ABSTRACT
If my experience with undergraduates is any indication of what goes on in our K-12 enterprise, then outside of art classes, few students in America’s public schools ever get asked what they would like to study. Instead, they are told what to study, or at least provided a narrow range of options. Fewer still are ever asked to find a question; virtually all are given questions then instructed to find answers. In other words, they are being trained to become problem-solvers, not problem-seekers. This distinction was pointed out to me, and to about 200 others, by a man named Richard McCommons, representing the American Institute of Architecture, who was delivering an exit interview to my university’s College of Architecture after a reaccreditation visit. The question he addressed was: What must we do to become more influential, or to acquire a higher reputation at the national level? McCommons focused on the senior project, a skyscraper. “We know how to design skyscrapers,” he said, “that’s a found problem for which we seek solutions. The problem is how to cram lots of people and offices into a relatively small area of earth. The solution is to build a very tall building. But to take the next step up, you need to find problems. That is, you need
to become problem-seekers, not problem-solvers.” Immediately after that meeting, I typed McCommon’s words and taped them up in the lab.
