Whether “science” or “knitting,” your children are using their minds to think critically and creatively about any subject they encounter. Parents and teachers, however, have decided which subjects are more deserving of absorbed attention than others. Science, we can all agree, is a subject adults consider essential. Knitting? Less so.

Yet what does it take for a mind to use a microscope? What kind of mental and digital dexterity is needed to knit? What kind of thinking is required to examine angles? What kind of mind is used to crochet or quilt?

When we talk about physics, we forget the physics of our bodies in motion on a playground or the skill to create a perfect tumbling domino chain.

Next time one of your kids assembles a LEGO build from scratch relying on the 2-D instructions to build a 3-D model, say aloud all the ways the brain did that bit of gymnastics to SEE what should be seen and to fit the pieces together in just the right way.

How many times do your kids compare movies and song lyrics to one another? How well do they forecast the next plot in a book series?

Brain stuff worth noting regardless of subject:

• Reading deeply and closely
• Following directions
• Modifying directions to achieve an effect
• Designing and then implementing that design
• Assembly
• Comparing and contrasting
• Forecasting outcomes
• Hypothesizing reasons
• Identifying themes
• Correlating one experience or practice to another
• Building a vocabulary in the subject area
• Noticing experts
• Practicing the skill for mastery
• Using a skill in one field to learn another

The dexterity of a child’s brain can be a bigger priority than mastery of dates, processes, and information.

Focus on how your child thinks well about any subject from cooking to skateboarding to algebra to medieval history.

Brains before curriculum.

“Frequently, by the time children reach 3rd grade, the sense of wonder with which they entered kindergarten—wonder out of which authentic thinking and thus thinking for oneself develops—has begun to diminish. By 6th grade it has practically disappeared” (459, Developing Minds, Thomas Jackson).

Traditional education models train kids to devalue their own thinking in favor of right answers and a teacher’s instructions. Little children who are used to exploring the world with their hands and wild imaginations are gradually conditioned to save those impulses for “after school” until they give them up all together before they even get to junior high.

And then we wonder why our teens appear to be inflexible, unable to grasp nuances. They’ve been conditioned by tests and homework to know that there is a right answer. They’ve lost their capacity for wonder. Teens who have retained their imaginations and their wide-eyed wonder are often seen as “not serious” about school or as “immature” or “socially inept.”

A Gift

If there were one gift I could give parents, it would be the ability to protect their children’s natural, not-jaded curiosity through the teen years. To:

• have a teen boy who is delighted by knitting or a teen girl who wields a power saw,
• converse with a teen who is enamored of fantasy novels to the point of writing their own and imagining that it could be published,
• know a teen who becomes so tender to the plight of abused animals, that teen chooses to volunteer at a shelter,
• raise a teen who plays with LEGO, who climbs trees, who secretly enjoys reruns of the PBS cartoon Arthur.

It’s one of the gifts of home education.

Let’s preserve conditions that promote wonder no matter what ages our children are.

The Enchanted Education for Teens

Still have questions? Learn more in my book, Raising Critical Thinkers.

The multiple-choice test ‘right answer’ thinking is what often derails thoughtfulness—evidence of caring about the question, not just surmising the answer a test-maker had in mind.

You’re in class. Teacher hands out the test. Hands on the clock tick. 50 minutes to answer 50 questions. Scantron hits your desk—ding!

What happens in your body? A thrill of adrenaline? Sweat?

You get to the end of the first question: four choices. You can’t decide between (a) and (b). Clock ticking. You can make good arguments for either of them. Clock ticking louder. You fill in one bubble, then erase it, and fill in the other. It’s hard to know which one is right. From one perspective, (a) makes complete sense. But you like (b) because it makes more sense to you.

Finally: you know! You know because you do one thought experiment to help you. You ask yourself, “What did my teacher have in mind when creating this question?” You stop consulting your own thoughts, ideas, and powers of synthesizing.

On you go—new method in mind. You won’t think about possible answers. Instead, you’ll ask “What’s the most likely answer the test-creator wanted me to supply?”

Goodbye critical thinking.

When we reduce learning to right answers alone, and decide whose right answers we must learn, and then put that right answer thinking under timed pressure, we eliminate an important force in our education: our own powerful minds!

Even math. Even spelling.

What would happen if your child could explain why they thought 7 x 8 was 54 or that “field” was spelled “feeled”?

How is it helpful to simply tell that child “You got it wrong?”

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

For more help, I’ve got a whole chapter addressing “multiple choice right answer thinking” and how it’s destroying our children’s natural capacity for wonder and intellectual growth in my new book, Raising Critical Thinkers.