John Logie Baird is accredited with inventing the television in 1925 when he managed to produce moving silhouette images and a live human face using a mechanical scanning disc.
Eleven years later, the BBC launched the world's first regular high-definition television service in London while television was introduced in Zimbabwe in 1960, becoming the first service in Southern Africa and the second in sub-Saharan Africa.
In the 1950s, it became known as the ‘gogglebox’ with goggle meaning to stare with wide or bulging eyes and "box" referring to the cabinet shape of older TV sets.
Now of course, things have changed in the world of television.
No longer do they come in the form of boxes while a modern reality series called ‘Gogglebox’ makes the viewer watch people laughing, crying, talking as they watch people on television through their own television set.
Whoever would have thought of that? Answer: people who think out of the box! But is that reality?
We are fascinated by boxes, it would seem, even if we may have moved away from televisions being box-shaped.
We like to pack things away in boxes; they are neat, tidy, organised, easy to stack, easy to pack.
We keep things in boxes to protect them; the fact is, though, that when something is in a box it is of no use – and what is the point of something if we cannot or do not use it?
“Oh, but we do not want to break it or harm it,” we cry. Then why have it?
But none of us like to be boxed in. Being boxed in has the connotation of being confined in a small space, being crowded, cramped and crushed, stuck in a dark dank environment with others breathing down our neck.
In soccer matches at corner kicks, the six-yard box is crammed full of people blocking, pulling, shoving, grabbing, wrestling, all trying to stop the others from getting the ball – the ball is what they all want but they spend their time and energy trying to prevent others having what they want.
That is when they need to think out of the box.
Yet our schools, our classrooms, our curriculum, our exam system, are just boxes.
Despite all our talk, the sad reality is that we are still expecting youngsters to think inside the box.
We want them to give the textbook (text box) answer, even word for word in some examination systems.
We require them to fit inside the box in terms of what they must like or not like, yet inside the box it is cramped with little room for movement, for expression, for ideas.
Anyone who steps out of line, we put them back in the box. The same applies in all areas of life – in homes, politics, sport.
We put people in boxes.
We have often referred to the wonderful film Dead Poets Society in which Robin Williams played the brilliantly innovative teacher who encouraged his pupils, not to pass exams but to live extraordinary lives.
In one scene he takes his pupils outside into the quad (yes, outside the classroom!) and asks them just to walk (with the cast-away but revealing comment, “No grades at stake”! Education is not about exams).
As he predicted, the boys all ended up walking in time, marching, same pace, same stride, same direction, fitting in (while the rest of the class clapped in unison, again, all the same).
They were so engrained, entrenched in the thinking that they must conform that they stay inside a box.
He called on them instead to “find your own walk”.
On another occasion, he asked them to stand on the desk – unheard of treachery, it would seem!
He simply called on them to see the world differently and then to live their world differently, uniquely, confidently. “Don’t just think what you think the author thinks.
Think what you think,” the teacher encourages.
When the Head tries to dispel such teaching, his humble response was “Funny! I always thought the point of education was for pupils to think for themselves.”
In order to get everyone in the school back into its neatly stacked and presented box, the Head dismisses the teacher – yet bravely, one by one, the pupils stand on their desk, even in front of the helpless Head, to bid farewell to the teacher who has given them life and hope outside the box. At last, they get out of the box.
While our younger generation is keen on Xbox and the like, we are keen for them not only to think outside the Xbox, but out of the box itself.
We must allow them to learn to ask questions - not just “why?” but even better “why not?” or “what if?” There is no room for boxes in education (after all, “what is a box?”.
“Box? What box?”). Be real – not dead! Kick boxes out of school.