Kerry McDonald — How Schooling Crushes Creativity

In 2006, educator and author Ken Robinson gave a TED Talk called, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” At over 45 million views, it remains the most viewed talk in TED’s history.
Robinson’s premise is simple: our current education system strips young people of their natural creativity and curiosity by shaping them into a one-dimensional academic mold.

This mold may work for some of us, particularly, as he states, if we want to become university professors; but for many of us, our innate abilities and sprouting passions are at best ignored and at worst destroyed by modern schooling.…

Robinson echoes the concerns of many educators who believe that our current forced schooling model erodes children’s vibrant creativity and forces them to suppress their self-educative instincts....

Compelling research shows that when children are allowed to learn naturally, without top-down instruction and coercion, the learning is deeper and much more creative than when children are passively taught.

Like American philosopher and educator John Dewey said many decades ago. It was called "progressive education" by then as an alternative to education by rote, which is now called "teaching the test."

Progressive education involves emphasizing learning over teaching, discovery over schooling, and group (team) learning over individual instruction.

Then objective is learning for life rather than credentialing.

FEE — Foundation for Economic Education
How Schooling Crushes Creativity
Asif Aziz

Sir Ken Robinson — RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Sir Ken makes the point that we are not educating contemporary students for the world they will be inhabiting but rather for the 18th century world upon which modern education is based. Economic and political reform will not be enough. We need to be educating the coming generations for the environment that they will be dealing with, on one hand, and on the basis of their individual capacity, on the other. Right now, neither is happening. In fact, contemporary education is contributing to the problem rather than the solution.

This analysis also casts light on why MMT remains out in the cold while nonsense flourishes.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff has written about the same problem in terms of brain function. The 18th century model under which we are still struggling sees "reason" as separate from and superior to other functions. Contemporary research reveal this to be a false presumption.