BY: Paloma Cuevas
Creativity
should be treated with the same status as literacy when it comes to
education... School generally kills creativity through stupid decissions and
restrictions... Children learn to be standarized instead of being treated as
extraordinary human beings... yet we ask them to grow up to be extraordinary
men and women who can cope with daily crazy situations...
One of the greatest things about being a child
is the opportunity to commit errors and to make mistakes, which are really
different things... while an error occurs due to ignorance, and a mistake is
just a slip the best thing about childhood is the flexibility children show to
learn, and to create due to the fact that they are not afraid of being wrong.
Of course it does not mean that by being wrong you are doing well, it means
that if you are not ready to be wrong, then you are not ready to be original...
The real problem with standarization is that
children learn to be afraid of making mistakes, and by that fear they forget
how to create... and how to come up with something out of the box...
Everywhere around the globe educational systems
have the same hierarchy on subjects, Math and Languages go on top of
everything, then some Humanities to remind us that we are human beings
and Arts of course at the bottom of everything... We forget to educate the
whole human and we focus on the child from the head to top, and in that area we
generally prefer one hemisphere giving most of the attention to "rational
thinking" and leaving any attempt to change things out of any questioning.
It's just like most of schools have forgotten
about the rest of the human anatomy and just use their bodies as a container
which carries their head which contains their brains around...
The simple idea of creating people who can do
something from their lives apart from academic knowledge seems just impossible:
But just as a sports wear ad once said "Impossible is nothing".
Children should be taught to think and not just to repeat, memorisation as well
as standarization should be a crime, children should be taught to question and
be critical.
The whole educational systems are crashing down,
having a degree is no longer a promise of getting a job, now you need more, and
it does not necessarily mean that you are well-prepared, there are people with
higher degrees that do not even now how to follow a writing process.
We should question what do we want from
professionals: people to be able to gather papers or people able to be
competent and use competencies around the different situations they will have
to cope with? People who can show a ton of documents or people who are able to manage
different kinds of intelligence in order to get to a result?
We know three things about intelligence so far:
1. It is diverse
2. It is dynamic
3. It is distinct
Intelligent people should be able to be creative
in order to become an individual asset for a real society, not for the ideal
one that does not really exist. As a matter of fact some disorders that have
been "created" or "labeled" with the idea of allowing
children to "merge" and to be "functional" in a society
that does not really accept them have just become a comodity for teachers who
are not really willing to teach.
It would be wonderful to rethink the fundamental
values on which we are teaching our children for a reality yet to come. How can
we be able to predict our society's needs for the future 50 years if we are not
able to handle children today?
Real teachers are not in the classroom to teach,
they should be there to light the intention of curiosity, to make students
eager to know and to create, to be a leading guide, so that kids can really
create and be responsible for their knowledge. Nowadays society privileges lazy
students by making them just take a little bite from the whole of knowledge.
The challenge is to make students think and to
be ready for the questions that this thinking might create...
