There's always something that prompts a blog post. This time it was the World Cup Group G football match between Belgium and England. It was followed on the UK's ITV channel by the programme Good Evening Britain, co-hosted by Piers Morgan and Suzannah Reid. The guests included the actor Danny Dyer and the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
The main purpose of the show was to judge the mood of the country following the football match but it inevitably digressed on to other topics. One digression was the fact that Danny Dyer's daughter, Dani, was a contestant on the programme Love Island. I have never watched Love Island so I cannot judge it but it is the type of programme that Piers Morgan felt was not the sort of show befitting of Dani Dyer's talents. Danny Dyer admitted he did have concerns but said as a parent "I've always believed you don't teach them what to think, you teach them how to think." This profound statement stopped Piers Morgan on his adversarial track and Jeremy Corbyn could be observed to nod sagely. It got me thinking too and hence this blog post!
Parents do have a tremendous influence on their offsprings' values, which obviously affect their subsequent thought processes and particularly the way they consciously or subconsciously develop mental models as they navigate their way through the challenges that life throws at them. Mental models are processes that we employ to help us break down complex issues into understandable and organisable chunks. The problem is, however, that attempting to understand complexity by breaking it down into building blocks of simplicity, often doesn't work!
The picture at the beginning of this post, illustrates an elephant being examined by six blind men. The illustration comes from the parable of Blind Men and an Elephant, which originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent. Each man has a different perception of what the object is based on what he is currently feeling and crucially, making comparisons with previous experiences. So the end of the trunk feels like a snake, the tusk feels like a spear, the ear feels like a fan, the body feels like a wall, the tail feels like a rope and the leg feels like a tree. The elephant is so big that none of the observers recognises the interconnections between the individual chunks of simplistic understanding and therefore, the realisation of the elephant is not apparent.
Returning to Danny Dyer's statement on HOW to think, if parents teach children the importance of trying to understand the bigger picture (the whole) before making judgements on easy-to-define chunks of knowledge (the parts), then his statement really was profound. That said, the WHAT and the HOW can be inextricably linked and the parent has to try to decouple his or her WHAT from the HOW that is being taught. If the blind daughter of the blind man feeling the elephant's trunk, asked him WHY he thought it was a snake, he should tell her that is his opinion based on his experience. He should suggest she asks the other men and maybe others who are not blind, for their opinions. That way she might soon conclude it was an elephant!
So the parental teaching of HOW to think must include the fact that parents, like all human beings, only have opinions and anyone seeking the 'truth' must be prepared to explore many opinions and try to understand the reasons behind the others' judgements, by asking WHY. Even then, their understanding of the 'truth' will only be yet another opinion but at least it should be well informed. Richard Dawkins, the renowned scientist, wrote a letter to his 10-year-old daughter explaining the problems of living in an irrational world. He warned her about three bad reasons for believing anything - tradition, authority and revelation. Without evidence, you should't believe something just because it's always been done that way (tradition), or because the person who told you about it is very important (authority), or because someone who believes it had a 'gut feeling' (revelation).
"I've always believed you don't teach them what to think, you teach them how to think." (Danny Dyer)
Yes Danny, but it's really not that simple!
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