My daughter came to me last week and said to me "Mom, if our visual receptors are blue, red, and green how do we see yellow? You can't make yellow with blue, red, green, or anything else. You can't just make yellow, mom!"
This sounds like a logical thought process for a teenager who is studying biology for the first time, right? If you're learning about these new parts of your body that you never knew existed and you have a basic knowledge of what primary colors are this is a pretty logical sequence of thoughts.
The thing is: she's not a teenager learning biology for the first time. She's not a teenager at all. She's 7 and in second grade. She's learning how to spell "department" and how many vertexes a pyramid has. She's thriving in Girl Scouts and learning how to work out problems with her friends. She's playing barbies on the weekend and learning how to ride a bike.
So now the question is: if she's capable of this level of though, what else is she capable of? Are we failing our children by not giving them enough of a challenge or are we pushing them harder than they should be pushed? If she's capable of understanding specific functions of the human brain, what other cognitive processes have we left untapped in our children?
Other countries teach their children foreign language in elementary school. By the time these children get to high school they have learned enough about academics to begin pursuing career options and higher education. Are we failing our children in the United States by not affording them these same options? Clearly, children are capable of more than we give them credit for.
Furthermore, are we hurting our future generations by not allowing them to keep up with the higher level of academics that are seen in so many other countries? The more my daughter learns and grows the more I realize what she is capable of, which is a far cry from what we as parents challenge our children to achieve. In two or three or four generations, will we still be teaching the same level of academics that we are teaching in our schools now, meanwhile watching global academia advance? We are being outsmarted in the areas of science and technology as we speak, and that will only hurt us in the long run.
If we do not come up with advanced technology, what will fuel our military efforts? What will we export to other countries if we do not have the level of intellect that seems to come naturally to people raised in other countries? If we are behind in academics, we will be behind in everything that is to follow academics. Our rivets will not be as riveting. Our vehicles will not be as economical or as technologically advanced. If we do have a prayer of succeeding, we'll have to hire minds from other countries - wait we already do that! Is this a sign of what is to come?
Clearly our children are capable of more than we have challenged them to become. Why not challenge them to grow? If the schools won't do it, why won't the parents? Why has there not been a "call to arms" for our children? Soccer moms will fight to get their children on a specif team - I know this because I watch this behavior every day - but they won't fight to get better education? We'll fight for whether the child has a black or a blue jersey, but not for whether our country ends up black and blue from the thoughtlessness of future generations? Where is our cognitive process there?
