Geography is the best trainer for holistic thinking

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

One of the main complaints about the modern education system is the formation of a fragmented picture of the world in children. After leaving school and even after graduating from college, the heads of young people are stuffed with a chaotic set of facts and ideas that are divorced from reality. Moreover, young people do not even try to bring the facts into a single whole or check the absorbed ideas for applicability to real life.

Doesn't try for three reasons:

- can not;

- the majority of young people do not have such an internal need;

- young people do not even imagine that the formation of a holistic picture of the world is not only possible, but extremely necessary in today's conditions.

Realizing this, many parents came to the conclusion that it is pointless to sit and wait for something to change in the education system, because children grow up much faster than thoughts wander in the heads of officials. And then the parents decided to take control of the situation into their own hands, as far as possible, began to look for old Soviet textbooks and even publish them at their own expense.

This is certainly good, one might even say that it is excellent, only today this is not enough. The problem is that Soviet education, just like Russian education, leaves children defenseless against one very dangerous enemy. This enemy is a lie. Lying in all its forms - from absolute and overt, to very well disguised.

Today, this leads to the fact that children are beginning to be actively used for their political purposes. We have already seen what this leads to three years ago and we really do not want to repeat other people's mistakes.

To prevent this from happening to those children who are still far from graduation, you need to try very hard to develop the skill of holistic thinking in them. To deceive a person who knows how to think is much more difficult than one who is ready to take everything on faith. Of course, being able to think holistically is not all you need to be able to do in order not to fall for the bait of a skillful manipulator, but this is one of the necessary (!) Conditions.

Is it possible today, with the help of parents, in spite of the school and the environment, to teach a child to think broadly and deeply? Teach you to look at the subject of reflection from different angles, and even make a whole picture out of it? Of course, this is very difficult, but still possible. It is possible, if we take Soviet education as a basis, but with one significant change, because no matter how good Soviet education was, it still did not form a holistic picture of the world. Whole - means including all-embracing, that is, universal, with a size equal to the entire earth, and not some part of it. Were there many people in the USSR who could embrace the whole earth with their mind's eye? Of course, not much, also because there was no such task.

What would Soviet education be like if there were such a task? He would have one subject from which the rest would branch. This subject would be geography, because it is the best trainer for holistic thinking. Why geography? Because, this is the subject that is closest to the forgotten natural science and because immersion in the study of such a huge object as a planet makes the greatest demands on the scale of thinking.

Studying geography broadens mental horizons. Any person who immerses himself in geography, willingly or unwillingly, must increase the breadth of his view, and this is a necessary condition for the formation of holistic thinking. Plus, geography makes you look from different angles. After all, there is physical geography, there is political, there is economic, mathematical and even historical. And this is not the whole list of "geographies". Under the dome of geography, very different views are collected on one and the same area of land or ocean and on the relationship of these areas in a single whole. This means that a student of geography learns to look at the world not only broadly, but also from different angles, and also learns to find relationships between different sides of the same phenomenon. All these skills ultimately form holistic thinking. This practice forms not just the habit of thinking holistically, but forms the need to think so.

Therefore, geography should be a central or pivotal subject in the education system. It is in relation to geography that all other subjects can be studied, because they are inextricably linked with it. Through geography, it is very easy to check how much a child has learned to apply what he is taught in other lessons.

This will help the child see where and how to apply the knowledge that is given to him in mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural history, botany, zoology, biology. Then all the items are collected in one big picture. Even history fits into it through historical geography. And where there is history, there is literature, there is oratory (ideally), there is philosophy and anything in general. All sciences are interconnected, in fact, they are branches growing from one trunk, and today geography is closest to this trunk, and once it was natural science.

Therefore, if you want to give your child an education on your own that will form his holistic thinking, then start studying geography with him as early as possible and look at all other subjects through this prism.

Of course, he (a) will object that this geographical knowledge will never be useful to him or her in life, but here it is important to understand yourself and explain this to the child that all this is needed first of all for training. Studying geography is perhaps the best way to learn to think big, and without thinking big, it’s impossible to achieve big results.

When immersing yourself in geography, it is important not to repeat the mistakes of the Soviet approach. You need to understand that geography is primarily a training simulator for practicing real thinking skills, and not the development of mechanical memory.

The memory load should be minimal, but the load on the imagination, on the ability to draw pictures of a huge scale in the head, should be very significant, on the verge of the utmost possible. Therefore, do not rush to search for suitable videos or 3d models. Let the child first try to draw a picture in his head and only then, if necessary, look at the picture, video, or 3d model.

After the stage of mental "drawing" is well mastered, it is possible and necessary to begin to revive mental pictures. For example, after reading any fragment of the book "The Origin of the Earth", you can invite the child to mentally imagine how the process that is described there is going on. It will be great if he shows you how he sees what he reads by means of improvised means.

After reviving the pictures, the stage of identifying system relationships should come. For example, you can mark on the map of Russia areas suitable for growing wheat, and then think from which area it is more convenient to supply grain to a particular city or several different regions at once. At the same time, one might think about what kind of transport is the best way to deliver this cargo. Simulation on the ground can also help with this task. A closet can be one area, a chair another, a table a third. On the floor with books, mark the areas where wheat grows.

If you show your imagination, then the study of geography can be turned into a game, ten years long, to create and equip your own planet, but this planet should not be primitive like the Little Prince. It should be alive, with the change of seasons, with the migration of peoples, with technical progress and even with conflicts. The best trainer for developing truly holistic thinking can hardly be imagined.