After watching the video entitled "Do Schools Kill Creativity?", I have to say that I agree with a great deal of points made by Sir Ken Robinson, especially his points about the educational system being "a protracted process for university entrance" and the existence of an "academic hierarchy" where the arts are placed below the sciences in importance.
I can remember being told by my family from very early on that you can't make a living by being a drummer or a ballerina, but boy, did I want to! I used to yearn for Wednesdays at school, the day in which our grade would make the rounds between Art, French, Music, and Gym class. They crammed these subjects into an hour each, but, for most students, those were the best hours at school. We got a break from the drudgery of math and language arts and got to have fun learning to express ourselves, usually with cheap plastic recorders or ancient records playing tribal dances. At some point after I moved on to middle school, I remember my mom telling me that the County was going to have to cut these classes in order to fund the creation of new computer labs, and I thought it was a bad idea. Sir Ken is right--even then schools were putting the arts below language, math and technology in the "academic hierarchy", and they didn't seem to be bothered if the arts were eliminated completely! In this, I'm not sure that schools are completely responsible for killing creativity, but they are definitely a part of it. Parents can take pains to foster creativity in their children too--it's not just the schools' responsibility--but not all parents will have the ability. I knew my parents would provide music or dance lessons for me if I showed an interest, but what about those kids in families living hand-to-mouth wearing last year's clothes and getting free lunch? Where would they get art supplies, if not in school?
As a student, you're also told from such an early age now that everything you do could affect where you go to college. I didn't really even know what college was in kindergarten, but I knew I should be quiet and listen to the teacher so I could make good grades because it all mattered for college. Nowadays parents fill out long applications to get their kids into elite preschools so they might get into the right prep school and later the right Ivy League college, but why? Is that all we know to be success? I asked my second cousin, age 6, what she wanted to be when she grew up and she looked at her father, then at me and said, "Financial analyst, isn't that right, Daddy?" Good Lord, I just wanted to be a princess at that age! Earlier and earlier, kids are being put on job trajectories, and they're being made to determine their careers so early that I don't know where kids have the time to even play make-believe anymore. What happens when my cousin realizes she has a singing talent? Will she be told that she can't go to the School of the Arts because she has to take accounting classes? It makes me happy to know that my parents let me go in pretty much any direction I chose, though they were always telling me that I was going to college no matter what. I guess I had freedom of choice in a way, but I never really thought about how much that must have affected me until now.
I guess that if school is turning out any kinds of people, it is workers. Workers who have been on a track from the womb, workers who may not ever indulge their creative side because they've understood there to be no time for such things if one is going to get somewhere and make a real living. Yes, workers--and a great many of them dissatisfied and prone to fits of anxiety and burnout. And that's if they ever even reach their goals. A great many will attempt to reach for the stars but find that their career isn't as fulfilling as the paycheck might suggest. There's a reason why fields like music therapy exist and why people are going to culinary school at night--most people need to have some kind of creative outlet so that they can exercise that other atrophied side of their brains. For some it may be sports that call to them, others a garage band, but I think it's important to recognize that for most Americans, we define ourselves primarily by our professions, and we really need to consider the impact schools may have had on the formation of that truly limited identity. That's why I'm glad to see that a lot of professional schools (i.e. medical schools) now give more credence to extracurricular activities than they ever did when considering applicants for admission. I think this is huge, because I don't think that I would be comfortable with a physician who eats, sleeps, and breathes his work. I'd much rather have one who is fulfilled outside the workplace, whose creative mind can fathom a more dynamic approach to the healing process than some textbook case in a medical journal.
For me school has always been the site of my creative development, not just as a writer, but as a student in general. I made sure not to limit myself to science courses just because I was good at them; I really wanted to learn it all. Instead of the basic Brit Lit, I took an English course in my junior year about 20th Century novels, wherein we read A Clockwork Orange as opposed to the usual Crime and Punishment. I think having this class available to me to take really exposed me to a different group of literary voices, and it challenged me to think about how a writer might tell the same story in a new and different way. I was glad to try something new and this was so refreshing after my sophomore year, when we were trained like soldiers to respond to essay prompts for the dreaded State Writing test. I had gotten really burned out with writing in general after that, and rediscovered my creative side in the Novels class.The fact that the teacher was allowed to teach such a different kind of class with non-traditional texts while adhering to the basic curriculum led to incredible results. All the students in my class did very well because we were reading modern works and writing about modern voices, something I really hadn't done in any other English class. I think maybe if schools were to allow their teachers to teach something different and new, instead of what they might see as strictly college-prep, students may get more out of it and be able to learn something more than just the basics.
I think Sir Ken's solution of raising arts classes up in the academic hierarchy has merit, but I worry that most schools will not be able to manage it. I believe this will be mainly due to the fact that school budgets are tight because the economy is poor, and because of the long-held belief that arts are not as important as sciences, math and language. Arts and sports programs are the first to get the axe when cuts have to be made. Still, there is a possibility that programs could be saved, but it will not be easy. Schools that have need would have to start reaching out to their community to provide support for these at-risk programs, and whether through grantwriting or oldfashioned fundraising, parents and teachers could make the effort and work together to provide the funding for their children's enrichment. Doing so would help all students at a certain school take advantage of such programs regardless of their financial status, and serve to get parents more involved in their child's overall education. Communities might also elect to support the formation of community charter schools. This type of progressive school is bound by state curriculum only to a certain extent and its mission is to synthesize all types of subjects into the students' body of knowledge by placing the arts at the forefront of education alongside mathematics and English.
For me, intelligence is the mixture of all my strengths and weaknesses and my ability to use me to approach and solve problems. Having succeded and failed both in spectacular fashion, I'd say I have a fair amount of intelligence, though not all easily gained. I think my intelligence has been shaped a great deal more by that which I have failed to learn quickly and easily--failing forces me to repeat processes and be more creative in order to try a different method that may be the solution to my problem. Because of this, I think of intelligence as something alive and constantly changing...whether for the better or the worse, I couldn't say. I've never enjoyed screwing up, but (most of the time) I have learned my lesson and grown from it.
In a way, I think Sir Ken's message about creativity relates to some of what Stanley Kaplan talks about regarding standardized testing. I feel Kaplan is right when he says that critical thinking skills are essential to mastering the SAT, and it's my opinion that to be a good critical thinker, you sometimes have to be creative in order to "think out" the less obvious answer. Schools may be placing too much emphasis on teaching students to memorize facts and should consider taking more time to teach kids how to make sense of it all. These kinds of skills can be further improved by placing emphasis on creative expression as well as logic--if students can create something new, they may be more apt to see a novel solution to a problem than those students focused on just the given information.
No comments:
Post a Comment