Are schools killing creativity?
Sir Ken Robinson makes a case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2009/11/02/ted.sir.ken.robinson.ted
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Sir Ken Robinson: We're born with great natural talents
- He says schools systematically suppress many of those innate talents
- Schools use testing and other systems to narrowly assess students, he says
- He says they devalue forms of creativity that don't fit in academic contexts
9 comments:
This guy has a point. However, without the elementary background of reading, writing, and arithmetic, our children will not move forward.
He is focusing on the fact that much in our society does not allow us, train us, or prepare us to "fail". Many business books have been written on this skill and how we must be able to fail, get up, change direction, and move on. When we fit in a mold of what we should be like(a professor of a college like he said), creativity is killed.
Elementry school focuses on the success of the student in a narrow set of areas. However, for our family anyway, our children need these narrow disciplines to succeed in everything else. It is up to us as parents to provide this creative avenue initially and then work as they approach higher education to open up avenues for them to discover for themselves.
These avenues can exist anywhere, school, church, businesses of parents, volunteer areas, vacations, home.
Interesting and should be a rally cry for the parents to get involved in their kids life.
I can't help but comment on one very small point in anonymous's response. .."without the elementary background of reading, writing, and arithmetic, our children will not move forward." p.s. our kids are NOT taught to "write".
In 8th grade they can print but barely "write" in cursive. The justicfication? They text, they have laptops to take notes on in high school and college. So therefore there is no need to know cursive? Are we not moving backwards here? According to my kids, Pleasantdale spends about 2 weeks in 3rd or 4th grade learning the basics of forming cursive letters. That's it, never again are they asked to "write". Not all schools exclude cursive but Pleasantdale does.
Why, you may wonder? Perhaps its because teachers don't have enough time in the curriculum when they are also taking breaks to teach to the standardized tests. Again, is this for the betterment of the children or the pockets of the administration who receive bonuses and credibility if the kids score high on the standardized tests?!
Standardized tests are designed to check where are kids are in relationship to other students across the state and country. It reflects on our teaching and our curriculums. Pleasantdale, rather than face the truth, chooses to over-prepare students and drill them and force homework practice for the test on them. This all certainly effects test results and skews the whole perspective. However, if the kids do better, it sure makes the school look good...! What about the kids Unpleasantdale? Cursive writing is a skill they may actually need as they mature. Your pockets are already rich enough for most of our tastes and it would be refreshing for the community to know where our kids actually stand in relation to other kids not being primed and forced to complete tons of practice test questions. I believe one of my children was told to complete a 30 page booklet (10 questions on a page) in just one night as preparation for one standardized test. That was on top of the normal homework load for 5th graders of several hours. When will the children become the first priority?
How 'bout this parents? Join some of us who have researched this topic and send a strong message to our school district. The only test that our children really must take is the ISAT. The other tests you can opt your children out and tell the principals that they will not be taking those tests. At the very least, don't make your kids do the test preparation at home. It is against the test philosophy and skews the results.
One Teacher’s
Philosophy of Education
I believe education begins at birth and continues throughout our lives. The education process I implement will create individuals that are life long learners.
Creating life long learners is a function of curriculum design that operates in conjunction with life experiences. Learning is not an end in itself. It must relate to real life experiences where it can be utilized and applied. The end result is an individual who will be a productive member of society.
It is imperative that I prepare individuals to hold productive jobs, be socially responsible and environmentally conscious. As our natural resources become increasingly scarce and as the world becomes more competitive, schools must nurture and develop individuals to be productive, creative and resourceful in order to adapt to an ever changing environment.
Every child deserves an opportunity to achieve. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to develop the necessary skills and open the door to the future.
All,
Well said in the post above from a teacher.
Prior posts and the original video talk about schools killing creativity, testing too much, testing to the test, not teaching cursive, not teaching writing(WHAT??) etc. Then we are supposed to get informed and storm the school and demand that our kids not take tests??
Come on, wake up. Whether you like it or not testing is done everywhere. If you applied for a job, chances are you would get tested.
Instead, we need to get engaged in our kids lives and use school as one form of learning. Then get out there and work with our kids to create "life long learners".
Ed, you have missed the entire point. It's not a matter of storming the schools and demanding our kids not take tests. Of course we need testing to measure achievement but the way in which Pleasantdale prepares students for standardized tests is defeating the intended purpose of the tests themselves. Do your homework and you will find that these standardized tests are not supposed to create more work for students, or teachers for that matter. New question formats are announced early in the year so that teachers can work that format into their regular teaching and so that students become familiar and comfortable with the form. Pleasantdale uses the opportunity of these tests to over prepare students in the hopes of falsely raising results and padding their pockets and credibility with rewards. Have you witnessed the packets of questions sent home with students to complete? They are sometimes drilled in class and sometimes sent home to complete, as teachers run out of time in school. Either way it is excessive stress on kids and teachers intended to inflate the scores and reward the administration. Have you witnesses kids' reactions to this overload on top of their regular homework load? I am suggesting that because Pleasantdale abuses the purpose of these tests for their own personal gain, that as parents we should get informed on this... which I suggest you do, and if needed opt. your children out. As a certified and experienced teacher for many years, I personally know the difference and in this atmosphere choose not to force my kids into this experience, if not absolutely necessary. ISAT's are required but ITBS and Gates are not.
