<Ken Robinson – Schools Kill Creativity>
When I was young, I didn’t know how to draw the sun. In the pictures of my family going on a picnic or a trip in a sunny day, the skies were bright and shiny, but there were no suns. It is not that I didn’t like to draw the sun; I didn’t know how to draw one. Whenever I looked up to see what the sun looked like, I couldn’t stand the light so had to squint or frown. When I went to the elementary school, friends asked me why I didn’t draw the sun. I told them I had never seen it. My teacher came by and asked what the problem was, and kids told her. She nodded, went to the board, picked up a yellow chalk and started drawing something. “My dear, it’s okay that you don’t know how to draw the sun. Don’t be embarrassed. This is what the sun looks like!” From that day, all of the suns in my paintings were replicas of my teacher’s drawing. I never thought of changing it, since I believed that my teacher knew far better than I. From then, the sun was always a circle with stretching lines around it.
Creativity. This is one of the priorities of schools around the world these days. Government is introducing various methods and materials which they claim can ‘nurture’ the creativeness of students. But as my personal experience shows, schools tend to confine students’ intellectual potential under the name of education. Many people are pointing this out and blaming schools for their outdated education. However, I think this blames are unjust; in fact it’s ignoring the situation and reality.
I believe it is near impossible to keep the creativity of a child untouched while trying to teach some facts and reasons, which is what teachers do at schools. Learning is not discovering your own principles in this universe; it’s getting to know what other preceding experts or professionals insisted with evidences to support. I believe the process of reshaping the original thoughts of an individual is an unavoidable process in order to pass down the knowledge the mankind has been piling up. Schools may try their best to find the most efficient way to educate children, but I think it still has some obstacles considering the fact that they have to teach many children in comparably short time period. Schools are not to be solely blamed for the lost of creativity in children, considering the continuous effort schools and ministries are making to improve the quality of education in a way in which all the kids’ potential creativity are protected.
Also, I think the education – which is referred to as simple pass down of facts- are in some parts necessary. I’m not saying that how schools teach their students is the best way. However, I believe this process helps children to make more educated and logical conjectures and efficient imaginations based on reality. Sir Ken Robinson in the video states that all of the people who work in education know how unlimited the children’s imaginations, thoughts or answers could go. Yes, sometimes ‘looking the world upside down’ can help people. However, more realistic views are crucial in order to improve the qualities of life or fix a problem in the society. Break-throughs can’t always handle all the problems we face in our life. The ‘one-way input’ the schools are doing now is kind of like helping the students to get to certain level in which they could talk VERITAS. Children would be able to understand and suggest substitutes for the problems in our society based on what they learned at schools – basic principles, laws or observations of our society and universe. Learning at School may seem like “educating the people out of their creative capacity” but I think it s is a process in which children’s personal capabilities could be put aside for a short, very short time.
Like every other countries in the world, our country and my school focuses on education, especially in creativity, to be specific. Indeed, creativity has unlimited power. I believe it is one of the most powerful and precious resources we humans can access to. In a situation like this, the schools are expected to excel in helping students develop their personal creativeness. When they fail to do so, they are criticized for such a ‘factory-like’ education. However, I think these blames are being ignorant of the schools’ style of teaching, their current situations and conditions. I’m not saying that we should just wait and watch what happens to our children. What we have to do is to find a way to teach children while minimizing the loss of creativeness of them. This is the job for the well-educated adults to do. Also, parents should be supporting at home too, since creativity is not raised by a magic snap; all of the adults should be willing to cooperate in creating an environment in which children can imagine and try whatever they want.
