Category: Essays

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School Destroys Creativity

One of the most ironic things I read about these days is about schools attempting to teach creativity.

I am not saying that there are no creative teachers, or those who valiantly attempt this lofty task, who break the mold and sometimes ignore protocol and tradition to achieve this goal. I am saying that the traditional structure of school itself is geared towards the suppression of creativity.

Children are not uncreative to begin with, in fact, they are the most creative creatures ever. Their imagination is boundless. They know no limits. They see possibilities, not problems, in every situation. They are simply bursting with creative energy from the moment they were babies. Anybody who has had to raise children or has interacted with toddlers will attest to this. 

So what happened? Why do schools now think that it is important to teach creativity? (I remember back when I was teaching high school, we teachers were made to attend a seminar on creative thinking, which turned out to be quite uncreative and forgettable as I don’t remember a single thing about it other than being there, and probably heckling the speaker).

The structure of school itself kills creativity. The child, bubbling with ideas, is now told to sit, listen to teacher and copy what she writes on the board. Anyone challenging her authority will be the object of various disciplinary measures designed to control the classroom environment. Woe to the teacher whose supervisor passes by and observes an unruly classroom.

So the artist soon learns that even if her drawings draw oohs and ahhs from her classmates, they are not worth much if she keeps failing her math quizzes. The dancer is made to sit still. The comedian is told to shut up. The dreamer is told to focus on “more important things” like grammar and the multiplication table.

For roughly 10 months out of a year, students lives are neatly organized into tiny compartments of time. The first hour is for Math, the second for Science, then English, then Social Studies, then FIlipino, then arts or music or something else. They are then tested, graded, classified and labeled according to how they perform in this narrow band of human knowledge deemed by experts as “basic”and “essential” — by what conceivable metric no one knows.

The whole system is naturally geared towards conformity, not creativity. In fact, it is a systematic drowning of creativity — which is why it is laughable that it is now seeing the need to introduce (or reintroduce) it — because it was the one that murdered creativity in the first place.

Author and self-directed education advocate, Kerry Mcdonald, says “It’s our antiquated system of forced schooling that was designed to crush creativity in the name of conformity…Young people who learn without school, or in other non-coercive learning environments, retain their natural creativity and curiosity. We don’t need to rekindle creativity; we need to stop destroying it.”

Amen to that.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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Two Parables on Holiness

One

News spread around the city that a holy man had taken residence there, in one of the outlying villages. Now, this was a true holy man, unlike many self-proclaimed charlatans or sons of god or some other such nonsense.

The mayor heard about this man and went to look for him, searching from village to village. Finally, in one of the villages, someone pointed him to a solitary hut away from the rest of the other houses.

He came upon a thin young boy in dirty clothes chopping wood outside the hut. His hair was unkempt and drenched in sweat. “This must be the holy man’s servant boy,” thought the mayor. 

He called the boy and said, “Hey there, I would like to seek advice from the holy man. May I come in and see him?”

“Of course,” said the boy. “Please come in.”

The mayor stepped inside the hut, which contained only a small table, a couple of old chairs, some utensils and a cot in the corner. He looked around, wondering where the holy man would come from. The boy sat in the corner and grinned, “So what seems to be troubling you, sir?”

“I don’t understand,” said the mayor. “I said I wanted to see the holy man.”

“You already are,” said the boy. “And if you want my advice, here it is. See every man or woman you meet as holy. That should take care of most of your problems.”

Two

A pilgrim stopped by a temple where the head monk was famous for his holiness. “Where is this holy monk?” He asked one of the disciples outside.

The disciple ushered him inside the temple and led him down a narrow corridor with a door at the end. As they approached the door, the pilgrim heard loud noises coming from the door, and as he drew nearer, he heard boisterous laughter, loud music, and sounds of merrymaking. 

The disciple opened the door and pointed to the head monk, standing on a table holding a bottle of wine and dancing to the music. There were other people all around cheering him on, laughing and clapping.

The pilgrim turned to the disciple who had led him there. “This is an outrage,” he said. “I thought that this monk was supposed to be holy.”

“Oh, he is a holy man,” replied the disciple. “It is one thing for a man to be holy, and it is a totally different thing that he should seem holy to you. Who are you to judge what is holy or not?”

He who has ears, let him hear.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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The Gift of Time (Part 2)

Last week, I said that as an educator, and as a parent, I believe the best gift we can give our kids is the gift of time.

I am not just talking about a father taking a break from work and bringing his son camping in the woods. I am not merely referring to a mother adjusting her busy schedule to spend an afternoon with her teenage daughter. I am talking about breaking the spell that adults have placed on children called mass schooling and compulsory education — which for the large part involves taking a huge chunk of children’s time, dividing them up into neat little compartments called “classes” in which they do what adults have deemed is best for them to do, without regard for what they think or feel about the matter.

One of my favorite chapters in the book, Free At Last: The Sudbury Valley School, by Daniel Greenberg, is Chapter 18, Time Enough, and it starts:

“There are no bells at Sudbury Valley. No ‘periods.’ The time spent on any activity evolves from within each participant. It’s always the amount of time the person wants and needs. It’s always the right amount of time.”

Here, children are given enough time to do what they want, as long as they want. What they deem as important is respected. No adult comes to them and says, “Hey, you’re wasting time doing that. Why don’t you spend your time being more productive?”

