To start, our current school system wasn’t designed to foster
each pupil’s natural curiosity and creativity. According to Ken
Robinson and Lou Aronica, authors of “Creative Learning,”
conventional education emanated out of necessity from the
Industrial Age where students were being prepped to work
in factories. It’s no wonder, then, that our current education
structure with ubiquitous guidelines, standardized tests and
strict schedules resemble more of an assembly line than a
place where kids fall in love with learning.
While we can certainly use more creativity in our
classroom to enhance the learning experience, infusing more
creativity and curiosity is also necessary to cultivate the
next generation of problem solvers that won’t be graduating
into the Industrial Age but an innovation era. Here are some
ways to encourage creativity in our students and help them
thrive in a changing landscape.
Take the focus off grades. One of the problems with our
current school structure is that most kids don’t benefit from
sitting down and absorbing information in lecture form,
which is a model of learning created to produce good test
takers. We have an assembly-line education that feeds every
child the same curriculum, then teaches them to regurgitate
this information in the form of a timed exam.
But tests are not the best measure of a child’s intelligence,
especially non-academic forms of intelligence like emotional
and creative intelligence. Such narrow standards disparage
children who develop slower and excel in non-academic areas.
These kids are treated as developmentally deficient. Even for
kids whose brains are more wired to learn from textbooks
and take tests well, the obsession with grades slowly kill a
love of learning.
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