About a year ago, I was looking for a good Ted Talk to watch, and I stumbled upon Ken Robinson's 2006 talk, called "Schools Kill Creativity". My view on education was forever changed. If you're reading this and you've never seen that talk, please do so! (and for that matter, watch his 2010 follow-up talk too) It helped me realize something that I notice every day now, that is, in the words of Sir Robinson, "we're educating people out of their creativity". His talk also tells a story of a little girl in a drawing class, who usually doesn't way attention, was hard at work at what she was drawing. the teacher came to investigate and asked what she was drawing. the girl responded, "I'm drawing a picture of god", the surprised teacher says ,"well no body knows what god looks like" to which the girl responded, "well, they will in a minute". now, I don't know about you, but I can't even remember the last time I attempted to picture what god looks like, let alone draw him out on a piece of paper. Why is that?
One thing I've also noticed during my progression through the education system, and something that I still notice in college, is that as people progress through their educational career, they become increasingly afraid of being wrong. In Elementary, everybody raised their hand to answer the teacher's question, when middle school came around, about half of the people were willing to answer the question, and when I was in high school, it pretty much boiled down to 5-10 people per class answering the question. In some of my college classes, it's lucky if someone even gives the question a go. Now, much like in Robinson's talk, I'm not saying to be wrong is to be creative, but if one is unwilling to be wrong, he or she will never be able to give themselves to a creative idea. In my opinion this stigma associated with being wrong is largely the fault of our education system. Fail once or twice in your educational career now a days, and it's like the world is over. It's almost like the world has forgotten that the best lessons learned come right after a failure.
Another thing our education system does, is make amazingly talented people who are passionate and brilliant in their own right think they're inadequate. This goes back to Einstein's quote saying "everyone's a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will believe its whole live believing that it is stupid" This is because the thing these people were good at wasn't valued by our education system. This is something that I've been guilty of for so long and I still have to struggle to not fall into this. I used to tell my friends who wanted to study something in college they were passionate about things like "Don't do that, you'll never find a job doing something like that". But now I believe that people would be most efficient, doing work for things they feel passionate most about. I also think people would be happier doing the thing they feel most passionate about for a living no matter what amount of money they're making.
I think in every class, no matter what the subject is, should be taught in a matter that evokes the most creativity out of the student as possible. I think we should move more towards this because in the age of the internet, knowledge of cold facts are practically useless, we are moving towards a society that values creativity nearly above all. I believe math should be taught in a way where the computation takes a back seat and the actual development of a problem is focused on. How do we take a real world problem, convert it into a mathematical expression, solve it, and convert it back into a real world solution? the computation is only a single step in the process and it is soon becoming the least important for humans to do. I believe that if we shift our attention towards evoking creativity, our whole world would profit so much more. At the end of Ken Robinson's second talk in 2010 he says, "every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet, and we should tread softly".
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