How to have 5.6 million ideas to solve the world’s COVID vaccine distribution

One Saturday afternoon at his lab in Menlo Park, NJ, Thomas Edison reviewed three different sketches to create a new specialized ore-milling machinery. Although they were good ideas, Edison wasn't convinced these were the best options. The engineer who designed them reaffirmed to his boss those were the only three possible options.

"Do you mean to say that these drawings represent the only way to do this work?" asked Edison. "I certainly do," replied the engineer. The following Monday morning, Edison handed the engineer 48 different designs for the new machine. One of these designs became the actual equipment. Edison rarely bragged about his genius, although he was definitively one; he instead considered himself prolific with ideas.

In my book, Becoming Einstein's Teacher: Awakening the Genius in Your Students, I share the longitudinal study on divergent thinking Dr. George Land started back in 1968. Dr. Land designed his categorizations of an individual's creative potential to study the capacity of thinking about different solutions to a problem. He created a simple test to explore the many usages a person can give to an object. For example, if I ask you to think of ways to use a paper clip, you may answer: to hold two or more sheets together, and maybe to open the SIM card compartment of your mobile phone. Can you think of anything else?

Land studied 1,600 children for 15 years. From ages 3 to 5, 98% of children scored within his "creative genius" category. Five years later, only 32% of the same children scored within the category. By the time they reached the age of 15, only 10% of children scored within the creative genius category. The same test applied to more than 200,000 people over 25 years-old found only 2% fell into this category.

Why do so many adults seem to lose divergent - or creative - thinking skills as they grow older? Land concluded that "non-creative behavior is learned" in schools because we teach children to use both convergent and divergent thinking processes simultaneously. The brain can only process one kind of thinking at a time or it shuts down. In other words, children are born creative geniuses but learn to suppress creative behavior in school. Their natural senses are numbed to fulfill a social norm of being educated in how someone else has decided most effective.

Now, imagine if children could use their creativity to solve today's problems… Reflect with me on this: The United States has 56.4 million students in K-12 alone. Imagine if one-tenth of these children had the freedom to think of one vaccine distribution solution, for example. We would have 5.6 million ideas to consider, which is certainly more than 48 ideas Edison had for his new machine. "To have a great idea, have a lot of them," Edison said.

Imagine if teachers believed in each learner's capacity to innovate, regardless of age, erasing the word "impossible" from their dictionary forever. Students wouldn't be afraid of having someone judging their ideas. If a 4-year-old asks an average of 300 questions a day, wouldn't this be an ideal age at which to start exploring new perspectives for a current problem? Perhaps we could have already found the cure for cancer, the solution for pollution, and the end of hunger.

So, suppose we use a learning framework that allows students to exercise imagination—or divergent thinking—related to their passions. We can have brilliant, creative minds even once they leave school. This framework requires that we believe all children are born creative geniuses, regardless of their socioeconomic status, their place of birth, or their differences.

The word genius comes from Latin genii, which means "to produce, create, beget, to give birth to." Coincidence or not, the word education comes from Latin educare, meaning "to bring forth from within." Both require action to give birth to what students have within. The genius is inside, and education brings it out! If genius is 1% talent and 99% work, as Edison famously said, we ought to help students develop working habits that get them to 100% genius. It means learning to learn and to apply what is learned.

Learn how to bring forth the genius in your students using the Relational Learning Framework in my book Becoming Einstein's Teacher.