You know it when... "You Can Explain It To A 5-year Old"

This is an idea I have used in my teaching for over two decades, and I do not know for sure how, where, or why I came up with it for my own thinking and use. I do know that it was why I wanted to put all of the core human values/virtues into the hands of children by the age of 5, because you could and you can and you should.

I have been known to use “5-year old” and “kindergartner” interchangeably. But I kind of would guess that I came up with it after I learned about the poem/credo All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten and/or the1986 book that followed.

However, I do remember hearing a very similar quote by Albert Einstein later on in my career — “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” Now, I knew that there was definitely something good and useful in Richard Feynman’s simple, silly lectures. Smart people seem to know that a true test of intelligence is the test of simplifying. Can you simplify that into an analogy of MM’s? Every year I start my classes with a simple analogy about bowls or paper or simple number sets or MM’s… MM’s might have been the first analogy I started the year with. “Civilization is the value/good we create and leave behind for the future.” If every day you create 6 MM’s and eat them, then there is nothing left for tomorrow or the future. Civilization is the MM’s you create and don’t eat. You leave them behind for others to enjoy in the future.

The power of the simple and the beautiful:

Scientist like beautiful theories, solutions, and questions. The Greeks came up with many beautiful and stupid-wrong beautiful theories, so be careful.

Systems thinkers like to add ‘style’ to the things they ‘create’ and ‘envision.’

Einstein liked to have fun..

Richard Feynman trafficked in fun simplification - fun to imagination.

Carl Sagan inverted the big and the small to great effect. See his blog link “THE Best of ALL TIME.”

Steven Hawking went for it all and offered this ‘all’ to us all.

The Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures challenged the great minds to think greater by thinking smaller.

Socrates was killed for “corrupting the youth of Athens."

Religion, which has always tried to offer us an explanation of it all, is collapsing in America.

Opennessence puts in the hands of 5-year olds the most complete, systems integrated, timeless, cross-cultural, scientific, inter-disciplinary, and pedagogically tactical… …beautiful values/virtues creation ever.

The theory of evolution is beautiful, but can anything compare to OPEN, open-handed values, and OpenNessEnce?

:)