Kindergarten Lessons: Mitchel Resnick’s Blueprint for Lifelong Creativity
Where Play Fuels Genius
Mitchel Resnick’s book is a critical read for many reasons. But especially because Resnick practices the learning approaches he endorses, and not just at any place, but at one of the meccas of education – MIT. Yes, at the OG Massachusetts Institute. His graduate students at the MIT Media Lab have adopted his deep-seated thrust to infuse a childlike playfulness and curiosity in their own learning trajectories, creating in the process practical, hands-on resources that are available to children, teachers and schools worldwide.
Let’s begin with what Resnick believes is the crackerjack invention of the previous two centuries. Hold your breath, it’s not a smart phone or a self-driving car or some esoteric agricultural practice. Rather, it’s something we’re all familiar with but pay scant attention to: kindergarten. Those early schooling years might evoke images of bawling toddlers and nervy parents, but they hold something invaluable, something we might be ceding to hyper-competitive, college-cracking forces.
Toys, Towers and Tumbles
In its pristine avatar, conceived by its German founder Friedrich Froebel in 1837, kindergarten is a space in which kids can freely and safely explore their environs. Like pile wooden blocks into shaky towers, watch them collapse over and over till they figure out a broader base might keep the structure from teetering. Or even just taste mud or splay twigs or make up games that involve world building, storytelling and other grownup activities sans the corporate claptrap.
Froebel had even stocked the place with artfully designed objects termed “Froebel’s gifts” –such as mosaic tiles, colored papers, sticks and peas, wooden blocks – to stimulate young minds. Offbeat thinkers and artists like the architect Frank Lloyd Wright attributed their achievements to Freobel’s Gifts. Companies like LEGO, Wooden Blocks, Tinkertoys and others are founded on those precepts. Maria Montessori built on Froebel’s ideas. Drawing from the crafty simplicity of these objects, when picking toys for kids, Resnick suggests: “Ask not what the toy can do for your child; ask what your child can do with the toy.”
When Pressure Crushes Play
Of late, however, even kindergartens have started getting contaminated with the pressures of the higher grades. As a result, in many schools, children are given math worksheets and phonic lessons to garner an early heads up in toxic admission races. Such gains, however, are being offset by deeper losses, some of which might be hard to recover at later life stages.
For instance, when Resnick met the President of Tsinghua University – considered the “MIT of China” – Chen Jining lamented the state of Chinese education. Tsinghua, like the IITs in India, admits very competitive students. Some admittees continue to perform at the A-level inside the University. Jining called them the “A students.” He said, however, that China needs the more elusive “X students.” As Resnick puts it, “They’re eager to define their own problems rather than simply solve the ones in the text book.”
Imagination Vs. Exam Performance
Ironically, both Resnick and Jining met at the headquarters of the LEGO toy company in Denmark. While Resnick’s team has had decades-long collaborations with LEGO, the Chinese academic might have sensed that the answer lay in the seemingly simple but also profound ability to play with “blocks” – whether those be blocks of biochemistry, thermodynamics, astrophysics, music or poetry. As Resnick observes, when kids play with blocks, they test boundaries, create new objects, infuse their play with imagination and fun.
Such pleasure has been sucked out of many school and college settings, with a hustle culture seeping into earlier life stages. Since creative thinkers blur boundaries between work and play, an increased thrust on test-taking conformity – think the Kota factory in India – denudes the creative capacities inherent in kids. In her book, Now You See It, Cathy Davidson says 2/3rd of today’s grade students will perform jobs that are not around now. Rapidly morphing workplaces need motivated and creative learners – not outdated performers whose skills have been thinned into a peculiar type of pattern detection: scanning previous question papers to predict forthcoming ones.
Kindergarten Mindset for All
To solve for this, Resnick says, “I believe the rest of school (indeed, the rest of life) should become more like kindergarten.” He describes “The Creative Spiral”, consisting of the following steps: Imagine – Create – Play – Share – Reflect – Imagine. In the higher grades, apart from structured sports and increasingly goal-oriented extracurriculars, kids stop imagining and playing as much. To prove a point, Resnick’s group at MIT is called “Lifelong Kindergarten.” Using what he terms the 4Ps of creative learning –
- Projects (you need to be working on something tangible to demonstrate creativity)
- Passion (you often have to work long and hard at these projects)
- Peers (you can collaborate with others, and even if you work alone, your output will be judged by others)
- Play (you must repeatedly try new ways of doing things).
More significantly, Resnick’s team has built the Scratch Programming Language and the worldwide, buzzing Scratch community – consisting of avid kids who create code to build story worlds and video games (https://scratch.mit.edu/). Many of these Scratch enthusiasts have also learned to collaborate from very early ages, using the internet in the best way possible: to forge cross-country friendships and work on fun, meaningful projects. To spur creative thinking among low-income kids, the Media Lab group has created the Computer Clubhouse network of after school learning centers.
Between techno-enthusiasts and techno-skeptics, Resnick believes that parents and educators ought to inhabit a middle ground. He has demonstrated with Scratch that it’s not a problem if kids use technology to engage in creative activities. He argues that it could be equally harmful if they spent all their time reading books, or playing the piano. Like adults, kids need a balance between diverse activities. Parents would do better to measure how much “creative time” kids get rather than be paranoid about devices.
He also applauds the “maker movement” that has gathered steam in the US since the early 2000s, galvanized when Dale Dougherty launched the Make magazine in 2005. The community and website (Makezine.com) suggests cool DIY projects that can be done in garages or basements. Like making a kite to capture aerial pictures. Resnick believes that making is an important aspect of learning. Beyond the much-touted learning by doing, he advocates for “learning by making.”
Unlocking A Universal Gift
Busting myths about creativity, including the notion that only some people are creative, Resnick believes that all human beings possess creative potential. And while it can’t be taught, it can certainly be nurtured. Why focus on creativity at all? Resnick writes: “Life as a creative thinker can bring not only economic rewards, but also joy, fulfillment, purpose and meaning.”
References
Mitchel Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers and Play, The MIT Press, 2017