Does Education Kill Creativity?

Creativity is import for us as it allows changes and to develop the world. Being unique is important and creativity allows us to be unique.  But in Education could the taught to test and the way the curriculum works prevent us from being able to express our creativity and uniqueness?

Ken Robinsons states “Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not – because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatised.” He also says that “the current education system was designed and conceived for a different age” meaning that maybe the way that education works today isn’t the right education and standards need to be raised.

After watching a video- linked below, this gives a real insight as to education and does it kill creativity. Instead of anaesthetising children to get them through education we should be opening them up to different ideas and making them come to life with their talents and abilities inside them.  

These days it seems to be that education is modelled purely on industrialisation and the image of it because as Robinson states “they still are organised on factory lines such as ringing bells, separate facilities, having separate subjects” These days it should be about putting everyone in to the same style of education as different people can perform better than other even at different age levels. So why are we putting our kids through school in somewhat ‘batches’ rather than allowing them to potentially use their creativity to perform well?

Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for creativity. Allowing you to see different interpretations of questions and answers and finding different outcomes. This allows the person to become unique and different.

A test was carried out on 1500 people in a book which was given to them called ‘Break Point and Beyond’. If you scored above a certain level you would be considered a genius at divergent thinking. 98% of kindergarten children scored this percentage however, because this was a longitudinal study, the same children were tested five years later and another five years later which showed remarkable answers. Because they had been educated, they had only been told that there is one answer to the question given and it’s normally given to them. This isn’t because teachers want it this way it’s because it happens this way because of the ‘gene pool of education’.

“A viable alternative vision that frames education as a transformative and creative process rather than merely an informative one” (Kegan, 2000)

 

References

Kegan, R. (2000).What “Form" Transforms?: A Constructive-developmental Approach to Transformative Learning. In J. Mezirow (Ed.) & Associates, Learning as Transformation (pp. 3- 34). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

What is Creativity?

Creativity is a means of connecting the previously unconnected in ways that are new and meaningful to the individual concerned (Duffy 2006). Creativity allows and enables individuals to be able to find different routes and paths that they can travel. It is a process of conscious invention and describes the resourcefulness of ordinary people rather than extraordinary contributors (Craft, A. & Jeffrey, B. 2008).

 Being creative is what makes us all unique. Having our own way of doing things and creating new ideas allows us to be different from everyone else thus making us stand out and being all different. Everyone needs to be creative in order to be different because without this everyone would be the same or similar and the world would be a boring place.

 Being creative is important. Education must not favour students because of their creative abilities but instead they should optimise the talents that all learners may have and can open them up to new ideas and to embrace the notion that we as learners need so it can give us many opportunities to be able to play with ideas.

In Education it is also better for them to emphasis students being able to break their barriers and not to use traditional but non-traditional approaches to problems. Also it should try and get students to make new connections and to acknowledge the importance of an environment which encourages and values the importance of creativity and using the imagination.

 Whys is creativity important for us you might ask?  Well For creativity to occur, a set of rules and practices must be transmitted from the domain to the individual. The individual must then produce a novel variation in the content of the domain. The variation then must be selected by the field for inclusion in the domain (Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1999)

The other predominant thrust of work in the field looks more at everyday creativity (Richards, 2007), such as creative activities that allow the average person to be able to  participate in each day.

 

 References
Duffy, B. (2006) Supporting Creativity and Imagination in the Early Years (pp. 3 – 27). Berkshire: Open University Press.

Craft, A. & Jeffrey, B. (2008) Editorial.  Creativity and Performativity in Teaching and Learning: Tensions, Dilemmas, Constraints, Accommodations and Synthesis.  British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 5, pp. 577–584.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999) Implications of a Systems

Perspective for the Study of Creativity in Sternberg, R. (Ed.) Handbook of Creativity (p. 35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, R. (2007) Everyday creativity: Our hidden potential in Richards, R. (Ed.), Everyday creativity and new views of human nature (pp. 25 - 54). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.