Another good link from guess who

[avevale_intelligencer]

pbristow linked to this. Go see. I'll wait. :)

One of the original commenters said "I can't find anything to disagree with in this," and that's kind of my feeling as well, which is interesting because what seems to be expected is more sort of leaping up and down and yelling "Amen! Woohoo! Tell it, Daddy!" or, erm, words to that effect. I can't fault what he's saying, but...

But...I can't escape the feeling that it was about the time that I was passing through the ejumacational system that the rot started to set in, and that was precisely when they started going on about creativity and discovery and letting the kiddiwinks find their own way. I was lucky, in that I got the last gasp of the old not-meant-to-be-fun-boy mode of learning in which you got given the straw (whether you thought you wanted it or not) and taught how to make bricks with it. I could have had a more enjoyable time at school, but I'd have learned a lot less. As it was, I left school convinced that life was going to be a lot easier than it is, and it's done me no good at all.

The story about the girl who wanted to be a dancer is very moving and all that. It would be nice if we could all follow our individual star and carve out our own paths. I've been enthusiastically pilloried for saying, as this chap seems to be saying, that creativity is an end in itself and should be encouraged and rewarded; people have said things like "and who, pray tell, would dig the ditches?" and it's a telling argument. If children are allowed to opt out of learning maths and languages because they want to be dancers or painters or whatever, we'll get a bunch of dancers and painters who can't talk to people or make change. (I am still horrified by the boy in front of me in the queue who stood there staring vacantly at the two twenty-pence and one ten-pence coin in his hand till the kindly checkout operator assured him that yes, that did add up to fifty pence.)

Many people, and I know this will come as a shock to a lot of my exceptional friends, don't want to work. Gods know I don't. But we have this complex framework of society that supports us, and it depends for its survival on lots of people spending their time doing what they don't want to do. To do this effectively, they have to be taught things they don't enjoy learning, not just rote facts (though they are important) but basic skills such as sitting still when they're told to and not being disruptive. They have to learn that sometimes you will be bored and discontented and frustrated and downright unhappy and that there is nothing you can do about that. Otherwise adult life will come as a terrible shock to them.

As for creativity...well, in my experience, if it's that important to a person it busts out anyway. Sometimes even in university professors. And yes, by all the gods, it should be encouraged. By the parents. When the kid is not at school. When that doesn't happen, or when the reverse happens, it's a tragedy that cries to heaven for redress, but that doesn't mean that the time in which the children are supposed to be given the tools they'll need in life should be spent encouraging self-expression and fostering unreasonable expectations.

I think what the man says is well-meant, and in an ideal world true, and when we have the work-optional society that the powers that be have been trying to hold back from us for the last four decades his ideas will be crucial in forming the educational system that will be needed then. But not yet.

And yes, I do live in my head. I do regard my body as a support mechanism for my head. I don't know how to live any other way. (There was a Feiffer cartoon about it that I remember to this day. "this is my body. it is funny-looking. it malfunctions. it looks best in winter clothes. lucky for my body that I need it to transport my head around. otherwise out it would go.") But school didn't do that to me. I was that way before I ever went to school, and I successfully resisted all its attempts, through music'n'movement and PE and games and so on, to convince me otherwise. I just wish I'd known I was supposed to be a university professor.

Comments

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

[NODS] That's it. See my reply to smoooom, above.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're both right, I can see that...but I think in that case it's not that anything needs to be taken away or changed, but that something needs to be added. The basis for creativity, if it is to have any chance at all of arriving at a right choice (more critical perhaps in the case of a ditch digger than of an artist, who can maybe afford to make all the wrong choices on the way to the right one), is the raw data pounded into the left side. Without that data, creativity is operating in a vacuum. And sometimes the thing that's been done the same way for hundreds of years is actually the right thing, and knowing that helps.

Education could end up taking a whole lot longer if it's to be done right. Which would be easier in a work-optional society than it is now, when economic survival of the individual depends on getting whatever paid employment is on offer, and the more educated you are the bigger debt you've got to repay. (Another way I was lucky...)

[jahura.livejournal.com]

If your definition of "creativity" is to provide a counter to logic, then that's a logical argument for logic. :) No educational system of the masses can be designed or adapted to meet the needs of the individual, and bland conformity in combination with apathy is the one survival skill conventional education provides for dealing with any situation outside the home. That's why home schooling has become more and more popular over the years and may eventually replace the current rigor in a couple of generations.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

See Eleri's comment above. I had a long reply written and it was boring me to death, I don't know about anyone else. The sum of it is, while I would trust anyone I know personally to do home schooling for their children if any, I think my friends are exceptional, and I think an educational system is going to continue to be necessary, and the needs of the individual are just going to have to be fulfilled elsewhere. And if agreeing that two and two make four is conformity, then yes, I believe we need some degree of conformity.

[jahura.livejournal.com]

Yes, two and two make four.
Three and one make four.
One and one and one and one make four.
Negative seven and positive eleven make four.
Twenty over five makes four, ten take away six makes four, and the square root of sixteen is four. While logical and correct, two and two are not the only way to acheive four and by insisting it is, is the soul of conformity. Open-mindedness isn't rebellion, but we are spoon-fed the belief that it is.