Do schools kill creativity? Very much so. My son is a school teacher and over the years he has had roles that were supposed to encourage teachers to be more effective in creating an environment for helping students to be more interested in learning.
The vast majority of teachers that he had to deal with have no interest is seeing their students become more interested or creative. The teachers were there time-serving their job or focused on political activism.
He and I have had discussions over the years and one of his concerns is that creativity and interest in learning had to be encouraged in the younger students (primary school, grades 1 - 4). Instead it appeared to be beaten out of the students (figuratively speaking by teachers having little or no interest in providing such environments).
Certainly, teachers were encouraged to do certain activities but these things were not focused on encouraging students to think, to be creative or to be interested in learning.
His view was that by the time students reached grade 7, they were no longer interested in learning or thinking as all of this "stuff" was just plain boring and had no applicability to their social lives.
As an educator who repeatedly gets feedback how good my classes are I have no problem sparking creativity. But let it be said: Teaching is damn hard.
Now I teach at the university level, but this only makes certain things (the material) harder and others (the teaching) way easier. Maybe after the pandemic some people understand this more than before — the hard part isn't the material, it is getting a group of wildly different people (kids) on board with the material you are teaching, help them to focus, to see the light, to get through material they don't understand etc.
If you don't totally burn for the material (and doing so is unliklier with the typically stiffer curriculum on schools) — it will take a lot of effort to pull this off in a good way. Effort that not every teacher will be able to muster under crunching work loads, where the preperation has to be done at home. Effort that doesn't pay the bills better. Good teachers are purely idealists. They receive no incentive to be good teachers other than their own intrinsic motivation.
So the problem the system has to prevent first and foremost is to enable average educators to teach better, because finding enough exceptional educators will not be possible. And you do this by adjusting the incentive structure.
Um... teachers who were focused on political activism had no interest in seeing their students become more creative? That sounds counterintuitive. Can you clarify?
If you look at any sort of political activism, there tends to be a tendency for the promulgation of dogma. Now not every activist does this and you will find that these kinds of people tend to be willing to discuss and defend their positions in reasonable and logical manner. But many activists don't seem to be able to discuss and defend, they want to shout down and heckle.
As for many teachers who are focused on political activism, when challenged by their own students, they seem to just get very upset at their students or the students' parents if taken to task over the particular activism taken.
Now, if you haven't seen this then you have been very fortunate.
My memory of "creative writing" in school is that it was very effective at killing any desire to write.
The usual scenario was to be given a title (e.g. "The Yellow Door"), a word count and a deadline, and told to produce something interesting. Should that be a story that might in any way be considered "pulp" (involving war, horror, fantasy or science fiction themes, for example) it would be judged a failure. It would probably be judged a failure anyway, without explanation other than "badly written, I didn't enjoy having to read that."
Perhaps I was simply a bad writer as a child, but "that was bad, try again" without guidance as to how to make it better, and some form of public humiliation each time (e.g. reading out grades or even extracts of stories as examples of what not to do), did not improve my skills.
School is pretty bad for anything where failure is the best way to learn. I'm pretty sure no one has ever become a good fiction writer without putting out hundreds of pages worth of crap first.
I'd argue it's doing exactly what it's supposed to.
> Should that be a story that might in any way be considered "pulp" (involving war, horror, fantasy or science fiction themes, for example) it would be judged a failure.
There's nothing creative about being given an assignment and jumping straight to topics you're familiar with. Where is the challenge? What do you learn? This is why all fanfiction is terrible-- there are no constraints, not even adherence to canon. Making two straight characters plow each other and go about their business as usual isn't creativity, it's pornography.
Creativity comes from being given a medium and a direction and being told to shape something from it within constraints. It's no different from art class and being given a block of grey clay. Rounding the edges off of it and saying "look, I made something we both recognize as a ball" isn't a creative endeavor. It's laziness. Had you hollowed it out, you'd have a container. You couldn't have at least made a lantern?
The point of these dumbass writing exercises is to subvert them. That's where you sharpen your creative edge. "What the fuck is a Yellow Door, anyway? A portal to an outhouse? What happens if someone falls into it? Do they swim through a literal poop chute and surface in the bog of eternal stench known as Scatlanta? What if that city was built inside the lower intestine of a colossal organism? What if it were at risk of being wiped out by a tidal wave of diarrhea? How would we evacuate an entire city through a single Yellow Door?" (pun intended)
Anytime you think you're done, always be asking what else can you do with this. It's how you find new ways to repurpose garbage to make...art.
Start with utter contempt for the subject and chisel away at the obscenity until something palatable surfaces. Now we get to the actual story: a disaster story, exploring the impossible logistics of evacuating a city ahead of a cataclysmic event. If everyone must evacuate through the Door, who deserves to go through first? Would a mercenary band of thugs (the Rear Admirals?) seize it and charge a toll? Are the people even worth saving, or would they bring disease with them and decimate their next host? Should we evacuate the people-- or route the tidal wave itself through the door instead? Would make for a hell of a geyser.
This entire world was fleshed out from a thought exercise equating the assignment to literal shit.
Prisoners (and the poor) are the most creative of any demographic. They aren't given materials, only constraints. They'll make weapons out of mundane objects, paint with their own blood and feces, turn plumbing into communications networks, distill alcohol, braid fabric into rope, invent languages and encryption/obfuscation methods, etc. Constraints don't stop them. They're what drive creativity.
