The Paradox of learning and education

In July me and my wife Anita Wuestman have been to the Asian Pacific Conference on Giftedness 2012 in Dubai.

Besides enjoying the strange qualities of Dubai and surviving the heat outside, we were thrilled about  the Union of Cultures we met at the conference.

My wife joint the presentations she thought were most interesting for her line of work = Counselling teachers and students in the field of Giftedness. I went for the speakers about change and creativity. Of course these things grow together. That is exactly why we are both interested in human development and organizational values and change.

What we saw was remarkable. Every nation is convinced of the fact that they need to prosper creativity and innovation and they know You need great and open minds to make that happen.  But at the same time they look for blueprints and matrixes, to frame the Gifted students and push them into “smart” directions.

I spoke to several delegates and exhibition participants about this paradox. In my view, talented Excellence can only be achieved if the surrounding aspects ( I call that the environment) of leadership, direction, facilities, tools and ways of rewarding are aligned. And in the Asian, Pacific and Gulf states situations they apparently are not, as the people I spoke with agree. Only they seem to feel the friction, but did not know how to point a finger to it.

Using blueprints and hard ways of pointing out how something has to be done, is making people obedient, but You do not trigger their brains. To achieve creative goals one has to have a mind-set of critical thinking, which is the exact opposite of obedience.

One can be an Excellent repeater of what the teacher or the book said, but that does not make You practice Your thinking muscles, Your creative muscles nor Your leadership muscles. Not to mention all the different talents and muscles keynote speaker Prof. Howard Gardner pointed at in his Multiple Intelligence Theory.

Education that triggers talents and minds should not look like a blueprint at all. Maybe behind the scenes there can be a curriculum, something like an intentional path to give us all some hold. But the admission to tools and a “Magic Theatre”  (a place where people meet, creativity and Synergy flow and one can express and further develop one’s idea’s) can have all kind of colours, but bleu.

The use of colours in expressing value systems is taken from the Spiral Dynamics (SD) theory of prof. Claire w. Graves. I have explained this in a summarizing Blog of Aug.1 about the implication of these value systems and colours. 

It looks as if the Asian, Pacific and Golf nations are doing well in discovering Gifted children and they nurture the great minds as good as they can. But they focus on the good achievers who are specialised in Math, Logic and Languages. The underachievers on those fields and multiple intelligence talents on other terrains  are left out. Not because the governments does not want them to do good, but they simply do not know how to find them, as they stay beneath the radar at bleu (SD) schools and bleu ways of monitoring and discovering.  

And by doing so they neglect the opportunities to create great chances for their countries to Enhance Excellence in Innovation. As breakthroughs never come from the book, but from the hearts and minds of brilliant people who dare to be different. Who learn how to survive in doing so and achieve great goals as a result of practice, experiments and being allowed to make great mistakes!

In Holland we have the same problem as mentioned above. Only we are on a path of recognising the challenge and we are looking for ways to differentiate within schools. To try to get away of the Bleu rules and find smart ways to avoid the growth killing context of traditional educational methods.  That is not easy and dumb and old-fashioned governmental rules hit in hard now and again, but I am proud to have been consulting with educational institutions that have succeeded in innovating education into learning again! 

Such as UniC, the school described in the next Blog!

If You agree, or disagree, or have some kind of an opinion about this, please post a remark! 
About 80 people read this Blog up to the 17th of august, but I have no image of the people who read this and I would like to know how they feel about it. So if You would like to respond? Please do!