excellent sheep

"So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, 'excellent sheep.'"

Today's post follows on yesterday's post. Why do I feel so concerned about unstructured playtime? Because that is when I feel children learn how to think on their own.

Solitude and Leadership
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts

This speech was delivered by William Deresiewicz to the entering class at West Point and it really touches on a lot of topics important to me: creativity, leadership, the factual inability of anyone to really multitask. His argument if you will goes like this:

1. We have a crisis of leadership in America at all levels because we are training out future leaders to be lemmings.
2. People who "think" they can multitask are neither multitasking nor thinking.
3. Leaders need to know how to think on their own.
4. To think, you need to concentrate for an amount of time greater than 20 seconds.
5. To think of new ideas, you need to step away from other people's ideas.
6. And to be a great leader, you need deep friendships to help you think, or suss out ideas.

I really like all of these ideas. And I want to keep trying to activly live a life where I am thinking.