One element of the dogma of the academic industrial complex that really bugs me that no end is the constant mantra of “we need to teach children problem-solving skills.”
I hear this phrase all the time. This is a classic example of toxic idealism. In my opinion, this is an entirely misguided idea.
First of all, your average homo sapiens is a born problem solver. In the first four years of life, your average human being goes from knowing nothing and having no skills at all to having complete control their physical selves as well as acquiring 80% of the language skills they will have for the rest of their life. They do this pretty much all on their own, using trial and error, just from watching other people.
If you don’t think a three-year-old possesses problem-solving skills, you’ve never seen one trying to get at a cookie jar that’s on the top shelf. Modern electronic devices that confuse me to no end offer no more than a mediocre challenge to the mind of an eight-year-old. These kids– who supposedly have no "problem solving skills"– can figure out how to use these things in a matter of minutes, just by fooling around with them. After watching every kid you know do this, do you really still believe we need to "teach problem solving skills"?
What really bothers me about how we “teach problem-solving skills” is that we set up a situation where children are taught that the solution is pre-existing, and the "problem" is to ascertain what is that one “correct” solution, rather than simply coming up with their own unique (potentially superior) solution.
This kind of “imitate the existing answer"-problem-solving skill is a rather blatant method of maintaining hierarchical authority and the status quo in general. It also kills creativity, because if a kid comes up with an answer that doesn’t match the answer in the teacher’s guide, it is ipso facto “wrong.”
With so much emphasis on pre-existing correct solutions (many of which do not make much obvious sense to the average kid), what typically happens is that children lose faith in their own innate problem-solving skills, and instead are relentlessly drawn towards creating an entirely new problem-solving skill, which is either “finding the ‘socially acceptable’ solution that will cost the least amount of emotional capital” or worse, "What do I have to do to get these people to stop bothering me, and get through this dull exercise with the least amount of effort?" It is this kind of problem-solving that turns kids from optimistic fifth-graders to pessimistic seventh graders.
The end result is, only those children who have extremely dominant personalities or highly enlightened family support are able to overcome this “the correct answer is already known, your job is to go and find it” training. The kids who are the best innate problem solvers (and the most imaginative) may not have those advantages, so their true capabilities get lost.
We don’t need to teach problem-solving skills. We do, however, need to give more kids permission to come up with their own unique solutions. The courage and willingness to give that permission is what our system currently lacks.
© Justin Locke
ps I updated my CA pix!
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=6079390&l=0cecd5afe7&id=633978119
