When concerning the issue of education, many points of view and opinions seem to arise about whether public schooling harvests the minds and creativity young ones or if it actually kills it. Sir Ken Robinson debates that education, and moreover, the educators themselves, are training the young minds of tomorrow to follow the flow of the system and, in his words, “Creating college English professors. Robinson seems to believe that the educators crush those who step out from the norm and scold them, labeling them with attention deficit disorders and mood problems. He describes a story of a mother who took her child to the doctor because she wasn’t paying attention in class. The child couldn’t sit still and was sent home with notes on many occasions. The doctor examined the child in a room filled with the sounds of music and witnessed her beginning to dance. The doctor didn’t diagnose her with a disease or a disorder; he said she was simply “a dancer”. By telling this story, Robinson further exemplifies his theory of crippling creativity in public education. He believes that there needs to be major reform in order to let that creativity help the student, not hurt it.
I agree with most of Robinson’s opinions. In today’s education, Educators are instilling rigid foundations into the minds of young ones that essentially force them into line with everyone else who has ever came out of that education system. This stops children from expressing themselves and scares any who do into submission to the system. I especially agree with the story Robinson told of the little girl who liked to dance. It seems to be the norm of public educators to dismiss possibilities of creative outlook for more degenerative “clinical” diagnoses. This allows them to effortlessly provide a solution to the differences the child is exhibiting, even if the solution in itself is an antisolution.
When reading the article "Leaving Creativity Behind", a method of test preparation is discussed that was created to adhere to the regulations instilled by the no child left behind plan. The article describes a “drill kill” method of studying for the state standardized examinations. It is a method of hard studying and solid constant instate of test information in order to master the concepts that will be tested. This is a prime example of how the education system is destroying the creative minds of its pupils. By focusing so hard on studying for these exams, students put forth all the energy on mastering the skills, and almost none on harvesting their creative ideas. This is incredibly destructive for the whimsical mind because if a student is trained to focus only on what is deemed important by their instructors, like for example, the essay question on an English section of an exam, they will never feel the need to branch off on their own and pursue their own ideas and concepts not necessarily given to them. This could become permanent depending on how often this particular method of education is introduced to the student.
One may ask what is so important about being creative and why an education system should favor education over the steady intake of solid factual concrete information. What comes into my mind is that with the growing advances in the medical, technological, and historical fields, is it the uncreative factual driven students that are responsible for these breakthroughs, or is it the creative minds that were scolded for stepping outside of the box that provide the major jumps in these fields. This leads into a bigger problem that is beginning to affect our nation. The very essence of creativity and methods behind it are changing. This change is a negative one that will eventually halt the major inventions and shrink their significance. When reading the article “Technology and the American Creativity Crisis” it was revealed that for the first time in years, technology has showed a general decline in creativity. By measuring the CQ or Creativity Quotient scores of individuals, a prediction can be made about whether or not that person is going to pursue a creative career such as an inventor or author or if the person is going to do something significantly less creative such as a factory worker or a banker. The reading goes on to explain that the average scores of Americans taking the test have declined over recent years. It also brings up a very telling point. It states that when comparing CQ scores to IQ scores, the results of CQ for “creative students” were over three times higher than the IQ scores of the same person. This point is extremely significant to this argument because IQ scores are generally boosted by those who study hard and focus primarily on the facts in school rather than the arts and innovative thinking. Obviously schools tailor students to have those higher IQ scores and to think almost entirely inside the box so if the equation that as IQ goes up as CQ goes down is indeed true, then when an educator has a student focus entirely on following the standards of education given to them by the superiors at the district, state, and federal level, then the CQ is most definitely suffering. It would be interesting to see how the students of these schools feel about the loss of creativity.
I saw a video on YouTube of a 7th grade child discussing how he thinks Legos should be allowed in school to promote creativity. If this idea were to be brought to the attention of a leader in education, they would most likely shun it as a waste of time due to it being a toy. The boy continues the video by showing ships he designed and built himself based off the popular science fiction film series “Star Wars”. This is shows huge creativity but more importantly, critical thinking because the boy had to be able to have a high level of sophisticated foresight to see the final product without any diagrams or pictures. He also had to have mature observation skills that allowed him to pull the general trends and shapes from an already built piece and use that information to create his own. Those two concepts of creative thinking are incredibly useful in today’s world yet they are inadvertently shut down by the system that is creating the citizens of the future. The question is, should we put forth the effort to fix this.
In order to answer this question, we must look at what would happen if we didn’t stop the downsizing of the global creativity. Critical and creative thinking has created almost every advancement in society today. Even something as simple as running water had to have been thought up and created by someone who had the mindset of “maybe we could do it better this way”. We are constantly looking for the answers to questions pertaining to the overall health and quality of our life. Examples such as how to cure cancer, how can we find a solid and stable renewable recourse for fuel, what is out in space and how can we get it. If we continue to think on the same tract as what has already been established, then we can never answer those questions because we are not allowing ourselves to explore other possibilities. This is where the problem of limiting creativity comes into play. If we continue to step on the creative outlooks of today’s children, or to what most of us forget, tomorrow’s adults, then we annihilate the critical thinker population of tomorrow that would otherwise be responsible for solving today’s issues. This will hurt our efforts in all types of growth because we are refusing to allow ourselves to go in a different direction to further advance once we reach the end of the particular road of invention and breakthroughs of thought we are currently on. This can only lead to the shrinking of our thoughtful society which can lead to huge consequences, especially in our relationship with other nations who do allow the thinkers of tomorrow to prosper. The big question now is now that we know there is a problem and know that it needs to be fixed, how to do we go about doing so.
It seems as though some of the remaining creative minds of today have attempted to solve the problem. I stumbled upon a website called the “No right brain left behind challenge”. The site is centered on a challenge that is calling industries to find creative ideas to solving the “creativity crisis” in today’s schools. The ideas are judged by a panel of creative thinkers that are significant in today’s society and the top 3 ideas are advertised and implemented in the following year before the next week of contests begins. By providing the incentive for big businesses to focus on the issue, we are beginning to take a step forward in the right direction. If we were to set apart more time in coming up with ideas for the creativity crisis in America, we would most likely come up with a suitable solution to the issue and would hopefully be able to implement it permanently, fixing the problem. The problem is that most of society doesn’t feel the need to look into fixing the system that in their minds isn’t broken. This brings back something I mentioned earlier. We as a nation are constantly forgetting that the students and children and learners of today are going to be the leaders and thinkers and builders of tomorrow. By implementing these limits on the creative mind of a young student and getting rid of the possibility for such creativity, we are in fact hindering ourselves and the world we live in. We forget the world is not run by the one tract minded individuals who have no room in their thoughts for the creativity. The world is run and supported by those who agree to think outside the box and ask themselves “why?”. We seem to limit the asking of “why” in our education by providing answers like “because I said so”. If we continue to stomp on the students desire to go beyond the solid line, we are killing the creativity inside them.
The American school system is indeed killing the creativity of its students. Respected intellectuals such as Ken Robinson and major businesses and industries agree. Most importantly, the students of these schools know they should be able to be creative but can’t because of the impending punishment and disapproval of their teachers and educational leaders. If we continue to allow this to happen, we are only setting up disastrous consequences for our nation in the future.