“Jacob seats himself before the potter’s wheel. He is thirteen years old. It is 10:30AM. He gets ready, and starts throwing pots. An hour passes. Two hours. Activities swirl around him. His friends start a game of soccer, without him. Three hours. At 2:15 he rises from the wheel. Today, he has nothing to show for his efforts. Not a single pot satisfied him.

Next day, he tries again. This time, he rises at 1:00 after finishing three specimens he likes.

Thomas and Nathan, aged eleven, begin a game of Dungeons and Dragons at 9:00. It isn’t over by 5:00. Nor by 5:00 the next day. On the third day, they wrap it up at 2:00.

Shirley, nine, curls up in a chair and starts to read a book. She continues at home, and the next three days, until it is finished…

Time is not a commodity at Sudbury Valley. It is not ‘used,’ either poorly or well. It is not ‘wasted’ or ‘saved.’

Time here is a measure of the inner rhythm of life, in all its complexity. As each string of events unfolds, the time appropriate to that string elapses with it…

Year after year at school, I have watched as each child’s growth unfolded according to their own sense of time. I saw children spring forward, and then stay steadily in place for a seeming eternity. I saw people dream, and then ever so slowly drift back to earth.”

I am working for such a school to be reality in our city.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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The Gift of Time (Part 1)

American author, Robert Byrne once said, “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”

If you read biographies of people, you will find that many of the most accomplished and successful people (and I’m not just speaking in economic terms) are those who have a deep sense of purpose. It is what keeps them going in times of deep loss, discouragement, disaster, or despair.

And yet many people go through life without finding their purpose. They live an empty and hollow existence, and it doesn’t matter whether they are rich or poor, whether they are famous, intelligent, or talented. We have had our fair share of rich, famous, intelligent and talented people taking their own lives, perhaps wanting to end the meaninglessness of it all.

To find one’s purpose requires a great deal of time — time to explore one’s inner world, time to reflect, to think, to dream, and act and experiment on those dreams. The best time to do that is during one’s childhood and teenage years — when one is still relatively free from the obligations and responsibilities of adulthood.

But then there is the reality called school, and quite frankly, school robs children of their time — it divides their day into neat partitions of topics deemed important by others (though rarely explained why). It tells them what to wear, and what to read, and how to speak, and how to walk and how to behave. It tells them (explicitly or implicitly) what professions one should aspire for simply by the importance it puts on certain subjects — mathematics and sciences are often on top — and therefore professions which heavily use them are to be admired. The young boy who proudly declares, “I’m going to be an engineer” is more widely applauded than one who declares, “I want to be an actor.”

School haunts children even after school hours with endless homework and readings and papers to write. Parents obsessed with having kids graduate with top honors hire tutors for additional instruction after school.

This is not to blame parents, teachers or administrators of schools. They are just trapped in the system, and most of them have the child’s best interests at heart — only they are boxed in the framework they understand because that is how they grew up, and how most of us grew up. It is difficult to shift paradigms and look at things from another point of view when you yourself have been so inculcated in it.

But as an educator, and as a parent, I believe the best gift we can give our kids is the gift of time.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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What Are Schools For? (Part 6)

The fourth and last purpose of education, according to Robinson,  is personal: “Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them.”

He then distinguishes between these two worlds: “There is the world that exists whether or not you exist. It was there before you came into it, and it will be there when you have gone. This is the world of objects, events and other people…There is another world that exists only because you exist: the private world of your own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions…This world came into being when you did, and it will cease when you do.”

Conventional education focuses a lot on the world around us — scientific and mathematical  principles, historical data, language, grammar, and literature, and a little of the arts. Very little attention is given to the world within us — to our own thoughts, feelings and desires. In fact, they are hardly considered at all in school.

The teacher walks into his class, fully expecting you to listen and pay attention to what he is teaching; never mind that you are not interested, or falling in love, or having a fight with your parents, or just lost your dog, or just plain sleepy.

Even subjects that are meant to explore one’s inner world are given external and academic trappings — values education become just another list of things to memorize. Art and music focus more on learning what others have created and again memorizing what others have done instead of becoming a means of self-expression.

So called educational “experts” miss this very important point: “We only know the world around us through the world within us, through the senses by which we perceive it and the ideas by which we make sense of it.”

Is it any wonder then that most kids in school, even those that do well, are bored, disengaged, uninterested, stressed, anxious or even depressed?

Children are not incomplete humans needing to be filled with “basic knowledge.” They are not broken people who need to be fixed. They ought to be seen as unique individuals with their own special set of aptitudes, attitudes, personalities, interests and ambitions. Not one fits into the mold of a “model student” because no such mold and no such student exists.

Education must first allow people to connect with themselves, to understand their own thoughts, feelings and desires, to be attuned with who they really are, to attend to the world within, before it begins to engage with the world around. That is, in fact, what children are doing from the moment they are born. They are continually trying to understand the world within them as well as the world around them.

They do this as they learn to coordinate their different body parts, to grab things, to taste them and smell them, to roll around , then crawl, then walk, then run and play and dance and sing.

Sadly we interrupt this process of self-discovery with school and give the world around them too much importance, while the world within them suffers and cries in silence.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.