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.

In my recent post, Everybody Hates School, I stated that:

…we are asking the wrong question. We know why students hate school – it’s boring, it’s useless, it’s bureaucratic, and it’s as well organized as a drunken mob fighting over the last hotdog at a ballgame. And that’s only the beginning. But what is the right question, you ask?

Why is it ok to hate school?

I went on to list the twenty principal problems (nice pun, eh?) with contemporary education – curriculum, creativity, religion, evaluation, tradition, teacher training, age, timing, technology, marks, textbooks, classrooms, subjects, punishment, innocence, bureaucracy, government, unions, administration, and substituting. My plan was to talk about these in groups of five. And I still shall do so. But I’m going to split them up into individual posts every few days, rather than burden you with all five at a time.

Curriculum.

I know what you’re thinking. Standardization is good. Learning is good. Books are good. Bulk purchasing is good. So what’s wrong with curriculum? Curriculum is the closest thing in contemporary government to mob rule. I shall take for granted that most of you don’t know how curriculum is developed and explain it in brief.

A group of government functionaries (see government in part 4), educational theorists (see teacher training in part 2), and teachers who want to spend time in a boardroom rather than a classroom (see substituting in part 4), get together and spend vast amounts of time discussing what we can’t teach our students.

I know, the theory is that they get together and talk about what we should teach. And they do that. Right at the beginning. They ask the question, what do students need to know? and receive answers that have not already been filtered out by the sheer lack of representation of good information in the room. That takes a few hours. The remainder of the time is spent discussing what parts of that we can’t teach, we don’t have time to teach, we don’t know how to teach, or faith (see religion in this part) won’t let us teach.

So far, we have determined that curriculum development is a waste of time. But most things in society and all things in government can easily be classified as that. So what’s the problem? As I said, so far. At this point, there isn’t one.

Then they make it mandatory. Problem.

We, as teachers, are told by our passion for teaching that our job is to help the students in the best way possible to learn, to grow, and to think. We are told by our curriculum that this is not only impossible but prohibited. And, since we are employed by the very organization who creates this curriculum, we (yes, I included) teach what we are instructed to teach and let students down, not one at a time but by the hundreds.

What could be so wrong with the curriculum, you ask? Three things – mediocrity, modifications, and segregation. We’re going to talk about these three things in depth in other sections but there’s no reason not to begin now.

Mediocrity is the most massive problem with schools. We expect less from students now than ever before. And they continue to disappoint us. Every time we lower the bar, the students find a new way to walk straight into it and hit their heads. We need to stop lowering the bar. We need to get out of this painfully archaic way of thinking that we tailor our teaching to what the student is capable of (theoretically speaking, this is a concept from the early part of the last century called the Zone of Proximal Development) and raise our expectations. Not a little. Or gradually. Expect nothing short of what we think of as genius and students will not only perform but ask for more.

You’re skeptical, I know. You don’t think you could have performed at exceptional levels when you were in school. There are several reasons that you think that. One is that what you consider normal is no longer what is expected of students. What you were required to do in third grade is likely what is now expected in the sixth and so forth. Don’t believe me? In some regions, ninth-grade textbooks are now being used in twelfth grade. The same answers now receive higher marks on the SATs. Standardized tests have been renormed across North America because average results were so poor that it didn’t justify education funding.

Another reason is that you were raised in an era where the expectation was low and you didn’t have to work to achieve it. Who knows what you could have done if you had applied yourself at age 8? Don’t sell yourself so short to think that you achieved your potential at every step of the way. I assure you that you didn’t even come close.

Where is my proof? The Internet. Who is better at using a computer – you or your six-year-old? She’s managed to achieve more in the last year understanding technology than you have in the last ten. Don’t tell me that children are stupid. I tell you that they are underachieving because they are expected to be mediocre. And, as they would achieve what we ask of them if it were difficult, they achieve exactly what we expect of them now. Sad, isn’t it?

Modifications are another staggering area of curriculum development. By this, I don’t mean exceptionality, which is a whole other topic about which we shall have much to say in the future. I mean, how difficult is it to change the curriculum? In theory, theory is exactly what drives curriculum development. In practice, curriculum is exactly the same as it has been for decades. Sure, we put different names on it. And we talk about groupwork more now than ever before. But teachers figured out groupwork a long time ago. And the use of technology in the classroom. And student leadership. And teaching to individuals rather than to norms. And how long has it taken for any of these things to be adopted in the government documentation? Simply, they still haven’t made it in there in anything but name. And they won’t because change is an admission of guilt that it wasn’t already working. And we can’t have that.

Teachers are asked to teach to the students but strapped into a straightjacket of rigid curriculum outcomes and methods. So what comes first? The student or our jobs? I’ll leave that to you to figure out and I assure you it’s not the first.

Segregation used to mean different races having different water fountains. And I suppose, in a way, that’s what I mean, too. The maths don’t mix with the musics. The Englishes don’t even contemplate talking to the sciences. Curriculum talks about subjects as if they existed in small black boxes, rather than as an ocean with seas of understanding flowing freely into each other. And that’s wrong.

We’re going to talk about this in much more depth in part 3 but I’ll give a brief of it here. There is no boundary between history and English, between math and music, between physics and geography. We made it up to make things easier. And because teachers don’t want to teach everything. Which they should be doing. Some primary educators have got the right idea, creating projects that span the gaps between traditional subject areas, using math to build models in art class, writing English assignments on topics from biology. The educated person is not an expert in one thing and mindlessly unaware of all others. We mark separately, we teach separately, and we treat subjects as if they had nothing in common but the building in which we sit. Wrong is only the beginning.

So what’s the solution to this one? Throw out the curriculum?

That’s too simple. That being said, however, it’s a start.