Do Schools Kill Creativity?

WOW! Sir Robinson does make one think when we try to think what our students will need 30 years into the future. When I look back at my past 30 years, I remember planting vegetables, having a job that would last for many years but now… There is no space for planting where I live but there will be when I retire, and I have changed jobs at average of at 3 years. Other jobs are no more found in my home country but are at the end of a phone call in another country. Most content is now online and is there a need for a large textbook anymore?

Being an experience elementary educator I have seen students being very creative at a young age only to see them as they grow up to loss much of their creativity so they could push more content into their minds.

Sir Robinson said many professors are living in their minds and only use their bodies to move their minds around. The challenge we all face is to take what we imagine is education and then thinking of where we want to go in the future and making it reality for our students. The other bigger issue is educating parents, universities, and the general community about why the model of education needs to change. Maybe even the model of an university education needs to change as well?

I greatly enjoyed Sir Ken’s jokes and stories. His talk was very entertaining but as an argument for changing education, it has large drawbacks. I don’t feel like listing them all out but I do want to focus on one phrase that he uses toward the end: educating the whole child. Educators can benefit from careful articulation of this idea. I want to try to do that briefly here. It’s tricky and I may have to come back again for another try.

First, I want to make some terminological distinctions. I want to distinguish among training, indoctrination, socialization and education. Training is the acquisition of skills without the knowledge of why or how the skills work. Vocational education in wood shops, metal shops, electric shops, auto shops and many other areas of schooling routinely train young people without requiring that they understand the physics or biology or physiology, etc. of why and how the skills work. Indoctrination is acquiring beliefs without the means to determine whether or not they are true or false. All societies indoctrinate their young into either sacred or secular beliefs, or both, without giving the young the means to determine the truth of those beliefs. Being raised in a religion, in an ethnic group, and in a socio-economic system such as capitalism or socialism are examples of quite ordinary indoctrination. Socialization, furthermore, is the process of becoming a useful member of society through both training and indoctrination with the addition of biological maturation that is also guided by the society.

Now, if we are going to agree with the many critics of schooling that schooling does awful and unfortunate things to young people, then we are going to need another word to describe an alternative process that doesn’t do those awful or unfortunate things. I suggest, for the duration of this writing, that education is that other word and that what the critics are criticizing can be understood as the socialization that is the primary goal of schooling all over the world today and as far back in history–to ancient China and ancient Sumeria–as we can find institutionalized schooling.

What then, is education, if it is not socialization? At this point, I want to recall part of Sir Ken’s motivational framework. It was to foreground the unpredictability of our future as a species and especially of the future of our children and their children. He emphasized that we do not know what our children will need many years from now, but he is convinced that creativity must be a much larger part of schooling than it is now and must gain at least equal standing with literacy.

At this point, I think we need to try to distinguish two different meanings of the whole child. One of them operates in space and time. The child can acquire x number of skills and y amounts of information. Those skills may or may not prepare the child for the unpredictable future. Schooling can increase the number of skills and increase the amount of information. Doing so may increase the probability that what the child gains will be of value to the individual and to the society in the future. Doing so most likely will also draw on and develop more of the students’ capacities. Lifelong learning can contribute to this meaning of the whole child by making classrooms and competent teachers available to people of all ages who wish to acquire more skills and more information. The whole child thus appears as a growing collection of skills, information, knowledge, techniques, etc. with which he or she can meet the unpredictable future. When, we might ask, though, is the child or the person whole? Is there a particular skill, piece of information, bit or body of knowledge, or group of techniques that will finally bring wholeness to the person? If so, what is it? Or, to put the same question from a different angle, at what point of development of personal capacity does a person become, or is a person, whole? What is that point?

These are rhetorical questions. Their point is that the acquisitive idea of the whole child posits an infinite horizon of acquisition. This idea of wholeness seems altogether in keeping with the capitalist, materialist, consuming and producing society that Sir Ken seems to have come from and to represent. Does it, however, provide a process for young people that actually, truly differs from what has already been described above as socialization? This is not a rhetorical question. I think the answer is clearly and flatly, No. Sir Ken’s idea of wholeness seems to require that school curricula become even larger and more full of courses through which students are to go. A full creativity curriculum, including dance, is to be added to math and language arts. Is this possible or desirable? Twelve hour a day schooling is probably possible. Year around schooling is also possible. But are they desirable? And if they are desirable, then for what? What is the goal? If we know already that the horizon of acquisition through schooling is infinite, both because there is already more content available in the world than any one person can acquire in one life time and because more is constantly being produced, then how would such an increase in curricular content and in time in school lead a young person to wholeness?

