"We Have to Liberate Ourselves First"

A while back, NASA commissioned a test designed to measure the creative potential of its rocket scientists and engineers. Only two percent of adults ace this test, being classified as creative geniuses. When NASA tried the test out on preschoolers, however, they found that 98 percent tested at the genius level. Curious about those results, they made it into a longitudinal study, re-testing the same kids after a decade of schooling. They found that the number of geniuses among these kids had plummeted to a mere 12 percent. This study has since been replicated over and over again.

This begs the question: What did we do to them? Nearly all of the kids were geniuses, then we sent them to school and most of them stopped being geniuses. Maybe there is a problem with the test, of course, and maybe there's a problem with our definition of "creative genius," but what if these results are telling us something real, and horrible, about the way we tend to do school to our kids?

If you listen to education policymakers, and I do, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that as far as they're concerned, our schools are little more than vocational training programs designed to prepare the next generation of worker bees for those "jobs of tomorrow" or to conscript them as warriors in an economic war to "out educate the Chinese." Sometimes they dress it up in the language of civil rights, insisting that "education" is the path out of the ghetto or barrio or whatever, which is still, at bottom, an economic argument. And maybe that's what most people want from our schools, but that's not what I wanted for my own child, nor for the children alongside whom I've travelled these past couple decades. I've always been much more interested in their capacity for creative genius.

Director of the Art of Teaching Program at Sarah Lawrence College and editor of Black Lives Matter at School, Denisha Jones says in our conversation at Teacher Tom's Play Summit, "I can tell you black children are brilliant. I can tell you brown children are brilliant. I can tell you all children are brilliant until they go through American schooling and we educate the brilliance out of them."

Some years ago, as part of a conference at which I was presenting I had the opportunity to visit what is called the Ration Shed Museum in the town of Cherbourg in Queensland, Australia, the site of an aboriginal reservation that was created by the 1904 "Aboriginal Protection Act." Indigenous people from all over eastern Australia were forcibly re-located there, and as European colonists did wherever they went, they took it upon themselves to control every aspect of the lives of these formerly free people. We learned about the schools that were established for the education of these "primitive" people, schools chartered to teach children about keeping their noses to the grindstone, obedience, and a very narrow range of vocational skills. It's a story that can be told about everywhere these colonizers went.