The recess bell signaled the end of the period. I was standing-by outside the classroom of the 8d armed with a map of Russia waiting for the door to open. Five minutes had passed when the bell announced the beginning of the next period in this case my geography lesson. Math is a major subject and geography is not. Anyway I was not willing to wait any longer and audibly opened the classroom door. My female fellow teacher was just in the process of writing the homework on to the blackboard. She took notice of me. “I will be finished in a minute!” The pupils looked kind of exhausted. One girl asked me if there is time to go to the restroom. I told the class to take a five minutes break. “I am sorry”, said my young colleague, “but it had to be. They were rather slow today and I had to push through my teaching material. Friday we will write an exam.” - Although I was aware that she had to stick to the curriculum her attitude does not make sense. Teachers learn in their pedagogic studies that transferring knowledge into the brain of a student for the purpose of making learning to happen does not work. Besides, the brain is not very well suited for storing information. Computers are much better at that. What makes our brain exceptional is its problem-solving capability, which requires foremost the ability to think. Here I see the main task of our schools. To enable young people to think. One shall teach to think and not what has been thought, is a statement by Prof. Cornelius Gurlitt the principal of the technical college of Dresden, Germany, which he made in 1905. As a former military staff-officer I could not agree more! For over 20 years in national and international assignments my main job was to think, which means in short, the recognition, assessment, and application of patterns. It is my conviction that this is the original task of our schools, to develop such capability. Here is an example, which explains how it could be done.
In the previous school-term the main geography topic for 8th grade classes had been “One World – Many Worlds”. In the introductory lesson I showed a photomontage of the earth by night seen from space. I asked the kids what they saw. They named the continents. Then somebody pointed out the lit-up areas. A competition started. They competed for the recognition of countries and towns. I inquired after the dark areas. They identified Oceans, the Sahara, and the Amazon region. What else do lit-up and dark areas tell you, I asked. A domino effect set in. I could hardly follow with my blackboard writing. Electricity, energy, waste, wealth, poverty, ports, trade … with their thinking they zoomed into and out of the night picture of the earth at a random pace. They parted the world into patterns. We sorted them using a mind map. I asked them to pick a topic of their choosing, which they had to prepare and present. The topics they picked ranged from children´s work in Bangladesh, illegal migration of Mexicans to the US all the way up to Huntington´s clash of civilizations. When the pupils realized that the exercise was not about making the teacher happy, they began to play with patterns. They abstracted, they reduced, they substituted, and they associated, without consciously knowing that they were doing it. At some time I explained to them the patterns of thinking and praised them for their skills in applying them. They began to enjoy recognizing patterns by themselves, not only in geography but also in other subjects and what´s more important across subjects. Besides geography I taught them also in the topics of history, politics, society and economics, and philosophy. So whichever subject was on a switch to the other was possible at any time if they or I saw a pattern which was of interest. And if no known pattern seemed to fit, we made up our own. This is called divergent thinking, which stands at the beginning of creativity. It is the marriage of thinking and feeling.
Remains the question on how schoolchildren acquire knowledge if it is not taught. Well, that´s a freebie. When pupils prepare a topic of interest, they do research. They learn to ask questions, read books, and use the Internet because they want to know. Thinking becomes a new game which produces lasting knowledge at the side. But learning to think and not what has been taught is not just boosting the intrinsic motivation to acquire knowledge. Above all, it fulfills the original idea of school as the Roman philosopher Seneca put it: Non scholae sed vitae discimus. Learning to think means learning for life.