Dear Friends of Bennett,
I was just reading an interesting article, “What you Learned in Kindergarten Can Still Boost your Creativity,” by Alexxa Gotthardt, Staff Writer at Artsy, kindly forwarded to me by one of Bennett’s senior consultants.
In her article, Gotthardt discusses recent research by MIT Professor Mitchel Resnick supporting the argument that the kind of physical activity that used to characterize Kindergarten—playing, moving, building, pasting, making—yields far better results for children and the adults they will become than the more “academic” approach that has become increasingly pervasive in recent years. According to Resnick, traditional Kindergarten—play and movement-based—develops a kind of creativity that more literacy-oriented Kindergarten cannot, and the need for this kind of creativity only increases as we get older and need to navigate the larger world
Indeed, given rapid and dramatic changes in the workplace and the fact that current children will have jobs the likes of which don’t yet exist, Resnick stresses the importance of creativity and adaptability. “Today, as many kindergartens begin to adopt a memorization- and test-based approach used in higher levels of education,” Gotthardt writes, “Resnick proposes a radical alternative: ‘I think we need exactly the reverse: We need to make the rest of school, in fact like the rest of life, more like kindergarten.’”
If we think about a typical five-year-old child who is designed to run, jump, tumble, roll, climb—essentially to touch life with all senses in the most physical and immediate ways, doesn’t this make intuitive sense?
Warmly,
Elizabeth