As teachers today we need most to learn how to teach students to succeed in a world that is unknown and may never be known by us. Inother words, we need the capacity to teach what we do not know. Wecan begin by showing less concern for disseminating knowledge and agreat concern for instructing our students so that they can directtheir own lives through thought.
As defined in the Dictionary of Education,education is both "theart of making available to each generation the organized knowledgeof the past" and " the aggregate of all the processes by means ofwhich a person develops abilities, attitudes, and other forms ofpositive value in the society in which he lives." If the world inwhich today's students will be living is as changed from the worldof today as predicted by our experts in science and technology,thenfollowing the first definition of education could create seriousconsequences for students who will be adults in the future world.
If teachers today are able to teach only about what has happenedin the past, then education is not going to be able to prepare theyoung today to live in the world of the 21st century. At first itmay seem that teachers may be facing a hopeless dilemma in strivingto teach their students to cope with an unknown future, but it isnot at all hopeless if teachers can learn how to teach theirstudents to think. Through thought man can not only make some soundpredictions of what the future is to bring but he can cope withthe new. What is needed most today in education is for teachers toteach that the young will learn how to discover unkown methods ofsolving unknown problems. The young must be taught how to thinkwhen the method to use is not known and the problem to be solvedhas not even been formulated. This is not a hopeless dilemma forthose who believe that with thought almost nothing bad is inevitable
and almost nothing good is impossible.
The real security for the children rests on their ability tothink.Teachers who try to get them to realize this, instead ofhaving them spend precious time memorizing the anxioms that mayhave served the past, are striving for the more adequate futuresecurity for them.Possibly some teachers do not adopt this strategybecause they are backing up into the future. They may not havedeveloped their own intellectual capacity to see beyond what seemsto be obvious,the realities of yesterday and today. But if theyjudge the future only in terms of the past and present they aresure to go wrong.One of the great mistakes teachers and otheradults make today is believing that childrren have only a smallcapacity for thinking. Such a belief keeps the child from fullydeveloping his mental capacities. It is possible that those who suc-ceed in school are the poor-thinker. The creative, brilliant poeplewho have made a significant "breakthrough" in some field are thosewho were failures in the school setting.One of Thomas Edison's grade-
school teachers wrote his mother that he should be switched toremedial school because he was inattentive,indolent, and his brainwas seriously "addled". The parents of Albert Einstein worried that
he was seriously stupid because he couldn't speak until he was over
three.Winston Churchill was regarded by his teacheres as a very poor
student because he was so bad at passing examinations.
One of the greatest sientists,who is often called a genius, oncesaid,"I am convinced that neither I nor any other human, past orpresent,was or is a genius.I am convinced that what I have, everyphysically normal child also has at birth. We could, of course,hypothesize that all babies are born geniuses and get swiftlydegeniused.Unfavorable circumstances,shortsightedness,frayed nervous
systems,and ignorrantly artuculated love and fear of elders tend to
shut off many of the child's brain capability valves. I was lucky in
avoiding too many disconnects." It is the resposibility of teachers
today to find for their students connections rather than disconnec-
tions with the world they will be living in as adults.
It is simple,comparatively speaking,to teach students how to fol-low a well-worn path,but it is the most difficult of tasks to teachthem how to reach a destination to which there are few if any pathsand,more difficult still,when the destination itself is not evenknwon.But as teachers,if we will accept the challenge of helpingthe children to resolve the problems of the future when we do notknow what their future will be like, our present tasks will not onlybe the most exciting of all possible tasks but they will be themost meaningful and important tasks of the world of today.