The limitation to the above idea of wholeness, and the characteristic that prevents it from leaving the sphere of socialization, is its mapping of wholeness in space and time. As long as wholeness is viewed as a spatiotemporal process, then there is no alternative to socialization. What we must do as educators (socializers) is to figure out ways to increase both the curriculum and the schooling time to increase the acquisitions of our students. With this idea of wholeness, we will be moving them toward effective positions of skill, information, knowledge and technique with which to deal with the unpredictable conditions of the future.

What, then, has become of that alternative process, that we agreed, for the purpose of this writing, to call education? It has disappeared. Why has it disappeared? Because it operates as much in the vertical dimension as it does in the horizontal dimension, to put it graphically. Because it is as much a process of personal insight and integration as it is a process of personal acquisition. Indeed, in this meaning of wholeness, increased acquisition and schooling time are more likely to impede wholeness than to foster or support it. At this point, education draws on the practices of centering and of concentration, whether they are represented by yogis from Tibet or by the tales of American Indian shamans. These practices take the students into themselves and guide them in journeys that are individualized student by student. Wholeness, in this meaning, cannot be acquired. It can only be experienced and realized. No one can give it to someone who doesn’t have it and no one can take it away from someone who does.

How does such wholeness fit into schooling? It doesn’t. Should it? That also is not a rhetorical question. : ) David

David,

I enjoyed your argument about what it really means to be whole. Does this mean adding more classes to the day? If so, which classes do we add? Or do we add more creative classes for the sake of the more traditional classes? If we do this are we not preparing our children then for life in a highly technological and scientific world? Or are there ways that we can deliver even the traditional courses such that we encourage and emphasize creativity? Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, often says, “The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.” Maybe the problem is that we are thinking of new ideas for use with an old model.

If we accept a difference, as suggested in my prior comment, between socialization and education, then we are faced with two ideas of wholeness.

One is cumulative; the other is intuitive. One requires ever-increasing amounts of time in school and ever-increasing amounts of curricular material for student acquisition. It places the individual student in a process with an infinite horizon of acquisition in which, in the terms of the process, the student can never fully realize themselves or be whole in that sense.

This process is clearly of use to contemporary society because it promotes the creation of new ideas, the production of new products and the consumption of all kinds of products. But that use of creativity is part of the infinite process of consumption and production in a competitive society oriented around levels of consumption and production, both national and personal, as ultimate meanings in life. However, this type of socialization cannot and does not provide ultimate meaning to human beings. This is one of the most important reasons why there are so many fundamentalist religious believers, and so many spiritual seekers, in capitalist societies and why there is so much competitive conflict around religion and spirituality in the same societies. Everything in contemporary industrialist, capitalist society is subject to competition, including religious affiliation, loyalty and belief. Finally, socialization of this kind fosters some conditions that seem highly undesirable: first, lack of meaning with subsequent mental and physical illness; two, high levels of violence both within the human species and between the human species and other species; and three, myriad addictive behaviors that contribute to individual and social impoverishment and illness.

If we take the second idea of wholeness, then there is no need to add classes, there is no need to add more creative classes and there is no need to change the ways in which the traditional courses have been delivered. The overwhelming successes of industrial civilization show beyond a doubt that, however many weaknesses standard schooling practices have, they are fully capable of providing the civilization with an endless supply of replacement workers at all levels of the society. Judging from the larger and larger numbers of people who are under-employed relative to their educational attainment, the current schooling system is overwhelming successful in supplying competent workers. The pressures for changes in schooling are not coming from a species that has failed to dominate its planet and subdue all other living things, or from a species that has failed to create new ways to live and entertain itself. The pressures for change are coming from other directions. Perhaps those need to be understood more clearly by contemporary educators who want to change the system.

