My final paper was turned in on 12/8/14. Its pretty long, but everyone that read it liked it, and some people who only read part of it wanted to read all of it.... As of right now (as I write this) I honestly don't know what grade I got, or the comments on it. Hopefully I'll get it back from my teacher when I see her in the hallways.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy my final paper in English 1113.
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ENGL 1113
8 December 2014
The Absence of Creativity in the
Classroom is Killing the Future
For years
now mass media has been inundated with this simple fact: Education is
broken. It has been put into brilliant
words by the late comedian George Carlin, “There is a reason that education
sucks. And it’s the same reason that it
will never ever, ever be fixed. It’s
never going to get any better. Don’t look
for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of the country don’t want
that.” This sounds vitriol but many
common citizens have realized this exact, same thing. He goes on to elaborate that these ‘owners of
the country’ do not want a population capable of critical thinking, they want
obedient workers. People just smart
enough to run machines and do the paperwork, yet dumb enough to accept what is
truly going on (Carlin) .
Even though
this is a very sad way to look at the situation there are many experts in the
field that add validity to what Mr. Carlin is saying. Some point at the No Child Left Behind Act of
2001, with its national focus on test scores, which led to teachers teaching
not much more than test answers (Kline) . Others point out that the problem lies far
deeper. “Now our education system is
predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole
system was invented -- around the world, there were no public systems of
education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet
the needs of industrialism” (Robinson, How Schools Kill
Creativity) .
Sir Ken
Robinson is an international advisor on education in the arts and his argument
seems to hold the most weight out of anyone’s.
In many ways he has pointed out that creativity is something that
everyone is born with. In one story he
tells, he speaks about a child that was in a play, and did not know his
line. His line was ‘frankincense’ but
the child said, “Frank sent this.” In
the story he points out, not only that the child had the creativity to at least
come up with something, the child also had the imagination to at least say something (Robinson, How
Schools Kill Creativity) .
The number one thing on a list of how to discourage creative thinking
states that one has to ingrain the idea that there is only one correct way to
answer every question, make sure that students answer tests with the precise
answer they were given in class, and tolerate no deviations. All errors or mistakes are bad and lead only
to embarrassment (Nickerson 1) .
Many a
college student comes out of high school afraid of college in some way. In classes they clam up, remaining silent,
seemingly afraid to speak, even in an environment that should breed
communication, because they are terrified of saying something incorrect. Being told by a professor or teacher that
there is no wrong answer seems to go against all the basic training they were
taught before. Why are students so
terrified of being wrong? What does that
do to the learning process?
If someone
is not prepared to be wrong, how will they ever come up with anything original (Robinson, How
Schools Kill Creativity) ?
Once upon a time there was a man who knew that making the light bulb was
a feasible idea. The concept was simple enough,
heat up a sliver of metal inside an enclosed environment, and bam! You have artificial light. The story goes that he tried anywhere between
seven hundred to ten thousand different materials for his filament, sending
people all over the world to collect things.
Eventually Thomas Edison supposedly succeeded, and when asked about it
said something like, “I have not failed ten thousand times, I have successfully
found ten thousand ways that will not work.”
No matter what form the quote takes on, or what the number in it
actually is, the message is the same, one has to not be afraid to be wrong,
because creativity depends on persistence.
If
creativity is so important, why is it stamped out in the path to adult
hood? It all comes down to what the educational
system was originally designed for. In
the era of the industrial revolution, what was needed was an educational system
would educate people enough to work in factories. If you look at it from the right angle,
school systems are just like an industrial factory, with the ringing bells,
separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. Children are educated in batches, grouped
together by their manufacture date (Robinson, Changing Education
Paradigms) .
This leads
to issues with the teachers as well. The
No Child Left Behind Act’s tests not only rate the students, but the teachers
as well. Many teachers have abandoned
activities that help children with their creative skills to simply prepare
students for this evaluative process (Baldwin 76) . With such emphasis on testing scores and
preparing students for industrial life, where does that leave graduates?
The answer
is, simply, “In a tight spot.” The job
landscape of this century is becoming more and more technical. It is hard to imagine that phasing creativity
out of education is beneficial in the slightest. Encoding a program is a tedious job, but
before one starts coding, one has to
be able to imagine what it would look like before you finish. Programs are all around us in today’s
society. We call them applications, or
apps, but the premise is still the same.
Every aspect of life around us was imagined up by someone before it even
started to be turned into a reality.
