Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

by Temple Grandin

Removing hands-on learning from schools is the worst thing to happen to education in recent memory, in my opinion. Wittingly or unwittingly, its disappearance screened out an entire generation of visual thinkers, whose abilities might have flourished in such so-called extracurriculars. There is no way for kids, especially kids who are object-visual thinkers, to find out what they’re good at by sitting behind a desk all day. Plus, it’s torture for kids like I was, with excess energy that could be better channeled into doing things, making things. These abilities need to be developed starting when kids are young. Without exposure to such classes, we can’t nurture the budding builder, engineer, or chef. We screen out designers, inventors, and artists. We need future generations who can build and repair infrastructure, overhaul energy and agriculture, create tools to combat climate change and pandemics, develop robotics and AI. We need people with the imagination to invent our next-generation solutions.