Reviews of the American education system reveal that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adolescents and young adults has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing in colleges and universities. We have come to accept that a significant percentage of kids are being routinely medicated. Unlike ever before, young generations are confronted with information from every angle, yet they are getting penalized for getting distracted from what they consider “boring stuff” at school. Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth, yet we are getting them through education by anaesthetizing them.
Child behind glass
Rather than putting students to sleep, educators should is exactly the opposite: we should be waking them up to what is inside of them! In view of the challenges we as a global community face, we should develop our thinking in the exact opposite way of what we have done so far. Instead of convergent thinking, we need to develop divergent thinking [1], i.e. the ability to see a lot of different answers to a question and lots of different ways to interpret the question – an essential capacity of creative thinking. In a longitudinal study [2], kids before schooling score 98% in the divergent thinking test, at the age of 13-15 years the score dropped below 40%. This study shows that while we all have the capacity of divergent thinking, it mostly deteriorates the more we get educated.
[1] An example of divergent thinking: “How many uses can you think off for a paper clip?” Most people come up with 10-15, convergent thinkers about 200, by asking questions back like “Could it be 200 foot tall and made of foam rubber?”