Oedipus, the Sphinx and high-stakes exams | Education

When Oedipus was about to enter Thebes, the terrible Sphinx stops him and threatens to kill him and all the inhabitants of Thebes, if he is not able to give the correct answer to the following question: what animal walks on four legs for in the morning, on two legs during the day, and on three legs at nightfall? Oedipus guessed the answer, because it was indeed a riddle rather than a Learn and Win question. With that success he saved the city from a monster that had it terrified, later becoming King. The Sphinx was not defeated by a well-trained memory or a brilliant deductive capacity; It was not the effort of algorithmic thinking, which approaches the problem step by step until finding the correct solution, but that eureka effect with which the creative intuition of human beings is called. The riddles in which the player You risk your life if you fail the answer are a common element in mythological cultures around the world. This universality in testing the human mind assuming the greatest possible risk -death- reveals the enormous importance of creativity, even from a strictly evolutionary perspective, not just to progress, but even to survive. What is presented as a game carries with it the most extreme consequences: King if you are right, corpse if you are wrong.

Competitive exams to regulate access to the university or, later, to access a body of public officials, are known in English as high stakes ―what could be translated as “high-stakes exams” or “with a lot at stake”― and have in common with the exam in which Oedipus won the high risk, but they are radically different from it by the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed . It would have been of little use to Oedipus to pass his test to have memorized philosophical texts, and even less to have resorted to the gods through the analysis of the flight of birds. However, surely having enjoyed good poetry books and experimenting with metaphors and allegories would have helped him a lot. Sophocles does not tell us if that was what made the difference. In any case, the enigma proposed by the Sphinx can only be solved with what we call lateral thinking or divergent thinking, something that cannot be found prize in any high-risk exam, certainly not in our Selectividad either, and that in fact is disappearing from school life as we progress from Primary to Compulsory Secondary, and even more from this to the Baccalaureate. It is still striking that, until not long ago, it has only been possible to exercise with so-called hobbies or with some board games. Solving hieroglyphics, guessing riddles, making remote associations, conceiving alternative uses for an object, discovering alternative solutions to the same problem, are pastimes for idle people or, at best, exercises to prevent degenerative diseases, but of course they would have nothing to do with serious learning.

If lateral thinking and creativity in general were left out of high-risk academic exams, and with it what counts as “good education”, it is increasingly common to see the demand for these skills and abilities in the processes of Selection for jobs in the private sector, and especially in the most cutting-edge sectors and for the best-paid jobs. It makes sense to think that the Oedipus style, let’s call it that, turns out to be more adaptive, evolutionarily speaking, for the private sector than for the public, and that is why private employers look less and less at the candidates’ diplomas and more and more at his abilities to solve enigmas, hieroglyphics and situations that seem impossible. Needless to say, however, there is no shortage of seemingly intractable puzzles in the public sector, and you would just as well have people who can think “outside the box”, to use the imported English expression. But we still do not reward those who have the abilities that Oedipus demonstrated in Thebes in academic exams or in the selection processes for officials.

With the latest artificial intelligence applications taking over convergent thinking and getting tens in all the exams in use, there will be no choice but to consider changing the academic status of lateral thinking and begin to recover it for the cause of school education, giving it entry , albeit modest, on the list of what has value and sense to learn. You have to put exams that ChatGPT fails and that Oedipus continues to pass. Let’s not underestimate the formative value of the game or divergent thinking. We have been playing our lives with them since the beginning of evolution. Nothing more serious than creative play. In him goes our life, of all life.

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