Religion.

During the Second World War, the government of the USSR mass-produced a poster that reads Religion is poison. Protect your children. In fact, as you can probably guess, it says that in Russian. But that’s the idea. What the poster is driving at is that modern citizens must give up religion for education. And they’re right. But here in North America, we missed that lesson. Or perhaps we learned a different one in Sunday School.

We have a school system that was originally church-run. Here in Canada, it was church-run a whole lot more recently than in other places. And it only completely eliminated the church in the late 1990s in Newfoundland. Apart from my sadness that it took so long, the issue that we are addressing is that it hasn’t really happened.

My personal views on religion are extreme at best. But I shan’t bore you with an ecclesiastical rant. There are teachers discussing morality and faith. Creationism is seen by many to be a valid perspective for classroom use. Our school system is called non-denominational, which implies that it accepts all Christian sects but nobody else. These are symptoms of a larger problem.

Teachers are using the school system as a pulpit from which to preach religious indoctrination. Church groups have power over schools and the government departments that control their curriculum. We celebrate religious holidays in schools. We allow a system to exist that implies strongly that Christianity has a monopoly on what is right and goes so far as to actually state that we are all people of faith, when we simply are not. While teaching the right answer is a spurious approach to education, teaching the wrong answer is definitely a bad idea.

I am not saying that people who believe in a supreme being make bad teachers. I know many, including my parents, who are excellent teachers and also religious. I am not arguing for an elimination of religion from the minds and hearts of teachers or even from those of the students.

It simply must not be part of the educational experience. We are no longer in the dark ages. The church is not the holder of knowledge. We have creativity, we have science, and we have thought. Teach those.

Creativity.

By this point, you have likely already seen Ken Robinson’s ubiquitous Schools Kill Creativity Ted Talk. He’s right. But he’s only gone halfway down the road. Schools do kill creativity but that’s not ok. We need to do something about that. The problem comes in two forms – we test knowledge as if it were important, rather than understanding, and we award less importance to creativity than to correctness.

You’re going to tell me that these things are not bad. Knowledge is good and it’s important to have the right answer.

In a way, I suppose you could make an argument for these statements. But I won’t believe you and neither should you.

Knowledge is worthless and the right answer is irrelevant.

In centuries past, knowledge was the all-important concept and the right answer was prised above all else. But we live in the era of universal information sharing and, although schools often like to ban information-carrying devices from the classroom and pretend that nothing has changed since the age of Plato, we have left the cave.

There are other reasons for the death of in-school (and after-school) creativity in our students. These include the lack of funding for the arts, the blatant disregard for creativity in science curriculum, and a lack of respect for novel approaches in a framework of learning that is not a framework of discovery. But those are secondary to the two main reasons.

Understanding is the new knowledge. You think that it’s important to know the capital of Lithuania and the date of the Treaty of Versailles. But that’s because you know the answers and our personal knowledge is valuable to us. What about the value of a stamp bearing the head of King George V or the name of the hospital where your best friend was born? Is that knowledge more or less valuable because you don’t possess it? I can look up almost any piece of information in less than a minute. And so can you. And so can your first-grade child. Instant recall is almost useless in a world where action takes time; a minute is short enough that it makes no difference in all but the most severe of cases. So why do we ask our students to memorize dates, to define words, and to label maps? We did it. And we’re smart. So it had to be good for us.

That argument doesn’t fly for me. And it shouldn’t for you, either.

What should we be teaching? In a word, understanding. In another few, we should be teaching students to come up with creative solutions to problems, new ways to understand the world and not simply the accepted approach. If I want the historical argument, I can go to Wikipedia. If I want something new, I can ask a child. And I should. And so should you.

But, you say, the right answer is still the right answer.

In this world, the right answer is only one of many right answers, in almost all cases. The Second World War was caused by Hitler. It was caused by Chamberlain. It was caused by Poland’s lacklustre defences. It was caused by France’s delusions of military superiority. It began because of a piece of paper. It was started because England thought it would be easier than assassinating Hitler.

These answers are all right and none of them is the whole story. The right answer is available any time, any day, free of charge on the Internet. What I want from my students is creative thought. Deeper meanings. As I said, knowledge has become worthless as it is now available anywhere; the right answer is freely available and understanding is now key.