

Do Schools Kill Creativity? - rafaelc
http://www.learnboost.com/do-schools-kill-creativity/

======
ks
This quote should be printed out and put on the wall:

 _"They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like
this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national
education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the
result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities."_

I think this is one of the reasons why start-ups and small companies are often
more flexible than larger companies. In a small group you know that even if a
person makes a mistake, that person can be great.

When you add more layers of people between an employee and the person who
controls your career and salary, the employee is more likely to be measured
using statistics. A failure will stand out and could impact the salary.

~~~
yason
Mistakes are essential for learning, growth, and becoming great.

Corollary: While great people don't make the easy mistakes any longer, they'll
focus on making great mistakes because that's where they're learning _at_.

~~~
Ardit20
Mistakes might be great for learning, but that does not mean that they should
be praised, or that there should not be disincentives for making mistakes.

Mistakes have consequences, great mistakes have great consequences. I do not
therefore think that great people make great mistakes. Otherwise, we probably
would not know of their existence.

~~~
yason
They _should_ be praised. Fear mistakes, fear disincentives, avoid any
consequences, and you fear life!

By definition of what a mistake is, you certainly don't want to make mistakes
as soon as you've learned how to do (what you want to do) without making them.
By merely making mistakes, any mistakes, you won't grow.

But you know that you're growing in life when you gain new problems to replace
the old problems. And when you're working on something new, you'll always be
making mistakes. New mistakes. It's those you don't want to fear,
disincentivize, or avoid.

If you don't make mistakes, you're either too shy to not challenge yourself on
anything you might not know well enough already, or you're the perfection
itself and you know everything already.

~~~
Ardit20
Depending on the context not challenging yourself or being too shy might be a
mistake in itself.

I do think many of us do not like mistakes, do not purposely aim for them, do
try not to make mistakes, etcetera, but we still do make mistakes. Just
because we dislike something does not mean that something does not occur.

I agree with you, we grow by making mistakes, where I disagree is that
children should be free to do whatever they wish, yeah shoot that man, yeh boy
go in front of the car, yes child do not do your homework, yes give the wrong
answer to 2+2.

So I think my point is that mistakes are not a great thing, are not something
to be romanticised, idolised, whatever. They have a use of course, but the
consequences of mistakes can be painful.

Also, we have been taught all our life to be conformist, yet many of us do not
always conform, we have been taught all our life to not make mistakes, yet
many of us do not live in absolute fear of making mistakes, are not completely
stagnant and do nothing but lay in our bed all day for otherwise we might make
a mistake.

------
boredguy8
Not much more than any other source of growing up. From "Free Play:
Improvisation in Life and Art" by Stephen Nachmanovitch:

"Schools can nurture creativity in children, but they can also destroy it, and
all too often do. Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning
and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the
future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the
marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers."

....

"But we have not yet gotten down to the marrow of the matter. We have been
talking as though there were something called "society" that defends itself
against creativity by all the means we've mentioned above: education,
specialization, fear of the new, fear of raw creative power. There is no such
thing as society, there is no such thing as institutions, schools, the media,
and the rest of it. There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing
their imperfect jobs. The marrow of the matter is that however we might
restructure society, however many resources an enlightened regime might bestow
on the fostering of creativity and the arts and sciences and freewheeling
education dedicated to the deep exploration of mind, spirit, and heart, we
would still be in the same soup. There is something called growing up, which
happens to us no matter what our circumstances. We all have learned what it
feels like to be betrayed for the first time, the second time, the third time,
when our innocence gets stripped away, and we jump from innocence to
experience. There is a point, or rather a long series of points, at which our
innocence and free play of imagination and desire collides with reality, with
the limits of is and is not, with the limits of what can and cannot be.

