I’ve been thinking a lot about education lately. It all started when I watched this TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” Robinson asserts that creativity in education is as important as literacy, and the current school system does not treat it as such. In fact, he says, the current school system stifles creativity.
What these things have in common you see is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they‘ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. But what we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong.
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And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way — we stigmatize mistakes. And we are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said, that all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately; that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather that we get educated out of it. So why is this?
Do Schools Kill Creativity?
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When I heard this, I of course started thinking about my own schooling. I was fortunate enough to go to some pretty unconventional schools throughout my childhood. My elementary school, for example, encouraged “inventive spelling.” If you didn’t know how to spell a word for the story you were writing, you made it up — you wrote it the way you thought it should be. Now, I can’t prove any cause and effect here, but I now happen to be a top-notch speller. I’m sure that’s more due to my childhood consumption of every book I laid my hands on, but inventive spelling was great nonetheless. We actually had a class called “Rhythm” that, as far as I remember, entailed a lot of jumping and dancing around a big empty room. I also didn’t have grades until I was 10 years old, and the school I went to resided inside half the public library building.
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So my schooling experience wasn’t exactly conventional, but it began to fit into certain molds as I grew older. After all, I had to get into college, didn’t I?
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Robinson suggests that our schooling system would look to aliens like an entire process devoted to creating university professors. If you look at the path from high school to university and beyond, schooling and academia have become insulated, self-perpetuating ecosystems that are often irrelevant to the world outside. Luckily, there are many teachers who reach beyond that — but it is a hard system to crack.
Confessions of a Lifelong Student
Let me pause to say that I have always loved being a student. I actually was one of those people who really liked going to school. And in university, after completing a thesis my senior year, I considered going on to do a PhD in literature. But after a year and a half of giving myself space from academia, I realized that if I do go back to school, it needs to be for something relevant to the social discussions and issues I confront every day. I still adore literature, but I cannot spend six years diving ever further into the insulated academic world of literary analysis. Today I am writing my stories, exploring new territory, and diving into projects that I figure out as I go. Most importantly, I have realized how much I am learning by going at it myself.
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I sat down today and thought about the most organic and fulfilling learning experiences I’ve ever had. The first four things that sprang to mind were:
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- becoming fluent in Spanish
- taking a community activism training course
- learning to start my own business and build an online community
- writing my thesis
What do all these experiences have in common? I was thrown into the thick of it, and spurred to make my way.
I became fluent in Spanish by living, studying, eating and breathing in Spanish for a full year in Valencia, Spain. The community activism training course was based around actually planning and creating our own nonprofit organizations — press conference introduction and all. My business and blogging? Well, I was just trying to figure out a way to support my mobile and independent lifestyle. And the thesis, though unquestionably within academia, required me to create something huge on my own.
In all of these examples, I made tons of mistakes. None of them were irreparable, and most of them were formative in my learning experience. Being in the thick of things is one of the best ways to get rid of that fear of failure, which is how we thrive and nurture our development.
Does this mean that our education systems need to become more experiential in order to become more creative? How can classrooms embrace the fruits of failure, and redefine them as discovery? I think this should be an inspiring topic to discuss, because there is so much potential.
I encourage you all to watch Robinson’s TED talk below — aside from being brilliant, he’s also relentlessly hilarious. [If you are viewing this post in an RSS reader or e-mail, you may need to click the link to watch on YouTube].
