CREATIVITY
Creativity is inborn in every human being. But it has to be nurtured by careful planning through education.
It is necessary that parents and teachers provide healthy conditions at home and the school. This would enable children to express themselves and contribute something new for society, which may be termed as creativity.
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way our children are currently educated. He champions a radical review of our educational systems, to develop creativity and cultivate multiple types of intelligence. Sir Ken Robinson argues that we, the present crop of educated people, were trained to become good workers, rather than to be creative thinkers. With their open minds and restless bodies, children are often ignored or even stigmatized.
I believe that children have tremendous native talents. They have extraordinary capacities for innovation. However our current system of education squanders them ruthlessly.
They say that children are not tactful; they are not afraid of being wrong. But if a child is not prepared to be wrong, he will never come up with anything original. And by the time they become adults, most would have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. We run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. We are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their native creative capacities.
Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Mathematics is very important, but so is painting. Children would sing and dance all the time if they are encouraged.
We would have to conclude that the whole purpose of education is to produce teachers and university professors. They are the people who run the schools and decide on the curriculum. Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. The whole educational system was invented before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialization. So the curriculum is based on the subjects most useful for work. An artist has no place in a factory. The consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think their talents are inconsequential, because the things they were good at in school were not appreciated.
It is important to note that brilliant innovators and founders such as Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft did not have formal education.
In the near future, more and more people will be graduating through this “damaged” educational system. Then, degrees will not be worth anything. When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job, if you wanted one. But now graduates with degrees are often jobless because you need an MBA where the previous job only required a Bachelor’s degree. It is a process of runaway academic inflation. It indicates that the whole structure of education is in need of radical change.
The brain is divided into two hemispheres; the “logical” side mostly deals with technical concepts, and the “creative” side that is identified to refer to the arts and abstract concepts. There is a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum that interfaces the two hemispheres. This shaft is thicker in women, which may explain why women are better at multi-tasking. We now tend to develop merely the logical side.
The brain is divided into two hemispheres; the “logical” side mostly deals with technical concepts, and the “creative” side that is identified to refer to the arts and abstract concepts. There is a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum that interfaces the two hemispheres. This shaft is thicker in women, which may explain why women are better at multi-tasking. We now tend to develop merely the logical side.
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| Whole brain thinking |
Our education system has structured our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth only for oil. This will not serve us for the future. We need to review the fundamental principles on which we are educating our youth.
We, this generation, will not see this future, but our grandchildren will. Our priority should be to help our children do a better job than what we have accomplished.
