Contact: Kurun Vella at: likiak.paul@mail.

com

BEHIND THIS WALL

by Paul Henrickson. Ph.D.
tm. 2013

In small village on a little island in the middle of sea surrounded by three continents in the midst of conflict there is:

the place from where teachers can gain support for their efforts to help children discover and to be themselves and feel no need to tell lies to get approval. GOOD? Right! Check it out.

Selected from the many puzzles intended for the school child pictured on the internet which clearly illustrate one of the major purposes of presenting puzzles to young people. That purpose is to train the child to follow the rules laid down by others so that the rewards of obedience (which are approval and some response that might pass for affection) will, in their turn, make it easier for the

child to follow the rules the next time around, and then the third and the fourth and so on until the training to obey is so well instilled in the response system of the child that any thought or action to the contrary will be quite nearly unlikely. It is a process less dramatic, occasionally as effective and being consensually approved it carries no guilt as with the process in the creation of a zombie. The conventional inadvisability of creating someone to be your obedient servant was, at one point, recognized by the Haitian government when it created Article 249 but a similar sensitivity to human rights was overlooked when Martha Mitchel, the wife of the United States Attorney General was kidnapped I love its gentle warble, I love its gentle flow, I love to wind my tongue up
And I love to let it go. was

the caption next to her photograph on her high school graduation yearbook. It was this talent that got her put away for the nations security.

or when Bradley Manning, acting on his conscience (when one is a good zombie one doesnt have one) released secret documents to Julian Assange. Perhaps something has miscarried in my analysis but if the actions of person A result in diminished individually determined effectiveness in person B that some form of malfeasance has taken place. The method by which the injury is affected may be of no consequence if the result is the same. At this point it seems appropriate to underscore the vital differences between teaching someone and educating them. In teaching them the subject is told what to do and how to do it. In educating some one you indicate the choices.

In the first case a known result is the goal. In the second the final goal is uncertain and the subject is always free to choose an alternate behaviour should his vision of the goal change. This is why the profession of what we call teaching is based on moral perception...and why the system . as we have known it for a very long time, is functioning immorally....and why we might consider those who receive the teacher of the year award might be considered immoral agents. It is not my aim to lead the reader into thinking that I wish to promote a form of anarchy, but only to encourage the reader to consider that the world is not black and white, nor correctly described as being dichotomous, rather, it is my intention to point out that providing a range of choices to a young mind

will further the development of critical thinking and intelligently performed moral behaviour which will not only encourage obedience, when it seems reasonable to be obedient, but will also allow for the individual mind to follow its own interests when they beckon. The reader can perhaps readily see that there is more room for that in this puzzle below than in the farm

scene above. Of course, it cannot be denied that the farm scene does offer the opportunity to identify the various animals and for a discussion about what a farm is and what usually takes place on a farm and why is certainly a valuable contribution to the childs intellectual development and for those reasons alone I would not advise the dropping their use in the class room, but, and this is important, what the classroom needs is the opportunity to experience a creative adventure and the unassembled puzzle below does exactly that...and every classroom should have the 40 puzzle set available for those

unscheduled times when there are lapses of focus on the lesson plan for that

period. Also what has been observed with puzzle solvers from the age of 6 to

sixty is that the puzzle solver is a bit unnerved by the absence of a model to go by...but that is exactly the point isnt it? I have never quite understood why some people express so much confidence in the judgment of others rather than in their own. There is no real shame in making an error, although we are often taught that there is, but the shame lies in not correcting the error when that error doesnt seem to help you achieve what one seeks. The player is strongest when he is the one to decide what it is he is looking for.

This illustration of a rooster being knocked off a

fence comes from the cover of the report on a verbal creativity task created by Dr. Paul Henrickson while a research assistant to Dr. E. Paul Torrance at the then Bureau of Educational Research at the University of Minnesota, 1961. Its focus is related to the puzzle program in that it concentrates on the role played by subconsciously developed imagery brought to the surface of consciousness for use by the individual in communicating to his peers his observations of the environment...this is the very basis of organic social development.