Saturday, July 22, 2017

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

2 comments:

Kaivey said...

I feel sorry for kids nowadays. They are constantly graded and tested. School teachers want the best results because schools are compared. Everyone is under pressure.

Of course you can't have poorly performing schools which let down children but the present system is horrendous. The idea of schools in the market place is stifling natural creativity and producing unhappy children. Lots of children nowadays on medication. Another capitalist racket.

Six said...

They created a way to quantify education and mistook it for quality.