A synchronized effort

It’s not just schools that kill curiosity and creativity in children. Parents do it too.

The only difference is that those who are supposed to teach do it within the framework of formal education and we, parents, do it without being subjected to this system.

It so happens because both the people we call teachers and the parents have a wrong understanding of what teaching should be about.

We like to think of ourselves as teachers but more often than not we do not live up to this title.

Teaching is about a transfer of some skill, knowledge or wisdom. But not just any transfer. The real teaching happens when the teacher truly cares about the student and his or her growth. Caring and empowering are at the heart of teaching. And the purpose of real teaching is not sharing of information but growth (of the student as well of the teacher).

We, on the other hand, think that teaching is all about telling people younger than us how the world around us works.

A Renaissance mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe. Before him everybody believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe. This was the “truth” they’ve been telling their children.

Would Copernicus have been able to change this false belief if all he believed in were the “facts” offered to him by people older than him? Of course not.

And yet, despite this obvious obstacle (the temptation to take everything we hear from people who appear more knowledgeable than we are at face value), thanks to his innate curiosity, he was able to come up with a contradictory, and also shocking at that time, theory that soon took the place of the old theory and became the new paradigm about how the world around us works.

Instead of being raised and educated with the belief that questioning authorities and the status quo and asking questions is the best thing we can do we are being forced to mindlessly memorize things that are presented to us as ultimate truths and, when asked, return them as “correct answers”. Schools do it and families do it.

We think that we should have an answer to every question our child ask us. That we will appear stupid or uneducated if we don’t. And the answers we give should be correct — that’s what we’ve been asked to do since childhood. And there was a penalty if we failed to return the correct answer.