What is best for the kids? The states does recommend that teachers remind families to have students eat a good breakfast and get plenty of sleep before testing. For some, this is not even possibile with the added homework load and the stress that our district puts on kids by over preparing them weeks before the actual tests.
As far as your dismissal of writing, please offer one reason for our kids not needing to be proficient in cursive. I'll accept it if it makes sense but at least justify it. Why teach it at all in 3rd grade, if there is no followup to master it. Do we do this with any other skillset?
Ed,
Get involved in our kids learning? Obviously I am because guess who completed those test prep. booklets last year? Not my kids because they did not have time in one night to do it with their other homework. They also paniced when I told them not to worry about them. "I'll get lunch detention if its not done" they argued. So I sat and answered them knowing that my kids tests at least would be representative of where they were actually at. It was interesting as a certified teacher to see the complexity of some of the questions and time how long it took me to answer them? If testing is so important to Pleasantdale, how about baseline IQ tests every few years so that we could compare them to report card achievement and possibily detect learning dissabilities or ADD problems? Certainly that would directly help our kids but wait, it could mean more funds outlay for the district. Not likely this will ever happen then.
I suggest you get more involved in our kids daily homework load and become aware of what so many experience. Perhaps call around and take a survey from other parents.
You are so so right that "we need to get engaged in our kids lives and use school as one form of learning. ...get out there and work with our kids to create life long learners". So when they apply for that job you spoke of and they don't get a packet of sample questions to practice the night before, what message has our school now sent them? Real world? I think not. And when they get a letter from someone who wrote in cursive and they cannot read it.... yet it is written in English, what do we tell them is the reason? "Remember in 3rd grade when you learned those cursive letters? That's what this is." I guess they never thought you'd really ever need it. Yeah Ed, get real world informed!
As for life long learning; my kids do story problems to figure out how much we paid in gas on trips and how much individual items cost that are sold in bundles. I ask them why they think salt makes water boil and ice on the sidewalks melt faster. I give the opportunities to get rewards for addressing envelopes or wrting letters in cursive. We play Scrabble and we make them look words up. I wish I didn't have to hear "why do I have to?" My response is, "because this is real life and you need to learn how to solve problems just like in school". As your parents, we are the teachers who will stay with you your whole life. Get used to it!
Anonymous,
Lets see, so many issues and problems, let me answer the easy one, cursive.
Anonymous says, "As far as your dismissal of writing, please offer one reason for our kids not needing to be proficient in cursive. I'll accept it if it makes sense but at least justify it."
The Reason: We don’t write handwritten letters anymore!!!!! We are now in the “electronic age”!!!
Ok, lets go way back to when I learned cursive in grade school. I did not even have a typing class until high school and it was an elective course you did not have to take. I was sending letters and using cursive for communication by mail.
This correspondence is two-dimensional. These letters now exist in a box(the important ones) in my basement.
Fast forward to today. I now correspond via email in real time. I would never write anyone a handwritten letter if I wanted results and to document the conversation. Too slow. Cursive, way too slow. With two keystrokes this digital entry can be changed into a pretty nice cursive font. In a heartbeat it can be changed back. I can change the language on it, send it around the world. This is the really cool part that there is now a universal language, the computer. I can send this to South America and it can be translated into Spanish or Portuguese and read by anyone. After I post this, you can from the comfort of your own home, cut and paste this and do the same.
Anything that exists that is not digital, is dying. Sorry.
I will be getting a kindle for Christmas and the same goes for all that copy. I can cut and paste, sort, search, take notes, etc. for each book. What a concept. As of first quarter 2009 e book sales accounted for 10% of all book sales. Whoa, in 24 months we went from 0 to 10%??? We are in the middle of a revolution. Books aren’t going away, they are just being formatted differently. Kindle is a tool of change. Others are coming. Look at the books that we get online to lighten the load of our kids. They can sort, search, edit, copy, cut and paste.
Death is occurring right now to the newspapers, publishers, and anything that exists in print. Sorry.
Over time digital will take over and dominate. Will there be small places for printed material, hand written material, and …..cursive?? Sure. Will it dominate? Absolutely not. Why should anyone work on a 2 or 3 page handwritten letter written in cursive when it cannot be used for anything other than one other person reading it on the other end.
Thankfully, our schools are adapting. My kids can read and write in cursive, with the touch of it that they had in 3rd grade. However, they type 40-50 wpm and can read, write, edit, and send a document in a heartbeat. Pleasantdale School taught them both of those skills.
Isn’t the point of all of this is that our kids are proficient communicators? School should teach many different means of communication. As communication between people changes, the needs of the students will change as well. The school needs to rise to this and adjust the ways of communicating to meet the future needs of the students. I believe that this is happening at Pleasantdale School and I am glad for that.
While you make some rather interesting arguments regarding cursive writing I politely disagree. If I were to agree with your logic then I would be compelled to agree that we do not need to teach our children how to spell (because of “spell check”) or how to add, subtract, multiply and divide (because of calculators)!
Jim,
I am not saying that we do not need to teach this. We do and we are. Having all of this knowledge is important. However, being a dominant study topic is not the way that the school system should go, in my opinion. Don't you believe that the rapidly changing environment that we are witnessing is changing the way that we have to view our education system? The way that our education system teaches and the topics that they teach are changing quickly.
And by the way, Jim, thanks for posting with a name. It is much easier to discuss topics with someone.
Post a Comment