A GREAT gift to humans is an inquiring mind. Western history shows that the ancient Greeks’ inquiring mind, as they lived in comfort on slave labour, was mostly to satisfy their curiosity about the world. Meanwhile, the Arabs, in their golden age, were used to search for the elixir of life and create gold. Along this line, they discovered useful facts in chemistry. However, the chemistry techniques were left undeveloped.
But in the last 100 years, the human mind had brought about more changes than what was achieved over the past 2,000 years. This advent of mind progress is due to the necessity to invent more techniques to produce food, reduce poverty and sustain the environment for human survival.
As a result, the in-thing among educators is to emphasise critical thinking and problem solving instead of just learning and memorising. Thinking is a skill that can be trained from young. To do it, we first have to provide the source of thinking. The basis of thinking is observation. Hence, the source must be used to encourage children to be observers.
Another source of thinking is reading. But the source of observation can also be obtained from activities, such as watching TV or movies.
Usually, we would just ask a child if the movie is interesting. But if we ask questions about shapes, colours, or differences, etc., we may encourage children to be more observant.
The Early Childhood Research Quarterly, published by Elsevier in 1999, stated that the number of questions from a mother to her child about what has been watched, strengthens children’s comprehension of characters.
Learning from this research, parents can induce thinking by throwing playful questions to encourage observation of the details in movies.
For instance, instead of asking a child if it was fun, we may ask
why the shape of the character’s nose is big or long or small. Or if
his favourite character wears red pants, ask what would happen if
it wears polka dot shorts. Simple
answers from the child may
lead to more questions and
answers, which, in turn, may
make him start recalling, observing and later thinking in his own
way.
To produce an inquiring mind is to move away from believing that thinking is a natural part of a person. It has to be stimulated. Sources should be provided. Children should be trained to be observant from young. At the heart of it, thinking is a skill where a child can be trained to have an inquiring mind through play.
Megawati Omar,Academy Of Language Studies UiTM, Shah Alam