I, for better and worse, tend to be a bit of a rigid, linear thinker, prone to hyperliteralism. Thus, my therapist recommended a parenting book for me, The Gardner and the Carpenter, by Allison Gopnik. The basic premise is that we can’t treat children like a piece of lumbar to cut into shape. Rather, we as caregivers can, at most, provide a nurturing ecosystem for them to develop and grow. Then, I stumbled across this article, by Zak Stein, Your Brain is Not a Computer.
This dovetails amazingly well with how I describe anxiety with my patients in clinical practice. A loose but apt metaphor for the human mind is that of a multitude of adaptive survival mechanisms that may (or may not) coordinate well together. We have the urge to be on alert, but to focus; to activate then relax; eg a number of oppositional dimensions that when not in balance, can generate what people feel as anxiety.
To say that the brain isn’t A computer, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t compute (as another loose metaphor); more that it’s not a designed integrated system. It’s a patchwork ecosystem of processes that may compute.
How might a school that functions like a 24/7/365 community center be more like the gardening approach than the current model of strict boundaries, bell-to-bell, and standardized tests? What might school culture be if children were taught such a metaphor about themselves, and how would that influence development of the self and community?
Nice post. Even in programming, it’s amazing how many ways there are to solve a seemingly simple problem (e.g., list sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm) with interesting trade-offs. If there’s not one uniformly optimum to solve something simple, it gives us pause about the variety of ways the human mind learns.
Thanks for the insight. Your example of sorting is a wonderful metaphor on a few levels. Goes to show that we need flexibility and feedback and awareness of advantages with each learner