Many revolutionary men and women are described as having the vision of a child not because of what they see, rather because of

GRADE: A-

Many revolutionary men and women are described as having the vision of a child not because of what they see, rather because of the way they interpret what they see. The "child’s vision" Bronowski mentions is not immature; it is innocent and pure. An immature vision would accept the status quo and move on. A child, however, is curious and inventive. A child’s vision seeks truth but is unencumbered by prejudice to what is held as true by the community. Clear vision opens the minds to truth. Those with imagination and clarity see connections that have been skipped a hundred times, possibilities that have yet to be considered, and new answers to questions most believe are already settled.

As Bronowski said, our sense of sight dominates our view of the world around us. Over time and through a few physiological mechanisms, our eyes naturally are or become conditioned to search out and focus on certain forms and especially on familiar patterns. Sometimes, as in the case of misfiring photoreceptors or bleached visual purple, our eyes can fool us into seeing something that isn’t there, or not seeing something that is. The tendency of the human eye to focus on patterns or to delete and insert small bits of information to straighten out something like the edge of a piece of paper is a great tool. It helps us to use our eyes’ imperfect mechanisms to fullest extent. These same types of tendencies also show up in the human mind. Through training, conditioning or natural predispositions, the mind searches out familiar patterns and sometimes glazes over rough edges that are either unpleasant or too complicated, searching out the path of least resistance, often at the expense of the final result. Unlike the eye’s tool, the mind’s tendency to smooth over rough edges or take shortcuts is an obstacle to achieving one’s full potential.

This path of least resistance is an easy trap to fall into for students. Once a student figures out how to get a product, such as a paper or essay, that is satisfactory for the teacher, he tends to stick to that formula even if it is not the best work that the student could have done. Once the student realizes that he is in a rut, he can make a conscious effort to step up and out of the rut. Unfortunately, realization is not easily accomplished, nor is it enough. The student has to seek a solution. Only through a solution can the student begin to create and expand his own idea base. The act of creating a solution involves acceptance of the student’s own faults, and the imagination to come up with an answer that the student can use practically within the confines of what he knows he is capable of. On an even larger scale, society, or any group of people, can easily find itself in a mode of thought or set of ideas that remains unchallenged, stagnant, for a period of time. It might only take one person or one event for people to start realizing that they have believed something that no longer is applicable or acceptable, but those wheels have to be set in motion by someone with vision. Martin Luther King Jr. was one such visionary. His ideas now seem basic. In their time, they were revolutionary. Many people took segregation and racism for granted, whether they liked it or not. Dr. King saw beyond the accepted social order and, through his gift as a speaker and leader, spread what he and many other people believed to be true. His actions helped to change what society, as a whole, believes today. Albert Einstein was another man with extraordinary vision. Science had accepted Newton’s model of gravity almost totally, but Einstein was not completely satisfied. Even Newton admitted that his calculations matched the real world only "nearly." Einstein's willingness to look at the facts as they truly were combined with his extraordinary intellect changed the way we view the natural world from the very bottom up.

Many people walk through life just getting by. The challenge, which everyone must face, is to make an effort to see everything through a child’s eyes, without prejudice or filters that society has placed in one’s mind. The first step is to become aware of your tendencies. The second step is to make a point of not allowing yourself to be limited in thought or deed by those prejudices and to remain open to all of the possibilities that all of your senses can absorb from the world.