Do schools kill creativity? – Sir Ken Robinson [video]
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The vast majority of teachers that he had to deal with have no interest is seeing their students become more interested or creative. The teachers were there time-serving their job or focused on political activism.
He and I have had discussions over the years and one of his concerns is that creativity and interest in learning had to be encouraged in the younger students (primary school, grades 1 - 4). Instead it appeared to be beaten out of the students (figuratively speaking by teachers having little or no interest in providing such environments).
Certainly, teachers were encouraged to do certain activities but these things were not focused on encouraging students to think, to be creative or to be interested in learning.
His view was that by the time students reached grade 7, they were no longer interested in learning or thinking as all of this "stuff" was just plain boring and had no applicability to their social lives.
Now I teach at the university level, but this only makes certain things (the material) harder and others (the teaching) way easier. Maybe after the pandemic some people understand this more than before — the hard part isn't the material, it is getting a group of wildly different people (kids) on board with the material you are teaching, help them to focus, to see the light, to get through material they don't understand etc.
If you don't totally burn for the material (and doing so is unliklier with the typically stiffer curriculum on schools) — it will take a lot of effort to pull this off in a good way. Effort that not every teacher will be able to muster under crunching work loads, where the preperation has to be done at home. Effort that doesn't pay the bills better. Good teachers are purely idealists. They receive no incentive to be good teachers other than their own intrinsic motivation.
So the problem the system has to prevent first and foremost is to enable average educators to teach better, because finding enough exceptional educators will not be possible. And you do this by adjusting the incentive structure.
As for many teachers who are focused on political activism, when challenged by their own students, they seem to just get very upset at their students or the students' parents if taken to task over the particular activism taken.
Now, if you haven't seen this then you have been very fortunate.
> Should that be a story that might in any way be considered "pulp" (involving war, horror, fantasy or science fiction themes, for example) it would be judged a failure.
There's nothing creative about being given an assignment and jumping straight to topics you're familiar with. Where is the challenge? What do you learn? This is why all fanfiction is terrible-- there are no constraints, not even adherence to canon. Making two straight characters plow each other and go about their business as usual isn't creativity, it's pornography.
Creativity comes from being given a medium and a direction and being told to shape something from it within constraints. It's no different from art class and being given a block of grey clay. Rounding the edges off of it and saying "look, I made something we both recognize as a ball" isn't a creative endeavor. It's laziness. Had you hollowed it out, you'd have a container. You couldn't have at least made a lantern?
The point of these dumbass writing exercises is to subvert them. That's where you sharpen your creative edge. "What the fuck is a Yellow Door, anyway? A portal to an outhouse? What happens if someone falls into it? Do they swim through a literal poop chute and surface in the bog of eternal stench known as Scatlanta? What if that city was built inside the lower intestine of a colossal organism? What if it were at risk of being wiped out by a tidal wave of diarrhea? How would we evacuate an entire city through a single Yellow Door?" (pun intended)
Anytime you think you're done, always be asking what else can you do with this. It's how you find new ways to repurpose garbage to make...art.
Start with utter contempt for the subject and chisel away at the obscenity until something palatable surfaces. Now we get to the actual story: a disaster story, exploring the impossible logistics of evacuating a city ahead of a cataclysmic event. If everyone must evacuate through the Door, who deserves to go through first? Would a mercenary band of thugs (the Rear Admirals?) seize it and charge a toll? Are the people even worth saving, or would they bring disease with them and decimate their next host? Should we evacuate the people-- or route the tidal wave itself through the door instead? Would make for a hell of a geyser.
This entire world was fleshed out from a thought exercise equating the assignment to literal shit.
Prisoners (and the poor) are the most creative of any demographic. They aren't given materials, only constraints. They'll make weapons out of mundane objects, paint with their own blood and feces, turn plumbing into communications networks, distill alcohol, braid fabric into rope, invent languages and encryption/obfuscation methods, etc. Constraints don't stop them. They're what drive creativity.
Creativity can't be taught, only channeled.
What were creative writing lessons at school supposed to do? If the answer was to enable me to write adequate fiction, and to gain enjoyment from doing so, then such classes were a complete failure.
> There's nothing creative about being given an assignment and jumping straight to topics you're familiar with.
I am not necessarily familiar with all the topics mentioned... ;-) Nevetheless, the reasoning given at the time was not yours, but simply that these topics don't constitute proper literature and are therefore not valid topics for creative writing assignments. I have no memory of ever hearing anything along the lines of what you have said above.
Come to think of it, the music and art lessons weren't very good either. Any success I have had along those lines (music) has been since leaving school and not involving anything I learned there.
School isn't everything. Every good parent teaches this. Creativity is a personal pursuit that demands time made for it like anything else. School isn't really the proper place for positive reinforcement of that. Teachers are overburdened enough. For some people it turns out that creativity isn't even a meaningful goal beyond knowing how to think fast in tough situations. It's not realistic to cater to every student's whims and preferences (especially if they're driven by asshole opinionated parents who can't finish their little project). Even the alternative-to-public schools that claim to do this are just creating cultural echo chambers and stunting the student.
It feels like that's starting from the wrong end though — teachers are over-burdened because of the way the education system is set-up; it's a symptom of the status quo rather than a reason that we shouldn't change it.
I think if we say "School is where you go to learn academic stuff only; there's other places for everything else", then we waste a big opportunity.
If instead of tieing ourselves to the current system as a model, if we just started from a blank sheet & the premise — "School is where we allow every kid the opportunity to spend 14 years preparing for life after that. What's the best way to use that time?" — I don't think we'd end up where we are now.
I disagree. People have been banging on this drum for so long over the course of at least a century and even tried to put their money where there mouth is only to end up with no meaningful difference.
Schools simply don't have as big of an impact as people think they do. It really is up to the parents and the student.
I think this is probably correct. I remember reading a paper that showed if you take into account the ability of their intake then private schools don't have much of an advantage over state education.
I imagine that the better schools prepare one for operating in operating within societal institutions, Ivy League, etc. but can actually be detrimental if you're trying to establish something radically innovative or operate in a way that isn't already accepted as "elite" by society.
I do think that if you want to be the proverbial "guy in the garage inventing the future," it's probably better to be a liberal arts school dropout / kicked out of a state university (Jobs + Wozniak) than coming from Harvard (Gates.) But for such people, there may be zero correlation between real innovation and financial reward.
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen