Picture this, the year is 1980 and an 8-year-old boy is sitting in the middle of his bedroom floor playing with a tub of assorted Lego’s.
He tells himself, ‘I want to build a house,’ and using just his imagination, he presumes to build a house.
After completing the house he next tells himself, ‘I want to build a convertible car,’ and again using only his imagination, he presumes to build a convertible car.
Flash forward to the present, that once 8-year-old boy is now grown into a 36-year-old man, and he stands at the doorway of his son’s bedroom watching his son play with a Lego kit.
As the father watches, he sees his son going step-by-step on the instruction manual, in hopes of building a house and a convertible car.
In the father’s generation, it took not only imagination, but critical thinking to build that Lego car and house, whereas in today’s generation it only took following predetermined instructions to build the car and house.
What’s the significance?
Critical thinking was a part of that man’s childhood, and it most likely has now become a part of his adulthood as well. Unfortunately the same can probably not be said about his son.
This illustration reflects how much of today’s generation is. Today the kids are provided step-by-step instructions to figure out problems they are given.
Unfortunately that’s not how everything works in today’s world.
Take this newspaper for example. Each week we, the staff, come in to layout pages. Sure we have instructions, and templates that are drawn out for us, but most of the time both of those are only suggestions and we alter them quite a bit to get the design to our liking.
Our job requires critical thinking and a lot of it because that’s how the real world truly is.
The world has no predetermined instructions drawn out for it. It’s like the wind in the middle of autumn. It’s either the perfect amount of breeze or it’s too much to handle for one day.
Critical thinking is required of a person if they want to truly succeed in life after college or life in college even.
During the father’s era, critical thinking was so common that even the Lego Company helped it along in the kid’s lives. Unfortunately, it seems that today’s generation has slipped so much in the critical thinking category that the Lego Company is now forced to provide predetermined instructions to simply build a house and a car.
What has changed?