Being wrong isn’t the same thing as being creative. But what we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, we stigmatize mistakes, and we’re now running our national education systems like this, where mistakes are the worst things you can make. We are educating people out of their creative capacities.Reminds me of conversations I’ve had these past few years with undergraduates during their student teaching experiences. The culture of learning at schools often rests primarily on students learning to respond to questions that separate right from wrong, that show if students can recall very specific types of information. Like Ken alluded, I’m sure this is in part a reflection of national legislation. A great joy for me, as a teacher educator, is seeing preservice student teachers (and their mentor teachers in the schools) also using questions that open up space for students to take risks with their thinking. Questions that help create an atmosphere to celebrate the learning potential of “being wrong.”
Dad lifting me on the forklift to photograph the barn. Click here to see the barn.
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