By Mitchel Resnick, Cultures of Creativity, LEGO Foundation
We live in a world that is changing more rapidly than ever before. Today’s children will face a continual stream of new issues and challenges in the future. Things that they learn today will be obsolete tomorrow. To thrive, they must learn to design innovative solutions to unexpected problems. Their success and satisfaction will be based on their ability to think and act creatively. Knowledge alone is not enough: they must learn how to use their knowledge creatively.
Unfortunately, most schools are out-of-step with the needs of today’s rapidly-changing society. They were not designed to help students develop as creative thinkers. But there is an important exception: kindergarten. As I see it, the traditional kindergarten approach to learning is ideally suited to the needs of the 21st century.
What do I mean by the kindergarten approach to learning? Imagine a kindergarten classroom. In one corner of the room, a group of children is building a series of towers with wooden blocks. In another corner, a group is creating a large mural with finger paint. In the process, children are exploring important ideas: What makes a tower stand up or fall down? How do colors mix together?
Even more important, the kindergarten students are starting to develop as creative thinkers. As they playfully work together, they learn about the creative process: how to imagine new ideas, try them out, test the boundaries, experiment with alternatives, get feedback from others, and generate new ideas based on their experiences.
At the core of this creative process is the ability to create. If we want children to develop as creative thinkers, we need to provide them with more opportunities to create.
Friedrich Froebel understood this idea when he opened the world’s first kindergarten in 1837. Froebel filled his kindergarten with physical objects (such as blocks, beads, and tiles) that children could use for designing, creating, and making. These objects became known as Froebel’s Gifts. Froebel carefully designed his Gifts so that children, as they played and constructed with the Gifts, would learn about common patterns and forms in nature.
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