Can we reframe school, work and life?
Hey creative thinkers,
I want to start off this post by thanking all of my fabulous commenters. Your insightful comments take what I’ve written and stretch it one rebel step further!
According to this Newsweek article, American creativity has been declining since 1990. Possible culprits? Increased television watching, less life hardships, standardized school curriculum and nationalized testing. Teachers say there’s little time for creativity due to curriculum and testing requirements.
The best part of the article? The demand for MUSES will be way up! Gave me some great ideas for my biz. I’m gushing creative excitement here!
Honestly, I’ve never understood the obsession with school testing. To me, it measures one’s ability to take a test. Is that what the world needs these days? Perhaps, it might be more useful to imagine the world we want to live in and reverse engineer it. Do we want our kids and grandkids to toil for 8+ hours a day in itty bitty cubicles staring at the clock or do we want them to have more creative options?
Did you say “no” to clock staring?
O.k. then how could we reframe school, work and life to accomplish that? Perhaps take a look at this John Gardner quote, “Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.”
What do you smart, creative folks think about teaching kids (if not adults) to grow their own metaphorical plants? About trusting them enough to let them create their own world?
Or should we stay the school, work and life course we’re on?
Muse thx, Giulietta
RSS
You have just hit on one of my pet topics! It frustrates me to no end that we are becoming (and teaching our kids to become) a society without creativity or innovation. We strive to keep up with the neighbors or to have more etc, but we don’t strive to create, to solve, to dream. We love our status quo and feel entitled… all the while giving up (and not caring or not realizing it) the passion that comes with dreaming and working hard to make a difference or create the fulfillment of dreams, or solve problems and answer questions. We ask our kids to take tests and memorize facts without allowing them to imagine or ask questions and then sending them out to find answers or envision potential solutions. We are raising a linier society (bugs in jars) instead of big picture thinkers who are ready to risk for their dreams and create solutions or ways to overcome obstacles!
I want to be a part of the change!!
Hello Giullietta,
I was reminded of a TED.com talk I viewed a while back in which the speaker described our Western educational philosophy as focused on ‘manufacturing’ education using an ‘industrial philosophy’. She suggested that the industrial model we seem to apply to everything we do by default is often faulty, especially when we’re talking about ‘growing’ people and encouraging true excellence.
Instead, she suggested that we move towards a more ‘organic’ model. Rather than try to create mass-production facilities, we should instead be creating educational ‘gardens’ in which we create an environment conducive to growth and learning, then let the students simply flourish within them, at their own paces, according to their abilities, natures and inclinations.
A baseline of knowledge, she suggested, could still be provided (and with greater efficacy than we now achieve), but the organic environment would encourage natural growth rather than manufactured homogeneity.
As someone fortunate enough to have come out of a specialized program that followed at least some of this spirit, I couldn’t agree more. I found it inspiring.
You ask the best questions… Thanks!
Hi Guiletta! I am COMPLETELY on board with you. Public education, as it presently exists, serves very few and an evolution is due.
Michael – I believe I saw that same TED talk – was it Sir Ken Robinson? He did one several years earlier that spoke directly to how schools kill creativity in children.
So much potential goes untapped, so many budding wonders go through the system with no idea of their inner magnificence. It really needs to stop.
Count me in!!
~ TE, what you say resonates with me big time. Yes, we strive to keep up with the materialistic Joneses instead of the creative, dreamer Joneses. Your bugs in the jar visual really speaks to our self-imposed captivity.
Our economy cannot revive itself until we revive ourselves – through creativity! Anything can be deemed valuable since the world’s all invented. We pay gazillions for pharmaceuticals why not re-direct those monies to art, music, dance, writing and other activities that make us feel alive.
~ Michael, sounds like a fantastic talk. Organic education to go along with our organic food. And the educational gardens. Super idea! Will try and find that talk on You Tube. Thank you for mentioning it.
Have you read Weapons of Mass Instruction? John Taylor Gatto talks about the educational factory farm. He’s got some earlier books I began reading close to six years ago. Free the animals, free the people!
Glad you like the questions. I led discussions when I was a teaching assistant in school. It’s in my blood!
~ Sally, it does need to stop! Right on about potential being untapped. Whenever I hear govt official say kids have to take all these tests to “compete in the global economy” it makes me crazy! Forget about competing. Let’s start changing.
Appreciate the great comments!
Totally with you here – the way the education system runs presently, it’s often twenty years before an individual taps into an area of potential that they’ve lived with undiscovered their whole life!
It’s so true that we often need to get out of school to start finding our potential. Why isn’t finding your potential a class? It makes me think someone somewhere doesn’t want us to find it. People seem to be herded into pre-approved work chutes … Thanks for stopping by. G.
I also wonder WHY we give kids homework. They should be playing and having fun not bringing work home. Why on earth would we want to train people to bring work home with them? What a horrible idea.
Jenna
Jenna,
Brilliant thought! (Now that you mention that it must be subliminal training to get you to bring “work” home after work.) I rarely did homework, even if they gave it to me. They’ve got you captive all day then you’re supposed to do more at night? Plus drag a small library back and forth to school each day. I attribute my creativity and other talents to time spent hanging out with nature. In my rebellious mind, life’s all backwards. Enjoyed your comment as usual! G.
Homework is a topic on its own. Studies are now showing that kids have too much, teachers are using it to teach over ensure grasp or reinforce, and it isn’t doing what they always believed it would. There is a movement, in some areas, to remove or reduce homework.
My daughter attends an elementary school that is not into homework. While her friends at different schools have homework that could take an hour and have since 1st grade, my daughter might have 15 minutes a few nights a week – might being the key word. She didn’t have a spelling test until 3rd grade – so the only tests she had were little math quizzes. The school does a lot of teaching through writing, projects, and experiments.
