Cultivating Creative-Mindedness. Guy Claxton

If we are truly going to prepare young people for the 21st century, teachers have to learn to teach history in a way that cultivates skepticism, maths in a way that develops curiosity, and English in a way that stretches and strengthens children’s imaginations.

For example, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote “History is the story written by the winners”. Get students to discuss this, and then to critique their textbook in terms of the unacknowledged opinions and values of the writer. That gets them to practice being appropriately skeptical about text, not in awe of it. Then get them to write about a historical event they have been discussing through the eyes of three different protagonists – to stretch their “empathy muscles”.

Or: if you are teaching younger children the colors of the rainbow, get them to look intently at a picture of a real rainbow and argue about how many colors they can see. (There aren’t seven colors in a rainbow; that’s just a convention.) Get them to cut it up in new ways, and think up beautiful names for the new color-bands they have chosen. This stretches their ability to look carefully, discuss accurately and think imaginatively. If you want, you can tell them the conventional colors, but for heaven’s sake don’t confuse them by saying they are “right”.