Inventing a Creative Education System

While a few years old now (TED 2006), this talk by Sir Ken Robinson still makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures, rather than undermines, creativity. Robinson asserts that children are exceptionally innovative and that schools suppress this creativity as children pass through the educational system.

Personally I don't believe "schools" suppress creativity. By that I mean the physical buildings or the teachers. I believe that it is, in fact, the creativity of schools and teachers that are suppressed, which may in turn to lead to the undermining of children's' creativity and innovation. Government policies, poorly constructed syllabi, lack of facilities, terminal state exams, a general lack of funding, uninspiring buildings, disputes over salaries, public perception of teachers and schools, all contribute to this stifling effect. Some schools, my own included, try to overcome these barriers and do manage to promote a sense of wonder in education through innovative approaches to teaching and learning. However, not all of these can be overcome by schools alone.

The Junior Certificate science syllabus is a case in point. It is so uninspiring and downright boring that teachers find it very difficult to instil any sort of wonder into science. Noel Cunningham has written extensively on this topic on his blog, Think For Yourself, so I won't go into here now. But I will include this short passage from a piece he wrote entitled: A Science Teacher's Apology

"We educators take this incredibly exotic jungle of knowledge called science and distil it until all the wonder has been removed and we are left with nothing but a heap of dry shavings. We then pour this into our syllabus and textbooks and make our students learn it off by heart so that it can all get vomited back up come exam time. And then we wonder why so many young people don’t like science."

But the point needs to be made. Schools and teachers are not directly responsible for suppressing the creativity of children. Teachers and schools would love the opportunity to explore new ways of teaching and learning but, for many, the resources simply aren't available and the pressures of state examinations requires them to subscribe to the "system". It can be as frustrating for teachers as it is for parents and educators like Ken Robinson. We must change the system, and more specifically the desired outcomes of our education system, before real innovative teaching can emerge.