Divergent Thinking

There is a gentleman by the name of Sir Ken Robinson.  I have watched two videos of him talking on the subject of education.  His primary plug seems to be that we should not educate children as if they were computers to be manufactured on an assembly line.  I agree.  Children are not computers.  They are much more complicated and generally somewhat more rebellious.

On one RSA video that I watched on Facebook after it had been linked from You Tube, Sir Ken Robinson introduced the idea of "Divergent Thinking," which if I understand his meaning correctly means "Thinking Outside the Box." 

What box?

The box we all live in.  The box that we think everyone else is in as well.  The box that we are really all alone inside of.

What is in the box?

Everything that we believe to be true or normal.  Thus everything outside of the box consists of what we believe to be untrue, abnormal, or inappropriate.

Sir Ken Robinson quoted a study about "Divergent Thinking" on the video linked above.  (It's a very amusing video; you should watch it.)  The researchers in this study gave a group of children a test of divergent thinking at about age 6 years, again at 8-10 years, and a third time at about 13 years of age.  The results indicated that the ability of this group of children to think divergently, or to "think outside the box," decreased over time.  That is, as we get older and become more "educated," our ability to think in this way diminishes.

However, I wonder if this diminished capacity for divergent thinking is entirely bad.  Obviously, creativity is a fun and necessary part of life.  But, if we encounter a new item and are unsure of its use, does it not make sense to use our previous experience to more efficiently determine the use of this item?  In fact, I would argue that this ability which probably is correlated with a decrease in the capacity to divergently think has likely kept people from harm in the past.

For example, if I had been a member of a hunter-gatherer people group living in the north of Canada, I would probably have been quite familiar with grizzly bears.  I would have begun life blissfully unaware of the dangers of grizzly bears, but by adulthood, I would have known the animals' appearance, behavior, and I would have been familiar with several ways to avoid harm due to grizzly bears.  Now, if a polar bear happened to wander south from the vicinity of Santa's workshop, I would have been able to apply my previous life experience to determine that a polar bear might also be a creature that I would not wish to have contact with.

My point is that while Divergent Thinking is valuable, the efficiency afforded us by Convergent Thinking is also good.

We need both.