Why Thinking 'Outside the Box' Is Not So Easy

By Marion Brady

Education Week
August 30, 2006

In the fall of 1987, the Associated Press carried a story from Tacoma, Wash., about a boy “penned in a coffin-sized box for two years because his stepgrandmother feared he was brain-damaged.”

Two years in a box! Did the kid scream to get out? Feel abused? Unhappy? No. When he was let out, according to the news item, “he was amazed to learn not all children are shut up in the same way.”

The boy illustrated, literally, the difficulty of “thinking outside the box.”

We all share that difficulty. We’re bundles of unexamined beliefs about what’s proper and acceptable, and many of those unexamined beliefs relate to schooling. We cling to them not because research has shown them to be true or because they make good, common sense, but simply because lifelong immersion in the status quo makes it exceedingly difficult to imagine alternatives.