While re-reading one of my favorite articles, ‘In The Air’ by Malcolm Gladwell, I was thinking about teaching… Then I read Clarke Quinn’s Mathematics or mathematician, reconsidered and what he said put it into place.
When we teach people do we want them to just know the subject, or to understand it? Teach them Maths or turn them into mathematicians, teach people science or turn them into scientists? There is a big difference between the two.
Through teaching people how to think we open up new ways to solve problems. We don’t want them to just know something, we want them to be able to use the knowledge.
What is more is that if we teach it correctly they can use their knowledge outside of the specific field they are learning. Interdisciplinary learning can lead to creative thinking and problem solving and if we don’t really know what new problems will arise over the next few months (never mind the next few years), we might just need all the creativity we can get.
