Schools – Killing the Creativity

UNESCO: “More people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history.”

200 years ago, the era of Industrialism began. To make this so called Industry function better, main resource was needed called “Human Power”. For this British Empire started the system called “School Education System”. And the cycle starts from the very moment our beloved children start taking their first step into the beautiful world. No one denying the fact that all the children have extraordinary capacity for innovation. Kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

I want to talk about Education and I want to talk about Creativity. Creativity today is as important in education as literacy, but the status it should be getting is not present there. All kids have one common thing and that is: they will take chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go. They are not frightened of being wrong. And if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. 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’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Picasso: “All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up”. But we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?

          When you travel around the world you can find one common fact about our education system: The Hierarchy of subjects. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on the earth. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not?

         Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. They are the real winners, they get all the brownie points from the system.

         So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you’re not going to be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.

And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.

When our father was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn’t have a job it’s because you didn’t want one. And today if you want the same job, you need an extra degree. It’s a process of Academic inflation.

There is a difference between task and achievement senses of Verbs. You can be engaged in an activity or something but not really achieving it. For example “Dieting”. He is dieting, is he losing any weight? No, not really! Teaching is a word like that. If a teacher is teaching but nobody is “LEARNING” anything, she maybe in the task of teaching but not fulfilling it. The role of the teacher is to facilitate learning. Part of the problem is that dominant culture of Education has come to not teaching and learning but TESTING. Testing is important, standardize test have a place but they should not be the dominant culture of the system. They should be diagnostic, they should help.

We all create our own lives, this is the restless process of imagination of alternatives and possibilities. And what one role of the education is to develop this powers of creativity. Instead what we have is a culture of standardization. We have seen in all the examples, you take an area of school, a district, you change the conditions, get people different sense of possibilities, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relation between teacher and a learner, you offer people discussion to be create and innovate what they do, and the scores that once were bereft will spring to life J The role of leadership in education is not and should not be command and control, the real role of leadership is climate control. Creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you do not have anticipated.

Benjamin Franklin:” There are three sorts of people, there are people who are immovable, people who are movable and there are people who move”.  There are many people throughout the country who are also moving. And if we encourage more people that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough that’s REVOLUTOIN. And that’s what we need.

Weve gotta let ‘em flame, let ‘em speak their name,

Let ‘em reach up to the clouds

Can’t eat if we don’t feed ‘em, can’t read if we don’t tech ‘em

Ther’s no light if we just hide ‘em

Don’t just let ‘em die

Let ‘em Shine (yeah yeah yeah) let ‘em shine on