One of our goals as a society is to educate our children, to pass along the knowledge of what has gone before so that the children understand where they’ve come from and how we got to where we are. At the same time, we are dependent on our children to create the new knowledge that we need in order to continue and to grow.
To accomplish this we must avoid the danger of infecting our kids with a “curse of knowledge”, of teaching our kids not only how to think but what to think. The best of ideas in almost any field of endeavor quite often come from those with the least preconceived notion of what that field of endeavor should be.
One of the home page quotes on the FIRST website is the following:
In case you’re not familiar FLL is the FIRST Lego League, a robotics competition program for kids age 9-14 (in the U.S., this equates to 4th through 8th grade). As the quote hints at, a team of technical and game experts spend a lot of time designing a game, coming up with the rules and putting everything together.
But it only takes a day for a bunch of kids, many not even teenagers, to think of questions and try to do things that never even occurred to these experts. The experts are learning from the “novices”.
What have you learned recently from the novices – children, new employees, etc – in your life?
no straight lines 