"Everything we have said so far should not be construed merely as an
indictment of the big bad schools, or the media or other societal factors. We
could redesign many aspects of society in a more wholesome way--and we ought
to--but even then art would not be easy. The fact is that we cannot avoid
childhood's end; the free play of imagination creates illusions, and illusions
bump into reality and get disillusioned. Getting disillusioned, presumably, is
a fine thing, the essence of learning; but it hurts. If you think that you
could have avoided the disenchantment of childhood's end by having had some
advantage--a more enlightened education, more money or other material
benefits, a great teacher--talk to someone who has had those advantages, and
you will find that they bump into just as much disillusionment because the
fundamental blockages are not external but part of us, part of life. In any
case, the child's delightful pictures of trees mentioned at the beginning of
this chapter would probably not be art if they came from the hands of an
adult. The difference between the child's drawings and the childlike drawing
of a Picasso resides not only in Picasso's impeccable mastery of craft, but in
the fact that Picasso had actually grown up, undergone hard experience, and
transcended it."

------
ThomPete
This exactly what Seymore Papert talks about in Mindstorms. he uses debugging
as a method to teach children to not fear making mistakes. In fact mistakes
are the norm. Written in the eighties. That's how education should be done.

------
xenophanes
Yes.

<http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/>

<http://groups.google.com/group/taking-children-seriously/>

------
code_duck
Yes, schools exist to teach social conformity and to prepare you for a
lifetime of working for corporations.

There is no question that part of this involves absolutely smothering
creativity. Whether it is a primary goal or a side effect, I'm not sure.

------
pinchyfingers
I watched this video a few times over the past couple years. Of course,
schools kill creativity, but the real sad part is that schools were always
designed to kill creativity and the nature of mass education will never
change.

Excelling in school is training to be a worker/consumer. I won't knock this
lifestyle, but I wouldn't expect the most innovative artists, musicians,
entrepreneurs, and leaders to be people who fit in really well in the mass
education system.

School is simply a detention center for the masses, and we all know this, even
if we're not willing to accept the facts and the consequences.

------
TGJ
Stop the trend of athletics over art and that might help creativity.

Remove the federal government from schools to stop the standardization of the
school system and that might help.

Try to change the way smart kids are thought of in school and make it where
they are the cool kids.

Stop giving medals and trophies to every kid and only to those who win. If
students realize that they are going to have to work to be #1 then they might
get more creative.

Just some thoughts.

------
jcw
Grade school nurtured my creativity. The only way I could get through the
boredom of it was through sketching and daydreaming.

~~~
jamesbritt
I've thought that about my years in parochial schools. They're like training
grounds or boot camp. Kids tend to either get molded into docile worker bees,
or develop a skewed sense of humor and the mental wherewithal to get over
without getting kicked out.

------
kvs
Mindless consuming kills creativity; whether at school or at home. Got to stop
that and engage people to _do something_ of their own.

------
tkahn6
School only kills creativity if you let it. Unfortunately, in general, to
really succeed at school (and I say 'at school' to mean school as a system),
you _cannot_ take risks. It's a simple transaction: You give us your _time_
(and that is really what you are giving up) and we give you a good grade.
Points off for deviating from or questioning the standard model.

I just graduated high school. My English teacher, who's class I found
interesting most of the time, said for a final grade: memorize 25 lines of
Shakespeare and recite for an A.

Fuck that, I'll go learn C or something. (To his credit, he didn't count the
grade when I flat out refused to do the assignment)

School, for the most part, is about memorizing and convincing teachers to give
you a good grade. That's all it is. _It's a game_ where the goal is to get the
highest GPA regardless of what it's supposed to represent. Every one once in a
while, I would get a teacher who understood that the purpose of school is
education, that students are there to learn. Definitely those were my favorite
classes.

And while we're talking about schools I'd like to rant about AP Computer
Science: I find it offensive that they actually have the balls to call it
'Computer Science'. I took the AP test, got a 5. It should be called "Can You
Recall Some Peculiarities of Java Off Hand?". Thousands of kids have taken
this class, they've memorized a few facts about Java, and now they think
that's what Computer Science is all about.

~~~
julius_geezer
Frankly, there are a lot of worse ways to spend your time than memorizing some
lines of Shakespeare. Of course, one would prefer to have one's choice and not
get stuck with a real dog of a passage.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
I wish I could upvote you higher. The ability to commit complex information to
memory is an immensely valuable building block for creativity. It's sad when
education is _only_ memorization and it's equally sad when education
_neglects_ memorization.

~~~
tkahn6
I fail to see how lines from Shakespeare are 'complex [pieces of]
information'. They're just words arranged in a particular order.

When memorization happens out of convenience that's a great thing. I have no
problem asking students to memorize the derivatives of transcendental
functions after they have derived them. It's good to memorize things that
appear frequently in the line of work.

For what purpose does memorizing Shakespeare serve?