> I'd argue it's doing exactly what it's supposed to.
What were creative writing lessons at school supposed to do?
If the answer was to enable me to write adequate fiction, and to gain enjoyment from doing so, then such classes were a complete failure.
> There's nothing creative about being given an assignment and jumping straight to topics you're familiar with.
I am not necessarily familiar with all the topics mentioned... ;-)
Nevetheless, the reasoning given at the time was not yours, but simply that these topics don't constitute proper literature and are therefore not valid topics for creative writing assignments.
I have no memory of ever hearing anything along the lines of what you have said above.
Come to think of it, the music and art lessons weren't very good either. Any success I have had along those lines (music) has been since leaving school and not involving anything I learned there.
If schools kill creativity, then so does every institution. That's a view fundamentally incompatible with civilization.
School isn't everything. Every good parent teaches this. Creativity is a personal pursuit that demands time made for it like anything else. School isn't really the proper place for positive reinforcement of that. Teachers are overburdened enough. For some people it turns out that creativity isn't even a meaningful goal beyond knowing how to think fast in tough situations. It's not realistic to cater to every student's whims and preferences (especially if they're driven by asshole opinionated parents who can't finish their little project). Even the alternative-to-public schools that claim to do this are just creating cultural echo chambers and stunting the student.
> Creativity is a personal pursuit that demands time made for it like anything else. School isn't really the proper place for positive reinforcement of that. Teachers are overburdened enough.
It feels like that's starting from the wrong end though — teachers are over-burdened because of the way the education system is set-up; it's a symptom of the status quo rather than a reason that we shouldn't change it.
I think if we say "School is where you go to learn academic stuff only; there's other places for everything else", then we waste a big opportunity.
If instead of tieing ourselves to the current system as a model, if we just started from a blank sheet & the premise — "School is where we allow every kid the opportunity to spend 14 years preparing for life after that. What's the best way to use that time?" — I don't think we'd end up where we are now.
> teachers are over-burdened because of the way the education system is set-up
I disagree. People have been banging on this drum for so long over the course of at least a century and even tried to put their money where there mouth is only to end up with no meaningful difference.
Schools simply don't have as big of an impact as people think they do. It really is up to the parents and the student.
>Schools simply don't have as big of an impact as people think they do.
I think this is probably correct. I remember reading a paper that showed if you take into account the ability of their intake then private schools don't have much of an advantage over state education.
Private schools probably have even more of an incentive than public schools to optimize for meeting entrance requirements for universities over optimizing for preparing for life.
I went to a pretty mediocre public school that had a serious drug problem (metal detectors, drug-searching dogs, etc.) and I actually think that learning to navigate the broken landscape of such an institution was itself an education in applied creativity – and probably more applicable to the real world than the academically-better but more rule-following schools.
I imagine that the better schools prepare one for operating in operating within societal institutions, Ivy League, etc. but can actually be detrimental if you're trying to establish something radically innovative or operate in a way that isn't already accepted as "elite" by society.
I appreciate your positive view on the topic. This is right in many ways. On the other hand I think innovation is very made up nowadays. So to really innovate you will probably need your elite network, funding, connections ... much more than knowing how to manage sub optimal conditions.
That's true, but I'm not sure if this is really a new thing, or if it's always been the case.
I do think that if you want to be the proverbial "guy in the garage inventing the future," it's probably better to be a liberal arts school dropout / kicked out of a state university (Jobs + Wozniak) than coming from Harvard (Gates.) But for such people, there may be zero correlation between real innovation and financial reward.
Civilization kills creativity. You have to be pretty docile to fit into society. That’s very different from how we evolved to function. The way we work best is the simplest way possible. Don’t like someone? Physically hurt them. Want something? Take it. Don’t want to do something? Force someone else to do it. But obviously that’s incompatible with any form of society.
I find this depends on the class sizes etc that affect the teachers’ willingness to work in more interesting/creative things. It’s hard to come up with creative projects and help/manage/grade them for 35 kids, but it’s great for 15.
Schools are a hot topic these days where I am (Quebec) as we're going into the fifth week of schools being closed in our area because of strikes. Someone I was talking to the other day wondered how the schools would catch up this huge loss of time, and we got to talking about what it is that schools actually teach, and how much of it is relevant. Maybe someone in our school system will ask the same question: for these kids, who will be growing up during arguably one of the most challenging periods in humanity (dealing with the terrible condition of the world their previous generations have left them), what can we teach them now that will be most relevant during their lives? Maybe it's ok if they don't remember that Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia, or maybe they can calculate less lengths of hypotenuses. Instead maybe scrap a big part of this old curriculum, and teach them to think creatively, and work on their awareness of things like environmental challenges, right wing populism.
The vast majority of teachers that he had to deal with have no interest is seeing their students become more interested or creative. The teachers were there time-serving their job or focused on political activism.
He and I have had discussions over the years and one of his concerns is that creativity and interest in learning had to be encouraged in the younger students (primary school, grades 1 - 4). Instead it appeared to be beaten out of the students (figuratively speaking by teachers having little or no interest in providing such environments).
Certainly, teachers were encouraged to do certain activities but these things were not focused on encouraging students to think, to be creative or to be interested in learning.
His view was that by the time students reached grade 7, they were no longer interested in learning or thinking as all of this "stuff" was just plain boring and had no applicability to their social lives.