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Formal education has this way of crushing your intelligence. No one has to tell them that. Kids are very smart. They know that going to school will only fatten up their left brain, and leave the right side of their brains starving.
And not one single class on how to organize European-style protests!
They're not 30 yeat. Wait till they get a few years of the real world under their belt, they'll be screaming for times as easy as high school.
Plus I think kids, especially teenagers, like to go against the grain.
I think that teenagers are, biologically, programmed to break away from parents and other authority figures because they have to in order to go out and establish themselves as adults. I see it as the baby bird being pushed out of the nest only they jump. They don't know what they are jumping into and, in time, come to realize that mom, dad, teachers and other authority figures aren't so stupid after all but they've made the leap by the time they get there.
Formal education has this way of crushing your intelligence. No one has to tell them that. Kids are very smart. They know that going to school will only fatten up their left brain, and leave the right side of their brains starving.
And not one single class on how to organize European-style protests!
If they're that smart, the'll fatten up the right side of their brain on their own and accept that society has provided for fattening the left side and end up with a fat brain.
School, really can't fatten the right side of the brain except in that it exposes kids to things they never would be exposed to otherwise. The more exposure you have, the more creative you can be.
If they're that smart, the'll fatten up the right side of their brain on their own and accept that society has provided for fattening the left side and end up with a fat brain.
School, really can't fatten the right side of the brain except in that it exposes kids to things they never would be exposed to otherwise. The more exposure you have, the more creative you can be.
Not necessarily. Some people just can't fatten up the right side of the brain. I'm one, and I know some others. Some people, like my sister, are very heavily right brained and not exactly academic. Some people are very heavily left brained and cannot develop skills from the right brain. Yes, people on both ends of the spectrum are rare, but they do exist.
Not necessarily. Some people just can't fatten up the right side of the brain. I'm one, and I know some others. Some people, like my sister, are very heavily right brained and not exactly academic. Some people are very heavily left brained and cannot develop skills from the right brain. Yes, people on both ends of the spectrum are rare, but they do exist.
Then school couldn't do it for you either.
The only contribution I see school making to creativity is the exposure to things you wouldn't have learned on your own.
I am also very heavily left brained, however, I find that the more I learn, the more creative I become. It seems as if once you learn a critical mass of material, you start thinking of new ways to put it together. You start asking, "Does THAT apply over here?" For a very long time, what I was good at was looking at someone elses ideas and finding the issues. By the time I left engineering, I was as likely to come up with a unique solution on my own as need the help of others.
One thing you do need is exercises where you are asked to think outside of the box and let me tell you, kids HATE THOSE. They do not want open eneded assignments. They want to know what is expected of them to get that A. They cringe when I ask them to design an experiment. Most won't do it. They will copy what someone else does, right or wrong. They won't even put the thought into it to decide their neighbor is wrong.
I find that what students want is not to be taught to be creative but to be taught the steps they need to take to be successful and that's ok because real creativity is born out of knowledge. You have to know how to use the equipment in a lab in order to figure out new ways to use it. Which is why kids hate open ended assignments. They don't know enough to actually do them.
Inquiry style learning was pretty much a flop. When I tried it (as part of a research project), the vast majority of my students just stood there and waited for someone else to do something and NONE of them had any understanding of what they had just "learned" when it was done. What I could have explained in five minutes, they could not learn in an hour and a half on their own. While kids may hate the lecture and practice way of teaching, it seems to be the one that works. I'm hard pressed to get them to design an experiment AFTER I've explained the material.
I don't teach physics now but when I did, I never gave the students the instructions when we did the simple machines lab. I gave them the theory and the equipment and few of them were able to actually do something. Questions would always be about what to do not about the logic behind it. "Do I hook this up here?" "What do I do with this?" Maybe if I had an unlimited time to teach I could teach that way but I don't. And it doesn't work in chemistry because you can't see what happens. My next lab is the reaction types lab. I, highly, doubt that any of my students will realize what is happening in those test tubes if I don't tell them and even after I do, I doubt they could design an experiment to test those theories. IMO, it takes a lot of base knowlege and feeling confident in your base knowledge before you'll get adventurous. I know it took me years and a lot of education just to get to the point I'd try.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 12-24-2010 at 05:25 AM..
Let's turn this on it's ear. To those of you who think creativity can be taught in school, how would you recommend we do so? Take a typical math class or chemistry class. How would you teach creativity in them?
IMO, creativity is taught by teaching someone to do lots of different things. Look at the Johnny Lee video posted on this site. I will bet that before he could get creative and use a Wii controller to create an interactive white board he had to know a lot about how a Wii controller works. That kind of creativity is born out of knowledge.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 12-24-2010 at 06:01 AM..
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