~~~
ant5
_For what purpose does memorizing Shakespeare serve?_

Shakespeare is clever, bawdy, and often amusing, and you have to be even more
clever to understand it. A lot his wordplay is based on idioms no longer in
active use.

Take, for example, Act 1, Scene 1 ([http://www.shakespeare-
literature.com/Romeo_and_Juliet/2.htm...](http://www.shakespeare-
literature.com/Romeo_and_Juliet/2.html))

SAMPSON

    
    
      'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I 
      have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the 
      maids, and cut off their heads. 
    

GREGORY

    
    
      The heads of the maids? 
    

SAMPSON

    
    
      Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads; 
      take it in what sense thou wilt.
    

'Maidenheads' as a colloquial term for a woman's virginity (or more crudely,
her hymen).

Or Act 1, Scene 3

NURSE

    
    
      And since that time it is eleven years; 
      For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood, 
      She could have run and waddled all about; 
      For even the day before, she broke her brow: 
      And then my husband--God be with his soul! 
      A' was a merry man--took up the child: 
      'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face? 
      Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit; 
      Wilt thou not, Jule?' and, by my holidame, 
      The pretty wretch left crying and said 'Ay.' 
      To see, now, how a jest shall come about! 
      I warrant, an I should live a thousand years, 
      I never should forget it: 'Wilt thou not, Jule?' quoth he; 
      And, pretty fool, it stinted and said 'Ay.' 
    

The nurse is speaking of her husband and Juliet. As a small child, she
'waddled all about', fell on her face and 'broke her bow'. The husband asks,
amused -- when you have more wit, will you not fall on your back? The young
Juliet clearly innocently replies 'Ay', likely sending everyone tittering --
to fall on her back when she has more wit is an oblique reference to her
having sex (on her back) when she's older (has more wit).

It's crude, inappropriate, and -- at least to me -- pretty damn funny, in the
story's context. It also has a hell of a lot to do with "words arranged in a
particular order", and the nuances of the meanings of words. Memorizing it
forces you to study the text more deeply than you likely have before.

I've never made use of Shakespeare as a programmer, but I still remember
reading his works in school -- and the significant appreciation I had for the
art and cleverness of it. I even memorized the entire Queen Mab Speech for
extra credit (I'm glad I didn't refuse!). It did help that I went to a private
school where the teacher was intelligent enough to explain the word-play to
us, and didn't avoid the less appropriate aspects of it.

~~~
tkahn6
I've found that process of deciphering Shakespeare is as exhilarating as
attempting to comprehend a new topic in mathematics. It feels like I'm using
the same parts of my brain. I do really enjoy reading and understanding
Shakespeare.

Memorizing Shakespeare, though, has nothing to do with this process. Of course
one needs a working memory of the text to put it all in context, but rote
memorization of a passage is orthogonal to understanding it.

~~~
mquander
Asking students to memorize Shakespeare is a proxy for asking them to
understand it. By asking them to memorize it, anyone with an intellect and an
interest will take the opportunity to study it, while still leaving incapable
students with a way to make the grade.

If you don't think that incapable high school students ought to have a way to
make the grade, you have a problem with a lot more than this teacher's
assignment.

That said, I think there are much worse things a teenager could do with his
time than simply memorizing passages of literature. The art that lives in my
mind has given me great comfort and inspiration already in my short life.

~~~
tkahn6
That's an interesting perspective. I think you may be right. The problem is
that, when I've understood a passage from Shakespeare -- really understood it
-- I still cannot recite it verbatim. I can tell you what it means, I could
write a paper on it if you wanted me to, but memorizing it and being able to
repeat it back to you word for word has nothing to do with my understanding of
it. So, in my experience, it's a really poor proxy to assess one's
understanding of the text.

------
zokier
_We don't need no education

We dont need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.

All in all you're just another brick in the wall._

