© Causes 2012. Anyone can change the world.
Great Thinkers is a program for improving pre-collegiate education by inspiring students to take up passions, such as music, science, and art, at early ages.
Great Thinkers is a program for improving pre-collegiate education by inspiring students to take up passions, such as music, science, and art, at early ages.
See our website at http://www.great-thinkers.org for more information.
Great Thinkers is a program for improving pre-collegiate education by motivating students to take up passions at early ages, such as music, science, and art, educating society's next generation of leaders. We are concurrently undertaking a similar effort at the university level called Project Polymath, representing the natural continuation of this educational philosophy.
Our method relies on motivating students through interest rather than fear. We do this by creating role models for the students to follow in three forms: by hiring only instructors who have the capacity, integrity, motivation, passion, and respect to inspire students and function as proper role models, by bringing inspirational role models and ideas from the past to the present through a survey course on the lives, work, and ideas of “Great Thinkers”, and by providing an alternative to dictated assignments in the form of progress towards student-driven projects and pursuits.
Thus we will expose students to revolutionary ideas and entice passion through hands-on demonstrations, students would be challenged to think and create along these lines wherever they may lead, gaining appreciation of the subject and establishing an unparalleled empathy with their predecessors which arises from facing the same challenges, and teachers would function as mentors, guides, and trusted role models to shape this passion and talent into a complete and useful framework which will serve the student in the future.
1. Students learn better and persist longer when they enjoy the material.
2. Motivated students have a better chance of becoming future experts and can better learn how to creatively apply their skills.
3. The current educational system operates through rote learning and strict obedience: an environment antithetical to creative thought.
4. Teachers should serve as role models and mentors, not dictators or wardens.
5. Replicating the work of past thinkers inspires students to think about the material - this can seed projects for credit in lieu of rote assignments.