The notion
of thinking outside of the box has always interested me; I just feel it is
under utilized. Going through the public school system feeling like nothing
more than a drone monotonously going through the motions has me thinking
something needs to change. Always being told you must do what you’re told,
becoming fixated on a schedule, following the instructions and rarely asking
why.
When I was
in high school I remember watching an episode of “Two and a Half Men.” The
episode was based on Pavlov’s conditioning. At the time I didn’t realize the
implication of the episode, so after I ended up google-ing Ivan Pavlov and was
astonished at what I found. The basics to one of Pavlov’s conditioning
experiments went like this: Pavlov had some dogs, he would ring a bell known as
a neutral stimulus (NS) and apply an unconditioned stimulus (US), the US being
food. When Pavlov gave the dogs the food they would salivate; the dogs would
only salivate in the presence of the food. After a while of pairing the bell (NS)
with the food (US), the bell became another entity in itself, known as a
conditioned stimulus or (CS). When the bell became a CS the dogs would salivate
by just hearing the bell, without any food being presented.
After
watching the episode I realized that seemed like the basis of high school to
me. My school had two bells per class; the first meant you should be in your
seats the second was move to the next class. The bell acted as a NS at first,
but upon learning about the class or teacher the bell would become a CS,
inciting emotion whether good or bad depending on the class. There was always
one bell of the day that would incite a rousing interest by most of the
students, that being the lunch bell. Upon realizing the parallels, my interest
of psychology rose immensely.
I tell this
story as a basis for my point of thinking outside of the box being under
utilized. Realizing that for those four years of school I could boil them down
to nothing more than reacting to conditioned instructions made me think school
may not be the best at growing creativity. The only real things I learned in
school were to follow instructions, and don’t ask questions about why you had
to follow the instructions. I had become fixated, I suppose, on following
directions. I found myself being confused when asked the question “do you have
any questions” not in terms of clarification, but whether or not I thought the
material is true or not.
For the
past 15 years (before college) it always seemed implied that whatever the
teacher said should be taken as fact. Being asked in multiple classes my
opinion on whether I believe the material to be true, or more true than false,
it took some work to extinguish the conditioning public school imposed on me. Using
top-down processing and the video shown in this week’s class about creativity
and how people tend to enjoy creative problem solving I wonder why it is not
used more in the public school system. The other morning I saw my neighbors
kids going to the bus stop, I said hello, asked what’s up, they looked at me
like they were going to jail and said “going to school” in unison, in a voice
that sounded like they were actually going to jail. I couldn’t help but say, “I
know what you mean.” I understand we are not always going to be able to do what
we want, but looking at school from both sides, how can teachers feel good
about what they’re doing if a majority of their students are miserable and
uninterested?
One last side note: playing call of duty the other day, in
the game the player can create a picture to link with their name on the game. Someone
started laughing and said look at so and so’s picture. The person used SCHOOL
as an acronym and next to it said:
Seven
Crappy
Hours
Of
Our
Lives
I wonder if two polls were taken, one for adults and one for
kids, what would be higher: the adults’ approval rating of congress or the kids’
approval rating of school?
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