Our Dangerous Addiction To Intelligence by Ofili in Memoirs Of An Immigrant, Success. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This is a question that almost every person has been asked at one point in their life. The answers we are most likely expected to give include Accountant, Engineering or Medicine. But John Lennon of The Beatles gave a different response… when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, John Lennon…who was barely five years old wrote down the word “happy.” But his teacher did not accept the answer “happy” they wanted something else…an occupation and definitely not a feeling. They accused John Lennon of not understanding the question… That clash between 5 years old’s innocent mind and an established and aged educational system, generated a classic response from John that exposed one of the greatest and most critical flaws of our educational system. In the words of John Lennon… “They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” And that is the truth, because for decades our educational system has not understood life. We seek to train students, with a goal to make them the most intelligent so that they can get the best jobs. We teach them how to answer questions and pass tests so that they can get the highest grades. But in the midst of all the craziness we forget to teach them about life, about happiness and about kindness. John Lennon in his response simply wanted to be “happy” and judging from his track record on humanitarian efforts it is safe to say that his happiness was centered on others being happy. But education teaches otherwise, the focus is on intelligence. They teach us how to derive, integrate, permutated and postulate but fail to show us how we can use any of that to make people happy. The focus is simply on intelligence and I dare say that we have an addiction to intelligence. And that addiction can be a dangerous one… Sometime ago I stumbled across a primary school Mathematics word problem and it read: Ada HAD 8 sisters. 6 of her 8 sisters ran away due to domestic abuse and violence and of those 6 that ran away, 3 of them died from malaria. How many sisters does Ada have left? …to be continued
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 07:52:22 +0000
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