Education: Death of Creativity?
BY ANNA KORSUNSKA (COMD/III)
annak@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Following up on the article I wrote last time about a phenomenon called the Indigo Children, I would like to elaborate on the most important idea: that, whether or not you believe in the Indigos, it is undeniable that today's world is moving very quickly, and we must keep up with it. We cannot afford to have one of the most important systems, education, become outdated.
The world is changing, but the education system is still the same. Mathematics and the sciences are at the top, and physical education and arts are at the bottom. And, formal education is aimed at making everybody the same. Standardized. And anything different is wrong. If you're not good at math, its practically the same as saying you're going to fail at life. Even before the dictatorship of math, you still had to learn facts, graduate, get a college degree, get a good job.
But now everything is different. A college degree isn't a guarantee of a good job. You need something extra. You need to be innovative, creative. You need to stand out, to be different. Isn't it ironic that your entire life you had to learn to fit in, learn to follow rules and be inside the box, and suddenly none of that really matters? Creativity is what drives progress. It's what makes life interesting. So why is it that the education system seems to be aimed at stripping children of the gift of creativity?
This article was inspired by a video that was sent to me from one of my readers. The video was of a speaker at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, Sir Ken Robinson, called "Do Schools Kill Creativity?"
He talks about the fact that education has its priorities wrong: not to teach really, and not to inspire and light a spark in children, but to fill them with the standard program and create a fear of making mistakes. He makes an incredibly good point during his presentation: "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."
It's the idea that children and young adults have this burning potential, that if it is not recognized, or if it is suffocated by standardization, it will go to waste. He gives an example of Julian Lynn, very famous and successful choreographer. She choreographed Phantom of the Opera and Cats. When she went to school in the 1930s, she was labeled as having a learning disability. (Nowadays it would have been labeled as ADHD.) She has some of the most successful musical theatre productions in history. She is a multi-millionaire. "Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down," Sir Robinson says.