Towards Open Ended Education

The Earth is flat. The Earth is round. Atoms are the smallest unit of matter, now electrons, now quarks, now..?

Thinking back to my public education, from elementary onwards, the thing that bothers me most is the definitiveness of its presentation. The teachers and teachings leave no room for open ended discussion, future developments, or possibility. Students are presented with "facts" with no potential for something beyond the facts. This is stifling for an eager, exploring mind. If everything is "fact", what's left for the young mind to discover?

Physicists generally recognize (now) that matter may be infinitely subtle in its variations. Infinitely. To say that the atom or the quark or insert-next-found-particle-here is the smallest unit of matter is becoming increasingly careless. What's more, at each smaller variation of matter discovered we get further away from our known day-to-day laws about 3 dimensional reality. Properties that we take for granted at this "level", no longer exist at these subtle variations. Particles may simultaneously exist in two different locations, for example, bridging spacetime.

But, the infinite and therefore undiscovered variations behind our world aren't what we come away with from our formative years in school. And not just physical science, but philosophy, history, and even creative arts, are subject to a falsely definitive teaching treatment. I remember my first philosophy class in college — "Philosophy of the Mind". I thought, "Now here's a class where surely we'll be able to throw about ideas with reckless creative abandon…" So we started with analyzing the iconic philosophers of the past. Great, I'm all for talking about the past — let's willingly and admittedly stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. But then that's all we did. As though everything that had already been thought on this topic was all there was to think.

Now one might say that a "higher level" college philosophy course might encourage some freer thought. That may be, but should we really be waiting until late college years before we start encouraging people to explore their own creative potential? Let's open up the ends of education earlier on, from the beginning. Let's not falsely close knowledge down into a neat packaged unit that's already finished for consumption. It makes the adults and teachers feel safe, but it stifles the natural creative inclinations of our youth.

Even as a starting point, this wouldn't require sweeping changes in public education. It would instead require only a change of attitude amongst teachers and textbooks. An attitude of discovery instead of an attitude of closed finality. A recognition that the teachings presented in any subject area only came out of times when those questions were open. If people had thought them closed, then those discoveries would never have been made to teach. Let's admit to our students that there are still infinite open questions, that most "answers" in teaching are still open questions themselves, and that education isn't closed. Creativity should not start once teaching ends, but should be an inherent part of teaching itself. My guess is that this is always one secret behind remarkable teachers — their recognition of the open-endedness of all thought and ideas whether from the pages of a textbook, or the mouth of a child.