Schooling and Education is meant to teach useful skills to individuals and develop them to their full potential, so they can become more intelligent and be more able to serve themselves and contribute to society. That would seem to be the general aspiration of our worldwide education systems, and while they do seem to achieve that in a certain aspect, it seems to be occurring at the cost of something else, something which in itself is also quite valuable, creativity.
Many studies and surveys around the world seem to be concluding exactly that, that our current education systems are inhibiting the use and development of creativity among students. The problem is, that we are all graded based on a certain quality, a quality which some may possess, and others may not, and in order to get good grades, one has to fit within a certain, quite inflexible criteria, and all of which in the end leads to lessened creativity. After we have spent at least over a decade in schooling, creativity as a whole becomes almost non-existent, for example, in High School we may be told to think “outside the box” for our next assignment, but in reality we just seem to be thinking in a bigger box, a box with more of the same kind of ideas, because if our idea is too radical, it won’t be accepted.
It seems fair to argue, that nowadays people seem to be most creative when they are children and have just started primary school. During the beginning of our schooling, it is not about handing in correctly formulated assignments on time, but rather, it is about learning new skills, such as reading, writing, drawing etc. and exercising those skills using our own creativity. For example, if you drew a painting of a house instead of a car like everyone else in kindergarten, and the purpose was just to draw, would your drawing be rejected by the teacher?
As we then go up a grade each year, the use of our imagination and creativity becomes lesser and lesser frequent. In primary school we are taught useful skills such as forming correct sentences, addition and subtraction, etc. but when it comes to exercising those skills, it is more about getting the right answer, rather than simply learning and improving your skills. In middle and high school, things become even less imaginative and creative, because then not only is it about getting the right answer, but also about getting it on time, and knowing whether it is the best and/or full answer to a given question.
One could of course argue that by doing exercises in middle and high school, which are similar in fashion to the aforementioned, we are learning and training vital skills which would be useful to us later in life, and if one dislikes the method of exercising those skills in school, one could spend one’s own free-time on practicing them in a way in which one prefers. However, the trouble with that is, as has been discussed in a previous post, do we really have enough time for that? Given all the other things we do in our modern lives.
Putting it all together, as we go through our schooling and education, the exercises and challenges we are faced with over time, seem to decrease in the amount of creativity required, and increase in the amount of conformity required. Therefore, over time our creative and imaginative skills are left uncultivated, while our other skills are developed, and while some may excel at those developed skills, others may not, which could make things seem unfair.
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