We live in a Culture dominated by Sensing personalities, where white and black are stark contrasts and are never allowed to diffuse into the grey. This is not my world. A common quotation used for the distinction between Sensor’s and iNtuitive’s, is that a Sensing individual, “can’t see the forest for the trees.” This is a very poignant statement when you add that around 76% of the population are dominant in the Sensing personality type.1
As the majority, Sensing personalities see life through a myopic lens, focusing on the details of the particular pursuit and forgetting to look up and see the forest that surrounds them. Hence their biggest strength (detail oriented learning/teaching) can become their most compromising weakness (their way is the only way), which is why Sensors are labeled as legalistic and unchanging. Directing them in this legalistic vein is their unwavering focus on the reality of the now driven by the five senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell. Sensors are not easily persuaded and must be shown facts and results that are easily detected by the five senses. This natural tendency to live within the senses gives them the ability to move well in the constructs of time and look at life as dispensations of time.
So, why do I bring up all this personality jargon? What am I leading to…?
It is important for this reason – Sensors and iNtuitive personality types deal with how a person gathers and distributes information. Hence a Society dominated by Sensors will dispense and distribute information in a very specific way… it will be focused and directed, having to do with the senses, and within a certain definable time margin. There is no room for questions that take you outside of the black and white “facts” found in traditional texts. Time is something to be manipulated and not lived within.
This information leads me to ask more questions regarding how our educational system is constructed, and ways in which curriculum neuters the imagination of iNtuitives and encourages the “stay within the lines” temperament found in the majority. Those of us who cannot sit for 8 hours in a desk, and participate in the guided practice of lecture and pop quizzes, are diagnosed with ADD and given Ritalin instead of goldfish crackers at snack time. Somewhere our appreciation of “diversity in learning” has become lazy and fallen to a one-track formula for educational success based upon a presentation of facts and expectation of regurgitation. I fear this “laziness” has been transposed into Christian education, exposition, and discipleship. As formulaic tactics of evangelism and discipleship pervades the religious section of every bookstore… labeling any alternate path to productive Christian living as heretical teaching and questionable doctrine.
And so I paddle upstream, fighting the churning waters of formulaic discourse in an effort to get behind the source and question the motive… it is along this path my future lies.
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1. Kroegor, Otto; Thuesen, Janet; “Type Talk at Work (Revised): How the 16 Personality Types Determine Your Success on the Job