This post stuck in my head though – the question, we know what needs to change – studies show that things need to change – but the powers that be aren’t listening. How do we change?
Hi Giulietta –
It’s time education actually started teaching young people how to live life. To understand and respect values, to have gratitude and respect for others, to be positive and creative in outlook. There are so many wise and great teachers in the world who could spread these messages if allowed to. There is no doubt that getting young people thinking this way earlier will change the world. Let’s build a movement!
Phil
TE, glad this topic keeps speaking to you,
The answer to how is usually, “just do it!” Go around the powers that be. They’re only powerful because we obediently hand them our power (something we learn at younger and younger ages these days). Start something in your own little town and it will catch on and fan out. I’m sure you’re far from alone in your alternative school thoughts.
Phil,
Oh yes! How to live life. Tell them about all the options instead of the one-size-fits-all life slog. Great thought. Many wonderful teachers out there and a lot of them not “credentialed up.” The freest thinking folks might not have made it through the educational system.
G.
Hi G – I loathe tests, even as an adult. I’m looking ahead to possibly becoming licensed in my profession (a new option here in California) and the journey will require three, count them, three tests! Ack! There are so many other, less objective, more subjective, ways to measure learning, so I’m with you. I say get creativity and the arts back in the classroom. But how? I’m stumped on that one. Thanks for the link to the article. I’m off to read it right now.
Hey, I’m back. Loved the article. Ten years ago I wrote my master’s thesis on counseling for creative people, and some of what I came upon when digging through the literature shows up in the article. Especially the stuff about the stereotype of the crazy, dark, mentally ill artist. It’s time to put that to rest once and for all! Oh, and the right brain/left brain info is fascinating. I always felt that was true, but have never seen it in print before. So thanks!
Hello Giulietta,
I’m not surprised that American creativity is falling behind. It starts in childhood with kids encumbered with schoolwork and distracted by TV and computers, so what time is left for creativity? Also, could it be that the school system is too focused on cramming information into little heads that there is no room for creativity? As for imagination, leave that to the comic book knock-off films, and the vampires, werewolves and distorted history to fill in that gap.
I agree that what is the use of tests that only serve to measure the amount of information remembered (from studying the night before)rather than overall knowledge level. As Einstein said, “Information is not knowledge.” Also, I never understood why a creative minded student has to take courses like advanced math, algebra. European systems allow HS students to choose between Science/Math study and the Arts.
As for homework, I see little use in it except for reading books. I once told my kids’ teacher, “I don’t believe in homework. Kids should go to school to study and go home to play or relax. They need to enjoy their childhood while they can as they’ll have to work for the rest of their lives.” And, as someone commented, why have to learn to take work home with you?
Hi Patty,
Neat Master’s thesis! We know we’re going in the wrong direction, but keep going anyway because decision-makers don’t want to change the system.
Parents have to make copies of that article and go to their local school commitees or write letters to the editor. Change usually starts at the bottom.
If it isn’t changed, we’re going to become zombies.
Good luck with your licensing! Do these tests measure compassion?
Penelope,
You bring up a great point about imagination. Hard to develop it when there’s no room upstairs for it.
I don’t understand the obsession with Math/Science either. Again, it’s being sold to us as the route to compete in the global marketplace (whatever that is). Yet, in that article China states they adopted a new educ. model and we adopted their old model. They want to promote creativity. Why don’t we?
Thx. G.
You said it right here: “trusting them enough to let them create their own world?”
That’s it right there. I have no thoughts on how to change the school system… but as I watch my 4-year-old grow and evolve and make connections on his own… I know that he’ll be okay.
My mom always read to me. And she insisted that I let go of her leg and play by myself. That’s all she did… and that was a lot.
Angie, love what your mother did! Encouraging you to let go … We need way more of that. Many of us need to let go of the “have to’s” we’re holding onto for dear unlife and let our world move in the direction it wants to, one that’s more natural for all of us! Thx, G.
I like that … teaching people to grow their own plants 🙂
Giulietta: This is such an interesting topic. I think I am going to have to agree with many of the commenters. There just seems to be something missing from the current education system. I think it definitely has some good things about it, but it is so important to also teach children how to really live in a great way and right now that is missing from the curriculum.
J.D., we have a tendency in developed countries to keep people dependent. Next thing you know it’s a college major. Doesn’t move us along.
Sibyl, Ooh! “live in a great way.” You are so right that they don’t teach that or anything close to it.
Thanks! G.
Hi Giulietta,
I think standardized testing (MCAS in Massachusetts) is destroying our school systems and the teachers have their hands tied behind their backs because they are given little choice. In fact, some of my children’s best teachers have been the older ones who remember the days before MCAS. They are the ones who have enough experience to be “rebellious” and continue to teach the children in the “old school” ways. These older teachers have enough tricks up their sleeves to include creativity in the classroom and still find a way to help their students get through the standardized tests. I’ve found that the younger, less experienced teachers are the ones whose classrooms revolve around passing standardized tests. It’s what they’ve been trained to do and unfortunately their jobs depend on how well their district performs on these tests.
Hi Liz,
I agree with you 250%. Glad your children have a few pre-regime change teachers. How frustrating it must be for teachers to have little say in their own profession. It’s like saying to an artist, “you will ONLY paint cucumbers.”
We are going in the wrong direction with all this testing and our children pay the price with high anxiety, uber heavy book bags that will cause pain down the road and a loss of creativity.
Even worse, all this standardization (in a supposed “free” country) costs the taxpayers a bundle to implement. Towns with a lot of money can eke high test scores out of their children.
Read, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “Dumbing Us Down” by John Taylor Gatto.
Thanks for the great comment! G.