On being a survivor.

The following text is adapted from an address given to Talent Identification Program (TIP) awardees at Duke University May 17, 2004.

I am sure that many of you have seen the Survivor series on TV where a group of people are placed on a desert isle and forced to live by their wits, avoiding wild animals, tarantulas, quicksand, and a few cameramen and directors. It has always been interesting to me that people rarely ask, "Who is filming these pictures on this deserted island?" Bright students often have reason to think of themselves as survivors, as well, in our public schools. Instead of some ugly rash that they might pick up on the island, they have to confront boredom and a lack of challenge. There are buttons being worn that say "No Child Left Behind." That is a good message but there should be another button placed beside it saying, "No Child's Talent Shall Be Held Down."

I have arrived at one type of solution to being a survivor in public schools. Many of you have spent much of your academic life problem solving, but you have been solving problems made up by someone else. The most useful thinking skill, and one that is hardly ever taught in school, is problem finding, the ability to identify and frame a significant and worthwhile question and then answer it by considering many options. It is that skill of problem finding that separates the creative artist, the creative writer, and creative scientist from the run of the mill practitioners.

A quick example. Francisco Goya, a Spanish artist in the beginning of the nineteenth century earned his living by painting portraits of Spanish royalty, and an unattractive lot they were. Someone else gave Goya the problem--"paint portraits of royalty"--but he earned his reputation as a great artist by painting two masterpieces, The Second of May and The Third of May that depict the Spanish rebellion against the French forces of Napoleon. This was the problem that Goya himself "found" and these are two of the paintings for which he is remembered. Instead of problem solving (How to make the Countess look good?) he found a problem himself (How to depict Spanish bravery in the face of Napoleon's army?).

Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying that it is the scientific problem that the scientist selects to attack that is important, not how elegantly the study is carried out. By common agreement Einstein was the greatest problem finder of all time. While working in a patent office 40 hours a week, he discovered that space and time were not absolute as Newton thought, but relative; hence the theory of relativity. Is light made up of waves or particles? Einstein found that you can consider it either, depending on the problem you are working on. Another Einstein problem was, "How does gravity work?" Einstein even had time to deal with the issue of "Why the sky is blue?" The interesting question is not explaining the genius of Einstein, but why there are so few Einsteins. Those who discover must challenge the current illusions that pass for truth in our own age. They must ask questions when most everyone thinks we have the answers already. It is finding the worthwhile problem to address that is the talent of the creative scientist, writer, or artist. So how does one problem find?

You select an issue or problem of interest to you, and hopefully to others, in your area of passion or concern. Let us choose one. What are some ways that groups of people can solve conflicts without going to war? Is there truly something in the human condition that drives us to violent conflict or can we control our own fate? That would seem to be a good problem to pursue. So you have to learn a lot about how wars begin, and even what diplomacy means, and how conflicts in the past may have been solved short of armed conflict. You might find out why diplomats are so nice and polite to one another. Is it because they like one another? Hardly, they more than likely would want to strangle the person they are discussing with--but they have found out that strangling the other diplomat will likely make things worse.

We had a Cold War with the Soviet Union for more than three decades without it breaking out into armed aggression. How did that happen? Have you studied that? We tend to study in history all of the unsuccessful attempts to solve conflicts, those that resulted in war. Our curriculum can even be defined as a sequence of wars--American Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, World War I, World War II, etc. Could we have avoided a Civil War and still maintain the values of each side? It sure would have saved a lot of bloodshed, agony and resources.

How can we avoid future conflicts? Must we have a catastrophic battle between the Muslim world and the Christian world? How can we problem find around this issue? What are our options?

Another issue for problem finding is that modern societies need massive amounts of energy to keep them running yet we seem to be running out of oil, one of our major sources of energy. What are some of the ways we might find our way out of this dilemma? One can spend a lifetime on this worthy problem.

Once you have adopted a problem finding approach you are never in a position of saying that "I have done all my assignments so that I have nothing to do." You can, instead, problem find in the areas of your own greatest interest. You frame the problem. You collect the relevant information by Internet, library, or what have you. You come up with a series of options as to what to do about the problem that you have found yourself and analyze the choices. Once you make your goal known, you can count on help from teachers who want to encourage this student search.

One thing you can be sure of, when someone tells you there is an "easy" answer to problems such as poverty, or taxes, or environmental problems, you can stop listening. This person has revealed his or her own intellectual laziness. Piet Hein, a Dutch writer, once developed some sayings he called Grooks. Grooks were popular a couple of decades ago--little couplets that tell eternal truths. One of them is pertinent here:

   Problems worthy of attack
   Prove their worth by hitting back.

You can tell real problems by the fact they don't easily yield to solutions. If our problems had an easy solution, they would have been found and implemented years ago. Lester Thurow, a Harvard economist, once said that people who claim there are no solutions to large problems like crime or education of the poor are wrong. There are, Thurow says, hundreds of solutions to these problems. The trouble is there is no solution that doesn't cost money or doesn't make comfortable people uncomfortable!!

Remember, you will never run out of problems to find and explore and you have the right to investigate a problem of your own choosing. You have analytic tools to search for knowledge such as the Internet that earlier generations only dreamed of. If you are still bored after problem finding then there may not be much hope for you.

So, my message to you today is be a survivor, be a problem finder, it will energize you and you might find some results that will help the rest of us.