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We Should Cherish Our Children's Freedom to Think Kie Ho

Kie Ho, who grew up in Indonesia and is now a Southern California business executive, argues in the following article that the educational system in the United States is good because it teaches students to think and to experiment with ideas. The author criticizes educational systems that rely solely on memorization and rote learning, because those methods stifle creative impulses.

Americans who remember "the good old days" are not alone in complaining about the educational system in this country. Immigrants, too, complain, and with more up-to-date comparisons. Lately I have heard a Polish immigrant express dismay that his daughter's high school has not taught her the difference between Belgrade and Prague. A German friend was furious when he learned that the mathematics test given to his son on his first day as a freshman included multiplication and division. A Lebanese boasts that the average high-school graduate in his homeland can speak fluently in Arabic, French and English. Japanese businessmen in Los Angeles send their children to private schools staffed by teachers imported from Japan to learn mathematics at Japanese levels, generally considered at least a year more advanced than the level here.
But I wonder: If American education is so tragically inferior, why is it that this is still the country of innovation?
I think I found the answer on my short trip to the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, where the work of schoolchildren was on exhibit. Equipped only with colorful yarns, foil paper, felt pens and crayons, they had transformed simple paper lunch bags into, among other things, a waterfall with flying fish, Broom Hilda the witch* and a house with a woman in a bikini hiding behind a swinging door. Their public school had provided these children with opportunities and direction to fulfill their creativity, something that people in this country tend to take for granted.
When I was 12 in Indonesia, where education followed the Dutch system, I had to memorize the names of all the world's major cities, from Kabul to Karachi. At the same age, my son, who was brought up a Californian, thought that Buenos Aires was Spanish for "good food." However, unlike many children of his age in Asia and Europe, my son had studied creative geography. When he was only 6, he drew a map of the route that he traveled to get to school, including the streets and their names, the buildings and traffic signs and the houses that he passed.
American parents forget that in this country their children are able to experiment freely with ideas; without this they will not really be able to think or to believe in themselves.
In my high school years, back in Indonesia, we were models of dedication and obedience; we sat to listen, to answer only when asked, and to give the only correct answer. Even when studying word forms, there were no alternatives. In similes, pretty lips were always as red as cherries, and beautiful eyebrows were always like a parade of black clouds, Like children in many other countries in the world, I simply did not have a chance to choose, to make decisions. My son, on the contrary, told me that he got a good laugh—and an A—from his teacher for creating his own simile "the man was as nervous as Richard Pryor* at a Ku Klux Klan* convention."
There's no doubt that American education does not meet high standards in such basic skills as mathematics and language. And we realize that our youngsters are ignorant of Latin, put Mussolini in the same category as Dostoevski, cannot recite the Periodic Table* by heart. Would we, however, prefer to stuff the developing little heads of our children with hundreds of geometry problems, the names of rivers in Brazil and 50 lines from "the Canterbury Tales?" Do we really want to retard their impulses, frustrate their opportunities for self-expression?
When I was 18,1 had to memorize Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech flawlessly. In his English class, my son was assigned to write a love letter to Juliet, either in Shakespearean or modern language. (He picked the latter; his Romeo would take it Juliet to an arcade for video games).
Here in America a history student can take the role of Lyndon Johnson in an open debate against another student playing Ho Chi Minh. But it is unthinkable that a youngster in Japan would dare to do the same regarding the role of their Hirohito in World War II.
Critics of American education in this country cannot grasp one thing, something that they don't truly understand because they take it for granted: freedom. This most important measurement has been omitted in the studies of the quality of education in this century, the only one, I think, that extends even to children the license to freely speak, write and be creative. Our public education certainly is not perfect, but it does have its advantages.

Notes:

Broom Hilda the witch: comic strip character
Ku Klux Klan(三 K 黨): secret organization of white men begun in the South after the Civil War to maintain white supremacy
Richard Pryor: black male film actor
Periodic Table: the arrangement of the chemical elements according to their atomic numbers