A teacher was going around the room showing objects and the kids had to identify them. She held up a banana and said, “Molly what is this?”
Molly giggled and said, “Well that is easy, it is a yellow banana.”
The teacher continued around the room with other objects with other students and then she came to Johnny. She held up a red balloon and said, “Johnny what is this?”
Johnny thought for a minute and then said, “it’s a red dog.”
The teacher was surprised by his answer and said, “Are you sure it is a red dog?”
He said, “Yep, it’s a red dog,” and proceeded up to the front of the class and took the balloon and started twisting and folding the balloon until a long red wiener dog appeared. He said, “See its a red dog.”
I have been kicking around this idea of free thought for a couple of years. I am sure that it is not something that is new, but it itself being a product of free thought I don’t know where else it might have been used. My idea of free thought is that in order to innovate you have to stop paying attention to conventional wisdom and start charting your own course. We can know everything about something and be called an expert, but that really only means that you are an expert in what we know about one thing or another. Innovation happens when you have learned enough and start questioning everything that the experts say and start thinking for yourself. I would even go so far as to say that questioning the experts is not enough. Sometime you have to forget the conventional answer so your mind can come up with a new one.
A good example of someone who did this is of course Bill Gates and his fellow world changers. They were smart enough to get into MIT but found that the experts could not teach them anything and chose to leave. They created because they probably didn’t know all of the answers so they created their own answers to questions. They didn’t rely on what the answer was supposed to be in the book. They had questions, found their own answers and wrote their own book.
So what do a Johnny and Bill Gates have in common? Well, they chose to see what no one else choose to see. Sometime in our past, someone was holding a red balloon and saw that red dog that has been entertaining kids ever since.
If you look though history you will find that many of the people who invented things we labeled with some type of learning disability or were just called dumb. This made me start to wonder about a few things. Especially about how we treat our kids today that are mentally challenged, learning disable, or what ever fancy word they have come up with to tell us that they are different from us.
It seems like today we are fixated on trying to get these kids mainstreamed into our classrooms. We want them to fit in as much as possible, I feel like the experts believe that they want them to be able to think just like us. They want them to try to be able to fit into society as best they can so that they can have the best life they can in our world.
Maybe that is the problem. Maybe the experts have it backwards. Maybe instead of trying to make them fit in our world we should open up our hearts and try to understand theirs. I’m not talking about scientific understanding. I’m saying that we understand that they see the world different from us and that is awesome, and maybe, just maybe, we could learn something from them about how to live our lives, if we stopped trying to make their lives just like ours. Maybe we have more to learn from them than they could ever learn from us. Maybe we don’t understand the depth of their thoughts because we are so entrenched in ours. Maybe, we are the dumb ones.