I heard a very old clip of an Issac Asimov interview today in which he talked about how people who do the same job over and again for years will experience a great deal of confusion and loss when that simple job is automated and they are now expected to do something knew. Asimov suggested those people would not be able to do something new/use their creativity, because it would have been beaten out of them by the repetition. This started me thinking about the students I deal with regularly and the kids who I am raising who too strive to do the bare minimum and strive –i mean strive– not to engage their creativity unless they actually are required to do so.
I’m worried about how much of our society is being reduced to a sort of minimum qual stupor. It feels more and more like we are being conditioned to be docile consumers whose only real sense of choice is Android or Iphone and the financial/social stratifying implications that come with it. We are raising a generation of NPCs–drones that seem uninterested in independent thought or function.
This idea has been brewing for some time. Even when I think about my kids and my partners kids I think of the majority of them as being developed to be cogs in the machine–NPCs who will grow up to perform a designated roll vs. push or pull human society in a direction they desire.
I feel like people, for the most part, want to be led. Leaders are rare. Vocal leaders are less rare, but true leadership is based on ideas and those are extremely rare. I don’t know how to better cultivate that in the classroom or the home, but I am starting to suspect it is already too late.