Creativity & Education

I had an interesting conversation with a very good friend who has been working in the educational field, specifically in schools, for several years. From her own experience, she believed creativity is a capacity we learn to develop in our families and in schools. However, she considered this capacity is not fostered with the same emphasis as logic because since we are little we are told to be more practical, and our educational system is designed to lead us to choose professions which will feed us in the future. This is the reason why the arts do not have the same importance as the sciences in our education and we kill many talents, she considered.

In my research, I found a couple of experts who support the idea that creativity is not something that belongs to certain privileged people; all human beings are born creative. Every child has a full capacity to imagine, to dream, to create (Bradshaw, 1990).  Picasso once said that all children are born to be artists (Robinson, Ted Talk). However, at some point in our lives we stop doing it because we are told (often at home and in schools) that our dreams are unrealistic and we do not get the opportunity to develop our creativity, we numb it instead. When we see creative people around us, especially in the artistic domains, we think they are special people with special gifts.  Yet, I believe these people found a passion and searched for the opportunity to develop their creativity in it. We tend to misplace creativity only in the arts; nonetheless, we see examples of great creativity in any domain. For instance, all the advances in technology, developments in medicine & sciences, successful businesses, among others. Thus, creativity is a capacity that belongs to every human being. However, some people develop it more than others.

I came up with more questions which awoke my interest in this topic: Where do we foster our creativity: at home, in school? What does education have to do with creativity? Do our scholar systems support or inhibit the development of our creativity?

Through education we learn values, develop a thinking process, foster relationships and develop our creativity. However, this last does not happen very often in our scholar system. Ken Robinson, an English international advisor on education in the arts, talks about this in various conferences. He defends the idea that schools actually kill creativity instead of foster it.

I invite you to watch this video of Ken Robinson and share your comments in this blog.

 

Personally, I totally agree with Ken because Curriculums are not designed to make us use our minds and bodies as a whole to think creatively. Moreover, curriculums do not consider the importance of play to enhance the students’ learning, when the capacity of playing is inherent to every child and is through games that they learn to create, memorize, relate to others and develop moral values. I believe that we should think about the possibility of changing curriculums to foster creativity in our students.

What do you believe?

References:

Bradshaw, J. (1990). Homecoming: Reclaiming And Championing Your Inner Child. New York: Bantam Books.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html