Divergent thinking in children is an exceptional gift, moreover, it is natural (no one told them what is normal and therefore what is not), your breadth of sight is full of possibilities, unusual, original and always idiosyncratic reasoning, however, sometimes this Creative potential tends to fade as they grow. In fact, the education system tends to normalize the thinking of its students, unifying perspectives.
If there is one thing that most of us know is that daring to think otherwise can be dangerous, Galileo, for example, proved it on his skin when his ideas made him spend his last years confined to him in his home in Florence. They are certainly the ones who challenge the world, but they are also the ones who help it progress.
- It is clear that times have changed.
- That the ends lived by other scientists like Giordano Bruno no longer happen.
- However.
- Other types of situations occur.
- As Sir Ken Robinson.
- A renowned education expert.
- Has pointed out.
- Today’s schools are “killing.
- “childish creativity.
According to him, our schools base their curriculum models on 19th-century systems, at a time when the industrialization of society made some capacities valued at the expense of others, promoting innovation, creativity or critical thinking was (and is often) unusual. when we have a very rigid hierarchy of disciplines and skills to assume.
We forget that children come into the world with extraordinary talents, we neglect the potential of their divergent thinking, that extraordinary psychic muscle that sometimes weakens by educating them exclusively to convergent thinking.
“It’s not what you look at that counts, it’s what you see. “Henry David Thoreau-
Henry David Thoreau was undoubtedly one of the most revolutionary philosophers, his unusual ideas about freedom and responsibility make him one of those figures always dragged by a clearly divergent thought. Forms.
He taught us that life is a canvas for imagination, it also made us realize that there are people who were born with different music within them and that we must let them be, because freedom leads to self-realization, it is almost the same with children. . However, we are not always able to understand this magical melody and this incredible potential lurking at all.
For example, subject matter expert Dr. Len Brzozowski points out something interesting discovered in a study conducted in collaboration with psychologists George Land and Beth Jarman. The data from this work were published in the book Break Point and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today. .
Divergent thinking in children aged 4 to 6 years has surprising results, it is necessary to mention at this stage what the professor of neurology of Harvard Medical School, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, points out, that during these ages what is called synaptic pruning occurs in the brain.
These are sensitive periods of the nervous system in which a programmed neural size occurs, modified only by experiments. If proper stimuli are not available, cell size will limit much of the child’s learning potential over time.
It’s also not about having “many neural connections” because then the brain would have an excess of “noise” (something that happens in autism spectrum disorders). Therefore, the key is to optimize this size with the most appropriate, ideal and encouragement learning, especially in this period between 4 and 6 years, when children have their full potential intact.
Divergent thinking in children involves special learning needs that must be met so that learning is not lost.
Finally, it should be noted that encouraging and protecting divergent thinking does not mean completely eliminating convergent thinking, much less, but rather a question of harmonizing the two dimensions. Sometimes there are problems where you need to have a single solution, children also need to understand these kinds of situations.
Therefore, we are able to support and optimize these realities. Remember a well-known albert Einstein phrase: “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it stupid. “