How Schools Indirectly Extinguish Creativity for the Sake of Education

How Schools Indirectly Extinguish Creativity for the Sake of Education
Jane Laine
Ivy Tech University

Cover Letter

Prof. Sands,

        Much of my critique was simply to pull ideas together more tightly and to elaborate more on the examples I used. One suggestion was to find more articles on the subject, so I found another source which reinstated my ideas from a new perspective and added this to my paper. This source ended up giving me more ideas on commentary, which I included in my paper as well. I tried to take out the parts about standard testing and right/left-brain dominance, as well as a quote and some “tidbits” which I don’t feel really contributed any relevant information. I feel that my ideas coincide a little bit better now and are more on one track.  This, along with adding a detail or two and more clearly restating my thesis in the conclusion, has helped immensely in making my essay more structured. I feel that it helps the reader to take away the main concepts more easily and with more permanence, which happens to be another critique I received.

        One part of the critique that I decided not to include was the use of a personal experience. I felt that this would make the article lose its credibility some, as personal experiences don’t seem to be a very reliable, factual source in comparison to published journals, books, and the likes. I didn’t want to add too much of an emotional sway in this way, and preferred that the reader change their opinion of education and creativity due to reliable evidence. I also made an attempt to cut down on loaded words.

        The largest issue I ran into was translating how I felt into clearly written opinions. While I agreed completely with what Ken Robinson spoke on, I had a little bit of an issue with figuring out exactly how to elaborate on it enough to produce a full paper. Taking some time away from the project and reading other articles on the topic helped to straighten out my tangled mess of thoughts.

The Importance of Teaching and Supporting Creativity

As an educator, Ken Robinson may seem a mildly ironic candidate to be discussing the unfortunate decline of artistic people due to the lacking support of creativity and those wielding it. However, in his 2006 TED talk How schools kill creativity, he gives a compelling speech on the potential reasons behind why and how creativity is being unapologetically stolen from our youth. While the piece is often interjected with tidbits of humor, the topic of his speech should be taken quite seriously. It is critical that we find the source of educators’ hesitance to promote creativity, despite the fact that it has helped us advance and will continue to do so if we let it.

As Robinson suggests, we are, in a way, whittling children’s minds down to believe that education and traditional book smarts are the only way to be intelligent. We have reinforced that this is the only way to be valued academically, regardless of children’s commonly innovative ideas and creative solutions to problems. Teaching children to come up with unique solutions to problems can help them later on, as this will assist them in coming up with answers when they are not necessarily given a direct method of solving the issue. We may be unaware of how pliable a child’s mind is, and how much they take in and learn at such young ages. If we implant and reinforce the notion that there is only one “right” way to achieve an answer, they will likely continue to believe this throughout the rest of the lifetime. Even Pablo Picasso mentioned that “every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up” (as cited in Peter, 1979, p.25). Maintaining a creative mind as we age can help us to come up with new innovations that we may not produce while under the impression that there is only one way to accomplish a task.