Creativity in schools

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Education is the passport to a better future, everybody agrees. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry also agrees that the world is going through a make-over, minds are changing, and what is considered a good education today might turn out to be the only average in the future. The changing times demand you to change with them, to be able to incorporate variations in your life and to confirm with the turning tides.

This flexibility for the future has to be learned today. In today’s schools, attention needs to be paid to innovative methods that bring creative thinking to the forefront of children’s mind. Learning isn’t all about gobbling up factual information and spewing it out on a paper at an appropriate time. Learning is knowing how to pass through life in the best manner you can, in the most effective and impactful way. Learning is knowing how to be creative.

Why improve creativity?

Creative learning results for an overall better grade at schools. When children do not think in terms of black and white, but rather venture into the grey, they find answers to difficult questions on their own without having to run them by the teachers. In addition, creative teaching allows students to seek employment pathways that aren’t strictly academic. In a world where unemployment is ever on the rise, people ready to be innovative and think differently can help the economy.

Business studies and art shouldn’t be individually and separately studied but should rather move arm in arm to ensure continuity in the skills pipeline.

How do schools around the world tackle their creativity problem? How do they bring it into the curriculum and inspire children to think different? Let’s take a look:

United Kingdoms

From the 1960s through the ’80s, the UK’s primary schools have been classed as innovative and focused on the child, according to the Plowden Report. Noteworthy, innovative schools in the United Kingdoms have a domestic system, where students, teachers, and parents have a say in how the curriculum might be run and what to include in the syllabus of the year, as opposed to following any standard education system.

In recent years, a lack of creative teaching has been noticed. Schools are forsaking their innovative programs for a more typical way of teaching. From the ’90s to date, independent observers have tried to bring this disappointing trend to the notice of government officials, but they often get sidelined.

A general consensus is that creativity is being squeezed out of UK schools.

Singapore

According to OECD’s PISA global education survey, Singapore’s education system was named the best in 2015. Singaporean schools are special in that they do not discourage technology in classrooms as a means of creative inattentiveness. The idea is that technology, especially phones and other screens, are a major part of a child’s life outside of schools, and to ban them inside makes schools boring and feel like torture. Hence the schools’ heavy reliance on technology.

Additionally, in Singapore teachers aren’t thought of as unlimited sources of information, rather a conduit to finding knowledge. Teachers are encouraged to keep learning, to keep widening their field of erudition so that they might better help children find the paths they are looking for.

This creative approach not only allows a child lots of space to grow according to the needs of his/her time but also makes the process of learning less cumbersome and feel more like an adventure than actual labour. And teachers teach students of the main steps in the creative process.

USA

The United States’ education system is seen as an inhibitor to creativity. Reliance on a system run by extensive state-wise tests leads educators to focus on making the students memorize the material, sometimes at the risk of understanding it. Neither the students nor their teachers, have any space for free movement and autonomy of thought in how they want to learn and teach. Slaves to the tests, they are forced to focus on only that material which will allow them to pass.

These tests, being as hard and fixated on remembering as they are, lead to a cyclic pattern of under-performance and bad impacts on school reputations. Poor performances by schools lead to a shortening of funding. Hence, sadly, in the United States of America, money is prerequisite to getting good and quality education. Nowadays this requires some creative ways to make money.