Teach Kids How to Think
Kids are our future. This future spends most of the time in schools, which are very far from ideal, to be honest. Will Stanton, a well-known activist, wondered how to change the existing system of education for children to cease being passive listeners and become real explorers…
Will Stanton is the author of the project Education Revolution, which deals with the current education system and offers a new model that frees the children of ideological indoctrination, helps to unleash their potential and forms the attitude to them as to living creative personalities.
Today, the education system largely inspires children to have ideas instead of teaching them. In fact, it has been this way for a sufficiently long time. Teachers urge young minds to take the authority rather than the truth for granted. Teachers tell their students instead of communicating with them.
Teachers become translators of information. They just mindlessly repeat what they once learned from their teachers and do not process the information, including the one that passed unnoticed by the critics. Children are not masters of their own learning. Instead, their minds are used as storage containers.
The factory model of education with a focus on academic and economic elitism produces an array of obedient operators for the system, encouraging them to coordinate each step along this way.
We are not seen as complex, creative, inquisitive personalities; instead, we are a part of one big machine.
The education system filters out our researching nature for the purpose of preventing any opposition to the system. The system does not need thinkers. It does not want people who ask questions. It needs the people who are easy to manipulate and control so that all power could be concentrated in the hands of the elite.
There are those who believe that critical thinking cannot be taught in school. Socrates, had he been alive, most likely would have laughed contemptuously when hearing this statement. Socrates used to say he could not teach anybody anything; instead, he could only make them think.
If we want to solve the problem of education in the school system, we have to learn to ask questions and not offer ready-made answers.
True knowledge can only be obtained during the study. Children should be encouraged to seek answers on their own. As for teachers, they need to provide kids with the tools and resources they need to study subjects and make their own discoveries. A well-formulated question can inspire more than a countless number of prepared answers. In every aspect of our educational research, it is important to establish an open dialogue with students, encourage healthy debate and allow children to make their own conclusions.
The importance of teaching philosophy in schools is underestimated. In a world where most people work hard and with blinders on their eyes, we must occasionally re-estimate our perspectives and look at the whole situation strategically.
Philosophy makes us think, ask, and observe. Without these skills, the humanity will continue to work mechanically, allowing those in power to suppress, oppress and enslave us in all respects.
We must learn to think once again.
