Our education quality level is rooted not only in the educations system itself, but also in other grounds, like the era in which we live; what students bring with them to the classroom.
A phenomenon that,
unfortunately, is disappearing from our everyday, especially from the young
generation’s life, is reading. Reading used to be a fun pass time not only for
the educated elite, but for every person who could read. It was not unusual to
find a poor boy sitting on abandoned stair case in the middle of the city,
reading a book that he got from the library, or even stole from another boy.
Reading, regrettably, is not
considered fun pass time for youth anymore. Yes, there are still some adolescents
who read but they belong, mostly, to elite group of AP students, made to read
by their English teacher or their parents…
The price for the decline in
reading is the weakening of our ability to use our imagination. When we read a
book our brain creates a picture of places, events and people, and we thus develop
the ability to see in our mind situations that are not part of our everyday
reality, and objects that are not tangible.
You may ask what does
imagination have to do with academics, especially with mathematics, and I will
claim – everything!
Abstract ideas are part of
every curriculum, unquestionably math and science. Students have to apply their
imagination to create a mental picture in order to be able to understand and
analyze a process, and use their brain to complete the picture and draw
conclusions.
This same process is
happening when one reads a book. You imagine the character, imagine the
surrounding, the events, and in your mind predict and complete the situation
before you know the entire story.
With TV and computer screens,
being the main source of information and entertainment nowadays, images and
audio are constantly feeding our senses, leaving no room for the brain function
of imagination. We are losing the important independent thinking and processing
because we don’t have to complete any mental picture. Every bit of data is
being chewed up for us before being fad to us.
There are other reasons for
the decline in the use of imagination in young people. We live in a culture
that unstructured time and uncontrolled activity for kids is a waste of time.
As soon as a toddler can sit and respond to interaction, he/she is signed up
for a class, tutored by a relative to identify the alphabet, and strictly
monitored in the playground or the assigned play group… What happened to free
time? Free play? Kids’ games of their own innovation and rules without parents’
constant interruption? How about just sitting outside in a rainy day, looking
at the sky and giving names for the imaginative shapes that the clouds form…?
An article that I read (link
is attached) talks about the word “play”, how the meaning of the word had
changed over the years. Play used to be an unstructured free activity that did
not involve any toy… nowadays “play” means an organized game or a ready-made play
tool, created especially for a specific kind of activity…
That brings me to another
source for creativity despair in our children; the nature of the games and
toys. When, and where, I grew up, before Toys R Us had hijacked our imagination
by providing every possible toy to place in our game space, we played with
wooden blocks and simple Lego-like pieces. With them we created our own
imaginary toys. We could build a house and a bench, trees, furniture, and even
good guys and bad guys with their weapon. We had to use our imagination to
build objects, that are now can be found in any toy’s store. It is hard to
envision anymore, what could be missing from those over loaded shelves. I even have
a nightmare of a toy company that employs innocent children, pay them with
piles of candies, and pry on any spark of imagination that they might have… (Sitting
them in a one-sided mirror room, with microphones, and record any flash of imagination
as soon as it is born, and immediately sends it to its developers…)
Another favorite plaything
that resulted from what might be called “deprived childhood”, was a simple
compass, the one that has one sharp edge, and a pencil is inserted to the other
side. I used to make wonderful creations of circles intersecting circles, and
with crayons colored the different sections. When I started geometry I was
already proficient in handling the compass, I knew what a radius was, and I
also knew that if I drew a circle and placed the sharp edge on the
circumference without changing the radius, I could mark six points that can be
connected to make different shapes. I also noticed that as hard as I tried, the
last point was never quite aligned with the starting point. It took me years to
realize why, but never the less I had that experience; I could already visualize
circles, rectangles and triangles...
How can you explain congruence and similarity concepts to youngsters who cannot create a mental
picture of a triangle in their mind? They are not incapable, but they lack a
skill that used to be widely accessible, imagination! Its absence prevents them
from developing a higher level of thinking and creativity.
When reading is replaced with
ready images and tangible objects, imagination development suffers… When a student
cannot create a mental picture of a field with fence around it,
he/she will graduate from high school not comprehending the difference between
area and perimeter… And when a young person lacks the ability to process an abstract
concept in general, he/she will be limited in intelligence and vision…
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