When I was a kid, TV was a lot different than it is today. I was fortunate to grow up in the Chicago suburbs (Park Ridge and then Barrington) in the 1960’s and 1970’s. We actually had several over-the-air UHF and VHF stations, carrying a broad variety of programming. While most of the stations still went off the air in the middle of the night, there was plenty of daytime programming to keep any kid occupied for hours.
For the most part, during my younger years, and then summers/days off from school later on, I would watch some early morning TV and then maybe a little more at night. For the remainder of the day, I was outside playing, or if the weather was rotten, I was inside playing. A couple of hours of television was all I usually watched, and that was always bracketed by hours of active play. During that active play, my mind was engaged in imaginary adventures, often with imaginary friends, in far off places straight out of the books I read or one my favorite TV shows.
One of the shows that I regularly watched was Romper Room. If you don’t know much about that show, here’s an article that explains the premise and gives some history. Basically, it was like a TV version of kindergarten.
It’s funny, looking back, at how much I learned from that show and how much my educational foundation was laid in that one hour a day. While my parents were my first teachers, I learned the Pledge of Allegiance from Miss Nancy on Romper Room. I was reminded to say a prayer before my snacks with the simply stated “God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for our food. Amen”. Do-Bee reminded me of all sorts of things that were useful to a kid who was growing up. “Do be a sidewalk player”, “Do be a car sitter”, “Do be a plate cleaner”, and “Do be a play safe” (I am a Romper Room Do Bee). The grammar might have been a bit suspect, but all those things stuck with me as I was growing up.
The most important lesson that I learned was that I needed to “Put on my thinking cap” every day. Miss Nancy would talk about the importance of learning to think for ourselves. The 1960’s and 1970’s were at the very beginning of the Information Age. None of us really knew what lay in store for the future, but it was pretty apparent that you had to be able to think for yourself if you were going to get anything done, let alone succeed.
When I went on to real kindergarten, that lesson of the thinking cap stuck with me. While I recognized that it’s essential that we learn some things by rote methods (e.g. multiplication tables, proper spelling, etc.), there are many other subjects that require us to think. Science, social studies, even literature require an approach that demands that we think about the subject matter. If you don’t, you’ll know lots of disconnected facts. You might even do well on in a trivia game (Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit, anyone?), but you won’t be able to apply that knowledge.
The same goes for rules and regulations. There was a time in our society when it was essential to raise our kids so that they followed the rules and didn’t question anything. When you’re working on an assembly line, or in a clothing guild years ago, you need to do your part exactly the same way as the other folks doing that same job. Essentially, those workers were human cogs in a production wheel. But as a society we’ve evolved past that point, at least in most of the developed nations. There are very few jobs now that don’t require some amount of thinking and analysis.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not promoting anarchy here. I believe that we have codes of conduct that need to be followed (“Do be nice to people”), and have regulations for everyone’s mutual safety that must be adhered to, even if you don’t completely understand the reasoning behind the regulations.
But that’s not a free pass to quit thinking. So many of our kids, and unfortunately now some of our educators, have given up on the thinking part. “Just give me the answer, I don’t care how you got there” has become all too common among our young people. The danger is that if they don’t know where the answers came from, then any answer will do.
Honestly, I believe that learning to think is one of the most important skills that anyone can learn in school. If we educated all our kids along those lines I believe that we would have a much more productive, safer, and saner society. Regurgitation of facts isn’t education. It’s an essential part of education, but it’s not the whole of education. We need to be teaching our kids to think.
So put on your thinking cap and let me know your thoughts. How do we go about teaching our kids to think?
