Schools kill creativity

 

I have to admit I laughed out loud for about 15 minutes, I had to drag Nat away from his studying for an exam tomorrow to listen and I even forwarded it to my mum aaah Frank sent this.

 On a more serious side Robinson had some really valid points. Children are not afraid of being wrong and they love having a go, they love to create. I worked in a childcare for two years and had I not been given a job the day I did at Lanyon, I would still be working in Childcare. It was definitly not my second choice but rather I felt like I’d studied for four years and felt I should give it a go. My boss told me if it didn’t work out to come back. What I loved about working with children was the unpredicitablity and yet at the same time the predictability. Boys will be boys and they will dress up as girls. Painting with sand, rocks, paint, glitter. It didn’t matter what it looked like, it was the experiment in between. Working with year sevens now (age 12 – 13) I’ve found that my students are still in this experiemental stage, they’re still children. Having worked with year ten’s (age 15 – 16) previously, I think Robinson is right when he says they have become frightened of being wrong. While I don’t agree that it is schools, I do agree that something (during hormone development) students become scared to take chances. 

As teachers we are all aware that it seems that most education systems like Robinson says have the same hierarchy of subjects. … At the top are mathematics and languages, then humanities, and the bottom are the arts. … there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. And while we will continue to argue that they are all important, it is the parents who seem to place subjects into a hierarchy based on their own ideas and beliefs. As teachers we often think of ways to teach things that are not conventional, however it seems that the media and governments skew people’s beliefs.