What are some of the sources of those pressures? Judging from both Sir Ken’s talk and from some of the comments in your blog, much of that pressure comes from the desire of capitalists to have even more new ideas with which to increase their market share. Another obvious pressure in our local situation in Taipei comes from parents who want their kids to have an edge in the competition for recognition, rewards, college admissions and future job possibilities. A third source of pressure comes from nations that perceive education as a means to elevate their status and want a fast-track to help them catch up with other nations. A fourth source of pressure comes from groups of people, many of whom have been traditionally disenfranchised and want a larger piece of the industrial/capitalist pie. Perhaps you can add some more sources of pressure for change from your talks with parents and educators. But, I ask you, is there any sign in any of those pressure sources that they want anything other than socialization, as described above, and the cumulative type of wholeness inherent in socialization, for the students? : ) David

What Sir Ken Robinson speaks to rings so true. I had a high school art teacher say to us once, “you walk into any 1st grade classroom and ask who can draw – and every kid raises his hand.” You walk into any high school class and pose the same question, you get maybe one shy kid raising their hand.

Try it. I did last year. I always thought it was self-consciousness in front of your peers. No one wants to stand out. No one wants to be the center of attention. Maybe a popular kid will joke about being able to draw, then do something goofy to get a laugh.

But now, I’m thinking is part of a larger part of culture. We don’t want to be judged. I think Sir Ken points to the real source of this fear; the fear of being wrong.

Classroom climate and environment is the most crucial aspect of teaching. I think that the relationship between the teacher and the student is at the foundation of creating a culture, a little place in the world where kids can feel safe and take chances.

When we have kids that aren’t afraid to be wrong. They’ll start to employ the rest of their brains. No more nodding and checking for clarity when it comes to content.

We’ll actually start learning. We can make kids to real work. They can form their own questions, focus their study, do real work. They can even make their work public. Take it out of the classroom and show other.

Do Schools Kill Creativity? Nah. I think there are creative things going on in classrooms all around the US.

Maybe culture kills our creativity. The relationship between the teacher and the student needs to be reestablished. What is the norm? What does an acceptable classroom look like, quiet kids sitting in rows or lively kids moving and talking, going to the bathroom when they have to, not when I tell them they can. Can you even imagine feeling like you are respected, not even equal, to your teacher when you can’t even excuse yourself without asking for permission.

Maybe our cultural understanding of schooling and education in general kills creativity.

Maybe our culture kills creativity. Do you think we can sue?

Although I have choosen the path of an educator, I have often found “school” to be a truly bizarre place. In fact, when I first began teaching, I remember walking into the bathroom one day and looking in the mirror and asking myself, “what in the heck is this crazy place all about?!” The longer I have taught, and the more I have seen amazing teachers developing wonderful relationships with their students, I have begun to think that school is not such a crazy idea after all. I must admit, though, that at one point last year when I was thinking more and more about the “educational reform” movement and the desire to transform a school, it did hit me, as David articulates in his posting, that school really is to prepare young people to function in society, and that anyone who wants to change education must therefore not be happy with the way society is currently working. Well, are we unhappy? Do things not “work?” Can we even imagine what we would consider a functioning society to function, in fact, differently? I am not speaking here about developing countries and places where we have lived where things did not “function” as we would have liked. I am speaking of “westernized” countries, where in fact most of the world’s educational model comes from. Thus, back to the question, does society need to change?

Well, I believe that while most things run just fine, and most people can plug right into the world upon graduation, there is enormous room for improvement. How much better would the world be if everyone was educated in a small school where they knew someone was there for them? If every child’s own personal and unique interests and strengths were fostered? What if it did not matter your economic, social or ethinc background, you still had the opportunity to attend such a school? Yes, I have my head in the clouds and am dreaming of utopia – but why not dream? Why not do what we can to make this happen for a group of students, who help make it happen for more students and so on? I may be naive, but what I think Sir Ken meant by educating the “whole child” is what I am talking about – not that my math students also need to take a dance class (and god help us if I have to teach some integrated math/dance course!:)), but rather that we should allow students to pursue their passions and desires. As noted in a study I saw on the CES website, test scores, grades, class performance, nothing as it turns out, was an indicator for success after college. The only thing that successful post college students had in common was that they were passionate about some extra-curricular activity at school, and they took it to a whole new level (did not just show up for track practice, for example). How about if we make room for those “extra” curricular activites in the school day? And not as “add-ins,” but “instead-ofs?” I may be a dreamer – and I do indeed dream of a better world, which includes a better system of education – the one I grew up with simply is not good enough for me.