3 ideas para evitar que las escuelas maten la creatividad, la curiosidad y el pensamiento crítico.

1. Acknowledge Campbell's Law. If everyone knows what is being used to measure progress, expect corruption. Whatever is being used to make decisions about money, resources, teacher performance, and student performance is subject to distortion. Right now, the action is test scores. Instead of trying to figure out how to make time for play, music, and the arts, people in our school systems are hyperfocused on boosting test scores. Principals feel the pressure, this gets passed on to teachers, and in turn, you have students that see school for what it is- a factory where they are working to get high scores so that everyone can avoid the wrath of failure. Expect short-cuts and cheating every step of the way. How can the proper information for these tests be distilled the quickest? How can this information be retained the longest? How can we remove distractions? High stakes test is a recipe for obedience, conformity, perfectionism, and unnecessary health damaging strain.

3. Recognize how much effort is required to focus attention for long periods of time, persevere at challenging tasks, and stifle the desire to socialize with all of the people sitting around you. Children and adults alike do not have the brain power to sit and learn information for 8 hours per day (much less when the starting point is around 8am). Rather than viewing self-control as a mindset, a personality trait, a virtue, or a skill, consider it to be a renewable resource. Using self-control to direct our attention, delay gratification, resist impulses, or control our emotions, exhausts resources in the body. We have a limited amount of resources that can be depleted. No matter how physically fit we are, exerting ourselves inevitably leads to some degree of exhaustion. Acts of self-control deplete mental strength in the same way that exercise temporarily depletes physical strength. But there is one important lesson from science: people can replenish their mental strength and with training, people can increase their self-control capacity (such that it will take longer to reach the point of exhaustion)....