Smoking kills your teeth and gums like schools kill creativity
Let me start by asking, how many of you struggled with linking this month’s image to learning?
What if you decided to brainstorm with a child? How many ideas do you think this would generate? I did this exact task, which resulted in 9 different ideas for this blog!
And no, I’m not going to share these ideas with you today… but it did bring me to my main idea for this blog!
Why do children have greater creativity and innovation to adults? Do you think it is just a coincidence that children have incredible imaginations, love getting messy, making music, drawing, painting, and creating stories? Why doesn't any of this carry into adulthood? Are we truly designed by nature to lose these precious gifts?
If I think of the adults around me that are successful in what they do; they tend to be people that have an extraordinary dedication for a found talent. All children have tremendous talents and yet we squander them, pretty ruthlessly as part of our education system.
Think about it. Every education system around the world is the same. It’s compiled of hierarchy subjects that at the top have Mathematics and Languages, then Humanities and at the bottom are the Arts. Even within Arts there is a hierarchy. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children in the way that we teach mathematics. But why not?
The truth is that when children start to grow up, we educate them progressively from the waist up. We start to focus on their heads and slightly to one side at that! We see successful people to be university professors. Most professors tend to live in their heads that look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It’s really just a way of getting their head to a meeting.
Today’s education system came into being to meet the need of industrialism in two ways. Firstly, the most useful subjects for work are at the top and secondly the academic ability which has come to dominate our view of intelligence. If you think about it, the education system around the world is an extended process of university entrance. The consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they are not because the thing they were good at during school wasn’t valued. As adult learners, we need to try and revert and open ourselves to the creativity that we once had.
I recently read a great story about a 6 year old girl who rarely paid attention except for during drawing class. The teacher was fascinated and one day went over to ask what she was drawing. The girl replied with “I’m drawing a picture of god” and the teacher said, “But nobody knows what god looks like”. To which the girl responded “they will, in a minute”.
What this teaches us is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go. They are not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same as being creative but what we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time children become adults; most children have lost the capacity. They become frightened of being wrong and in most companies, mistakes are stigmatized. We are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make and as a result we are educating people out of their creative capabilities.
Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this to be true. We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it!
What we know about intelligence is that it’s diverse, dynamic and distinct. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinaesthetically, we think in abstract terms and we think in movement. Intelligence in the human brain is hugely interactive. Creativity more often comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
Have you ever heard of Gillian Lynne? Gillian is a choreographer, who did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She was once asked how she became a dancer and her response was very interesting. When Gillian was 8 years old, she was really hopeless at school. In the 1930’s, the school contacted her parents and with the concern that Gillian had a learning disorder. She couldn’t concentrate and was always fidgeting. Today, they would probably call that ADHD. Gillian and her mother went to see a specialist and she was led to sit on a chair where Gillian sat on her hands for 20 minute whilst the specialist and her mother discussed the problem. After some time, the specialist asked to speak to Gillian alone and led her into another room. He turned on the radio and returned to the mother and told her to watch her. Within 2 minutes, Gillian was on her feet, moving to the music. After a couple of minutes, he turned to the mother and said “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick, she’s a dancer. Take her to dance school”. The mother did this and once Gillian entered the dance school, the room was full of people like her. People who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think. She did all types of dance and eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School and became a soloist with a wonderful career in ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company and met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theatre productions in history. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth and for the future it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating today.
Very interesting thoughts in here. Great work.
ReplyDelete