In the
factory environment, much has become computerized, with technology creeping
into every facet of the process. Without
the knowledge to truly work them, workers just get by instead of excelling at
their jobs. Just getting by hinders the
production of the worker, thus slowing down the entire machine that is the
factory. If a worker had just a little
more knowledge, combined with creativity, he just might see a way to make the
entire process better. Every great now
and then this actually happens.
Why does
this not happen more? Most workers are
perfectly fine with just getting by at their job. Some do not want to stick their neck out with
an idea and be wrong because of the embarrassment. Most others have their own reasons, but that
is another subject.
In schools
all over the country, at every level of academics, math has reached a near
satanic level of being hated. Many a
human being has a deep hatred of the subject, but a select few love it. They see it as a language, a universal
language that describes everything eloquently.
Everything that exists can be described using mathematic principles,
whereas if we wanted to describe something new in English, we’d have to make up
a new word.
The leap
from seeing a bunch of numbers on a page, to seeing a bunch of numbers as a
language takes a certain amount of creativity and imagination. One has to have the brain to see the
correlation, to make that leap that these set of numbers perfectly describes
this thing over here. Where one sees
light rays from the sun shining through the clouds making beautiful patterns in
the sky, another sees the angle the light is coming from the sun, how it is
bending through the curvature of the atmosphere, and diffusing down to the
earth itself.
Augustus de Morgan is quoted as
saying, “The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but
imagination.” Imagination comes first in
all things. Einstein is often considered
the most intelligent human being to have lived, but he is quoted as saying,
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
How can we have another Einstein, if we kill creativity and imagination
in students before they are allowed to grow up?
Stephen Hawking is a genius on a
grand level and his genius comes from his imagination, an imagination he
engages with on a constant basis because of the disease that has paralyzed his
body. He imagines something that could
exist, then backs it up with concrete math.
Many look up to Hawking and Einstein, knowing their genius is unrivaled. Many even say we need more men like
them. Those closest to them call what
they do an art. Picasso is quoted as
saying, “Every child is an artist. The
problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
The fact
that creativity is under attack is not under debate, because it is. It is being systematically removed from the
learning process so that students can do well on tests that their teachers and
school systems are graded upon. Schools should
not be factories for cranking out workers for a work environment that does not
exist anymore. The entire world is
advancing into a technological society that people are ill prepared for,
because students do not have the ability to creatively think or the imagination
to be wrong on the road to being right.
Sir Ken Robinson, in his TED
talk of 2006, said many prolific things, but he said something that should
resonate with anyone wanting to understand what is truly wrong with education
today. He said, “All kids have
tremendous talents. And we squander
them, pretty ruthlessly. My contention
is that creativity now is as important to education as literacy, and we should
treat it with the same status” (Robinson, How Schools Kill
Creativity) . The entirety of the human civilization is
poised upon a precipice, between the past and the future. The only way we will not stumble is by,
“seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our
children for the hope that they are. We
may not see this future, but they will.
And our job is to help them make something of it” (Robinson, How
Schools Kill Creativity) .
Works
Cited
Baldwin, Alexinia Young. "Creativity: A Look
Outside the Box in Classroom." Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom.
Ronald A. Bahetto and James C. Kaufman. New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press, 2010. 76. Print.
Changing Education Paradigms. By Sir Ken Robinson. Perf. Sir Ken Robinson. RSA
Animate, London, UK. 16 Jun 2008. Speech.
Edison, Thomas. Thomas Edison Quotes (Disputed).
n.d. Web. 3 December 2014.
Einstein, Albert. What Life Means to Einstein
George Sylvester Viereck. 26 October 1929. Interview.
How Schools Kill Creativity. By Sir Ken Robinson. Perf. Sir Ken Robinson.
TED2006. Febuary 2006. Speech.
Kline, Peter. Why America's Children Can't Think.
Makawao: Inner Ocean Publishing, Inc., 2002. Book.
Life is Worth Losing. By George Carlin. Perf. George Carlin. Beacon
Theater, New York City. 5 November 20015. Performance.
Morgan, Augustus De. Graves, Robert Perceval. The
Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Vol. 3. 1889. 219. Biography.
Nickerson, Raymond S. "How to Discourage
Creative Thinking in the Classroom." Nurturing Creativity in the
Classroom. Ronald A. Bahetto and James C. Kaufman. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press, 2010. 1. Print.
Picasso, Pablo. Pablo Picasso Quotes. n.d.
Web. 3 December 2014.
