What is an Outward Facing Eater?

Outward Facing Eater became a phrase a friend (David) and I coined while he and I were talking about kids who do not conform easily. David contends that this behavior is learned. Strong wills, non-compliance, and nonconformists are not born, my friend contends, but they are made.

In defense of that notion, I was explaining to my friend that my child was strong willed from birth. My child refused to drink from a bottle in the typical/stereotypical way, with him nestled in the crook of my arm viewing my chest or the bottom of my chin. My child fought, squirmed, squealed in a frustrated anxiety filled tantrum yearning to be facing out towards the world. He wanted to take in life through with is eyes and his ears. He wanted to see where the sounds were coming from, look up at the ceiling fan, scan the walls for pictures, objects, symbols that he would later discover to be called words. He insisted on not conforming. He demanded that he have the right to see, hear, and eat as he sees fit- not how I felt more comfortable doing the feeding.

I allowed him to eat this way vs forcing him to eat in the way that was more comfortable for me to feed him. I would walk around with him as he drank his bottle as if his back were attached to my chest. I showed him pictures, spelled out the words on those pictures, went to the windows, went to the mirror... the more I moved around showing him things, explaining things to him (though I am sure he didn't understand me...because he was a baby,) the more he saw, the more he hungered to see more. 

If the weather was nice I took him outside. He demanded to look outwards when he wasn't eating. We touched the leaves, the trees, he rubbed the bark grit between his fingers and felt the coarseness, tried to taste it and then reached for more, more, more.. he just wanted to learn, and he wanted to learn constantly.
After explaining this to David he said "See? The moment you allowed him to eat facing outwards, the moment you became his "information slave." allowing him to win that battle was the moment that he knew he was in charge." Ahh David was a teacher indeed....and a behaviorist.
I did not believe his behaviorist hypotheses (of course), I believe it was simply his temperament. If you have several kids, you will probably notice they are different. One may be extroverted where the other tends towards introversion. One may be easily placated where the other is never satisfied. One child may stand calmly at your side while walking through the mall and one may run circles around you as you are walking through the mall. 

Kids are different. Kids are people with personalities all their own. Some of their personality is programmable but some of it is set. Do I have research to prove this? No, (but I know it is out there.) I have my life experience to verify it and I am sure as you think through your family, your siblings, your kids, your neighborhood friends and their families, your classrooms through your schooling experience, you too will verify that people come in all sorts of personalities, with their own idiosyncrasies and temperaments.

Outward Facing Eater, represents the students that don't comply for the sake of complying. The kids that are not going to do what you would like them to do simply because you would like them to do it. These are the students that ask "why?" a lot. "Why am I going to spend a lot of my free time doing that homework? It seems to have no relevance to my life. It seems to be information that I already know, yet I have to complete half an hour of mindless busy work to prove to the teacher, yet again, that I know the random facts. 

Why do I have to learn what you are teaching? I have no interest in that. I would much rather continue to learn what I want to learn. 

Why do I have to prove to you that I now know where Pennsylvania is? The steps of the Scientific method, how to do a push up, what a dangling participle is?

Why do I have to prove anything to you?

 I know things that you don't know. You don't see me trying to get you to learn them and then for you to prove to me that you know those things. 

Why do I have to complete yet another workbook? 

Color this map? 

Read a little bit and then stop because you have some mundane question? 

Why do I have to learn information that I can easily access on my phone? 

Do all adults really need to to know kingdom, phylum, class, order etc.. to get through their daily day? I think not. 

Why won't you answer my many questions? 

Why do you seem so annoyed that I have so many questions? Are you not supposed to mentor me, teach me, help me grow? 

Why do we all have to grow the same way? Because it is easier for you? The adult? 

Why are you only interested in teaching me the things you/school want me to learn? Why? Why? Why?"

I believe that some of our greatest people through history were Outward Facing Eaters. 

The question askers, the people that pushed back on rules if the rules were stupid. The people that not only asked "why" but also asked "why not?"

And if the answer didn't make sense then they forged on towards doing the smart thing, the right thing, in spite of the cultural norm, or the rules.

In school, these kids are called troublemakers. In life they are called pioneers, entrepreneurs, leaders, brave, heroes.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Teddy Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mark Zuckerberg, and countless others were Outward Facing Eaters as children (did I just compare my kid to those people- I think we got another crazy parent on our hands). The easily conformed, the easily schooled- they make great employees. They make easily forgotten gravestones and students that are "a pleasure to have in class." 

We still have jobs that require obedient conformers, but unfortunately they are building robots to do those jobs. The factory worker is no longer needed here. The cashier doesn't make a livable wage. The cubicle jockeys are all we have left and they are becoming a dime a dozen. We need creative driven thinkers, we need people that question how we do things and make better ways of doing those things. We need new solutions, better ways, newer ways, and we are not going to get that by producing a cookie cutter kid from a cookie cutter kid factory. 

We need Outward Facing Eaters.

We can nurture the Outward Facing Eaters, we can guide and encourage them to think of better ways, different ways, or we can try our hardest to break them- which is what schools accidentally accomplish in the name of management. 

We have an educational system that places 30 kids in a room with one adult. 

That adult has to teach a designated lesson. 

They are usually lessons that have been taught throughout the generations. Lessons that you learned, lessons that I learned and universally...lessons we both forgot because they were not relevant.

That one adult has to quiet all 30 minds.
That one adult has to fear the kids into believing that if they don't sit, listen, and become busy little task completers then they will be failures. Not just in class, but in life. The teacher must get control of each kid. The teacher must teach the lesson and a complying child is an easily managed child. 

A child that does not easily comply can be labeled a discipline problem, trouble maker, a kid that doesn't want to learn, a kid that doesn't care about his grades.The teacher that can't manage the child will be labeled incompetent, a bad teacher, a teacher with no control and may be put on an improvement plan. What a great system. 

If you can read this and still think that our system is "one of the best in the world" a system that has "produced some of our greatest" or "it was good enough for me then it is good enough for them." Then I question your ability to think for yourself. To think deep. I will say without reservation, if you can read this  without realizing the contradictions in our education system. The backwardness. The fact that we create adults that are the exact opposite of what we, as a society, want the educational system to create---then you can rest assure that you are a full fledged, card carrying, inward facing eater.

How can schools better help all students? How can schools change in a way that may not look anything like they look right now? We need the Outward Facing Eater in all of us to come through and help answer this question. We no longer need an institution (school) that has basically looked and functioned the same since its inception. School is no longer the keeper of the knowledge. School is no longer the place you must go if you want to learn. Learning is all around. What we need now is a way to prepare our kids for the centuries to come- not the century we left. We need school to start looking like the real world, and today's real world does not look like the bottom of a chin.