Guest Viewpoint: How would Albert Einstein do in today's public schools?

There has long been a myth, destroyed by Isaacson, that Albert Einstein, who gave the world the Theory of Relativity and contributed greatly to our knowledge of physics and quantum theory, failed mathematics in public school. In fact, Einstein himself said, “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was 15, I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” Not bad, huh?

It’s too bad the myth isn’t true -- it’s been used by kids for years to justify their low grades in math and to argue that math is not relevant for their future careers.

The truth of the matter is that Einstein was a very good student. “As a young man, he never did well with rote learning,” Isaacson wrote. “And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute force of his mental processing power, but from his imagination and creativity. . . . As Einstein once declared, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’”

Einstein did much of his thinking by creating mental picture images of the problems he was trying to solve. For example, he thought about space and the speed of light by imagining a boy riding alongside a beam of light in space. He thought about other issues by trying his best to imagine a real situation, like what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto a trampoline and then add billiard balls.

Isaacson asked us to “imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time. Okay, it’s not easy, but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was.”

Imagine Einstein in our schools today. Do our schools feed the kind of creativity that Einstein exemplifies? Do we help children use their intellect to solve problems?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to visit a number of schools through a program run by 2006-07 Connecticut Teacher of the Year Christopher Poulos. He had invited state legislators, education officials, and state association officials to tour schools with him and participate in town hall meetings to discuss education issues.

So far, we have seen some very fine schools -- the kind of schools you can tell are doing an excellent job as soon as you walk through a classroom or laboratory door.

At the Middle School of Plainville, we visited a “Lego lab,” where students -- working in groups or by themselves -- were writing software to get the robots they made out of Legos to perform certain actions.

Einstein would have loved that class! It had just the right amount of math, technology, and science to stimulate the students, who were really enjoying their “work.”

This was a good school in a fine district. But I have no doubt that many schools do not have the resources, or perhaps the vision, to provide such a stimulating course.

My concern is that our ever-increasing focus on standardized tests will drive out the passion and creativity of our students. NCLB and other mandates that require more rote learning might help students who would not otherwise be able to learn on the levels that they will need to become successful citizens.

But this must be balanced by the need to stimulate passion for learning, curiosity, and independent thinking.

Einstein himself complained about teachers who discouraged independent thinking. He felt he had to solve problems his own way -- rather than follow the conventional wisdom.

This balance is just as important with our higher-achieving students, since standardized tests may force students to tamp down their creativity and solve problems by rote.

The need to do well on tests forces us to find the lowest common denominator among our students and use it as the standard to which everything applies. We cannot afford to do this to our better students since we will need these students to be creative, innovative leaders in the years to come.

At the end of the book, Isaacson writes about how Einstein, while not a religious man, had a very deep and meaningful sense of wonder and awe about the reality around him. He spent decades working on a unified theory trying to explain that nature “is the validation of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.”

While we might not understand the math involved, the awesome appreciation of what is around us and how the mind can produce such inspired thoughts is part of what our education system must nourish.

Wouldn’t it be great if all our schools could provide education that would nurture geniuses like Einstein?

Think of how every child could receive the right balance of rote learning and a firing of the imagination that would prepare children for an exciting and productive future -- and how students would have a curiosity and love of learning, not only now, but throughout their lives.

Of course, not everyone is an Einstein. But we must do all we can to nurture the abilities and potential of every one of our students.

Their future -- and ours -- depends on it.