelt stretched out in the basement.
I’m not supposed to know about this when he tells me tonight at our troop meeting.
Notwithstanding that rabbit season ended a few months ago, what he did was a pretty good use of a Saturday afternoon.
This past week at summer camp my Scouts spent many hours “aimlessly” playing in the creek. Some of these Scouts will receive partials on some of their merit badges 🙂
I wish I could my guys to do the same. How cool a fort could you build in a week’s time? How much of camp could you discover? My hat’s off to you Larry – good work!
They have plenty of time to get their merit badges. I am not saying sluff but I am saying Scouting is supposed to be FUN!
I believe this is an essential in today’s world. Just slow down and observe/learn. I know that as a kid in the 70’s and 80’s in NE Texas I was completely un-programmed in my routine. I spent enough time to learn what I was doing instead of rushing through many activities.
I know my own kids(now scouts) were programmed quite a bit when there mother and were married. When I became a single dad of three and I traveled for a living I wanted to spend more time with the kids when i was home so we limited the outside activities to one art and one physical activity. They all loved swimming so we did that and all are really good at art. Time to just exercise that part of their brain, let them to start winning art awards and now my oldest daughter a Venture Scout is a lifeguard. My Webelos 2 son is has picked up on science and robotics and has won lego’s robotics contest as well as Travis country sculpture contest for the 4th-6th grade level.
I think it goes to not being in gymnastics, football, soccer, music lessons etc… all at the same time. This is what is great about scouting is and the merit badge process. Find an endeavor you can explore and master.