Creativity and Education

A serious concern in today’s schooling is lack of creativity. Creativity comes from where? It simply means doing different from the main stream. In school, if a boy does something different, he is scolded and asked to abandon it. He is gradually persuades that what he was doing different was “wrong”. And gradually he develops fear of doing “wrong”. If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time the child grows, he gradually loses his courage to take up the so called wrong and he loses his originality. This happens to thousands of people daily in this system. And this is how person loses his creativity.

It was in the past that the children studying in a school have few things to learn. Small books, no computers, no mobile phones, internet or all these hitech things. What happens now, the children, studying in a school, not only study the textbook but also this information. There is a lot of information around his tiny mind to cope up, the entire textbook plus the new developments in the technology, art and literature. He won’t sit quiet watching a new I phone to be launched, he is curious, he will go inside the real story. By doing so, he is right now getting too much information which he was not supposed to deal with if he was born 50 years ago. So, but natural, human mind cannot undergo such a fast evolution to cope up the extra strength to catch all these things just in one or two generations. He needs time. This is all about the evolution, not of revolution. So all we need is to reform our education system and take a breath to think what we are doing to mankind. Because, what we are doing, is not only pretty dangerous but also self-destructive.

This is the problem in the west. They are seriously concerned about their education system despite of inventing most of the things that are present today in the market. I mean, they have enormous brain power of innovation, they have bagged hundreds of noble prizes of invention and they are more creative than we Indians. Despite of that, they are down to earth, they are continuously analyzing the system and trying to get better day by day.

I’ve read a book by a Japanese television personality and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Tetsuko Kuroyanagi at the time of world war 2, mentioning a small school somewhere in Japan. The book is named “Totto Chan”. I found it the best solution of creative education. But problem is to apply it in the current heavily populated public health system. We cannot do it properly as we don’t have such a huge chunk of creative teachers to run it. Teachers produced in this system are also as mechanical as the system is. It is like man is manufacturing their children. Children are divided according the age groups into several standards, and so are called “batch of 2001, batch of 2002” and so on. Something similar to manufacturing date of a factory, this is what Ken Robinson, creativity expert in US, says.

In India, the situation is different. Here the literacy is the problem, not creativity. In this country of booming population, there is no space for creativity. Day by day the condition is getting worse. This is the right time to act, at the time of our Indian industrial revolution, learning from the mistakes of the west, not repeating them again. But unfortunately, we are doing the same that they’ve did and they are retreating now.

I have some justification about current system of schooling and education also.

I apply the great theorem of statistics – the null hypothesis. All men are not equal. All men are not equally creative given a chance; neither can they do something great that can help the mankind. It is better to keep them serving the humanity. All are not genius, neither one can expect everyone to be the same. If all are creative then who will clean the roads, who will take care of the garbage, symbolizing every cumbersome work that a genius finds boring.

Think about a lion, he maintains his territory with a careful eye. What he does daily? Nothing creative, wakes up and goes for hunting. Is it creative? Nope. Never. Man is also an animal. He also seeks survival, the entire education system based upon the survival of the industrially revolutionized man. That’s right. It should be. It will be funny and idiotic if liberty is given to the people to chose their work and to have their choice in education. Nobody will be a clerk, nobody will be a soldier (even lion needs to fight with the other to save and secure his territory, the basic nature of all alive on the earth, the competition). The sense of survival will end there immediately. So from the back of the mind I have also support to the industrialization of the education, it has succeeded and performing well in maintenance of the industrial revolution.

And at last, man remains the least important animal on the earth. Because, if all the bees and beatles are killed, the entire earth will lose the life within 50 years, but if all the man are killed, all other lives will flourish.