10 ms·

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

51 points by rafaelc 16y ago

zokier 16y ago
We don't need no education We dont need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone! All in all it's just another brick in the wall. All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
ks 16y ago
This quote should be printed out and put on the wall: "They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities." I think this is one of the reasons why start-ups and small companies are often more flexible than larger companies. In a small group you know that even if a person makes a mistake, that person can be great. When you add more layers of people between an employee and the person who controls your career and salary, the employee is more likely to be measured using statistics. A failure will stand out and could impact the salary.
- yason 16y ago
  Mistakes are essential for learning, growth, and becoming great. Corollary: While great people don't make the easy mistakes any longer, they'll focus on making great mistakes because that's where they're learning at.
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    Mistakes might be great for learning, but that does not mean that they should be praised, or that there should not be disincentives for making mistakes. Mistakes have consequences, great mistakes have great consequences. I do not therefore think that great people make great mistakes. Otherwise, we probably would not know of their existence.
    - yason 16y ago
      They should be praised. Fear mistakes, fear disincentives, avoid any consequences, and you fear life! By definition of what a mistake is, you certainly don't want to make mistakes as soon as you've learned how to do (what you want to do) without making them. By merely making mistakes, any mistakes, you won't grow. But you know that you're growing in life when you gain new problems to replace the old problems. And when you're working on something new, you'll always be making mistakes. New mistakes. It's those you don't want to fear, disincentivize, or avoid. If you don't make mistakes, you're either too shy to not challenge yourself on anything you might not know well enough already, or you're the perfection itself and you know everything already.
      - Ardit20 16y ago
        Depending on the context not challenging yourself or being too shy might be a mistake in itself. I do think many of us do not like mistakes, do not purposely aim for them, do try not to make mistakes, etcetera, but we still do make mistakes. Just because we dislike something does not mean that something does not occur. I agree with you, we grow by making mistakes, where I disagree is that children should be free to do whatever they wish, yeah shoot that man, yeh boy go in front of the car, yes child do not do your homework, yes give the wrong answer to 2+2. So I think my point is that mistakes are not a great thing, are not something to be romanticised, idolised, whatever. They have a use of course, but the consequences of mistakes can be painful. Also, we have been taught all our life to be conformist, yet many of us do not always conform, we have been taught all our life to not make mistakes, yet many of us do not live in absolute fear of making mistakes, are not completely stagnant and do nothing but lay in our bed all day for otherwise we might make a mistake.
- kaitnieks 16y ago
  I'm not sure if those mistakes compare. When you fail at school's test it's because you didn't learn some facts or formulas, not because you took wrong steps in unpredictable markets and environments. The companies do punish people who make the wrong decisions even though these people couldn't have known they would be wrong and just took a bold step. But in startups you also get penalized by losing your company and/or money.
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    Mistakes are part of life. Failing because you didn't learn a fact only shows that you didn't learn that fact. It shows nothing else. But children grow up and become managers thinking that mistakes is something to be avoided when in fact mistakes are something to be expected and accepted. This fear of mistakes is exactly the reason some people actually believe in projections. Sad but true.
- Wilduck 16y ago
  And yet, this is phrased to suggest we've made a mistake, and we should be fearful of its consequences. I guess he's speaking to educated people :).
ThomPete 16y ago
This exactly what Seymore Papert talks about in Mindstorms. he uses debugging as a method to teach children to not fear making mistakes. In fact mistakes are the norm. Written in the eighties. That's how education should be done.
tkahn6 16y ago
School only kills creativity if you let it. Unfortunately, in general, to really succeed at school (and I say 'at school' to mean school as a system), you cannot take risks. It's a simple transaction: You give us your time (and that is really what you are giving up) and we give you a good grade. Points off for deviating from or questioning the standard model. I just graduated high school. My English teacher, who's class I found interesting most of the time, said for a final grade: memorize 25 lines of Shakespeare and recite for an A. Fuck that, I'll go learn C or something. (To his credit, he didn't count the grade when I flat out refused to do the assignment) School, for the most part, is about memorizing and convincing teachers to give you a good grade. That's all it is. It's a game where the goal is to get the highest GPA regardless of what it's supposed to represent. Every one once in a while, I would get a teacher who understood that the purpose of school is education, that students are there to learn. Definitely those were my favorite classes. And while we're talking about schools I'd like to rant about AP Computer Science: I find it offensive that they actually have the balls to call it 'Computer Science'. I took the AP test, got a 5. It should be called "Can You Recall Some Peculiarities of Java Off Hand?". Thousands of kids have taken this class, they've memorized a few facts about Java, and now they think that's what Computer Science is all about.
- julius_geezer 16y ago
  Frankly, there are a lot of worse ways to spend your time than memorizing some lines of Shakespeare. Of course, one would prefer to have one's choice and not get stuck with a real dog of a passage.
  - GiraffeNecktie 16y ago
    I wish I could upvote you higher. The ability to commit complex information to memory is an immensely valuable building block for creativity. It's sad when education is only memorization and it's equally sad when education neglects memorization.
    - tkahn6 16y ago
      I fail to see how lines from Shakespeare are 'complex [pieces of] information'. They're just words arranged in a particular order. When memorization happens out of convenience that's a great thing. I have no problem asking students to memorize the derivatives of transcendental functions after they have derived them. It's good to memorize things that appear frequently in the line of work. For what purpose does memorizing Shakespeare serve?
boredguy8 16y ago
Not much more than any other source of growing up. From "Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art" by Stephen Nachmanovitch: "Schools can nurture creativity in children, but they can also destroy it, and all too often do. Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers." .... "But we have not yet gotten down to the marrow of the matter. We have been talking as though there were something called "society" that defends itself against creativity by all the means we've mentioned above: education, specialization, fear of the new, fear of raw creative power. There is no such thing as society, there is no such thing as institutions, schools, the media, and the rest of it. There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs. The marrow of the matter is that however we might restructure society, however many resources an enlightened regime might bestow on the fostering of creativity and the arts and sciences and freewheeling education dedicated to the deep exploration of mind, spirit, and heart, we would still be in the same soup. There is something called growing up, which happens to us no matter what our circumstances. We all have learned what it feels like to be betrayed for the first time, the second time, the third time, when our innocence gets stripped away, and we jump from innocence to experience. There is a point, or rather a long series of points, at which our innocence and free play of imagination and desire collides with reality, with the limits of is and is not, with the limits of what can and cannot be. "Everything we have said so far should not be construed merely as an indictment of the big bad schools, or the media or other societal factors. We could redesign many aspects of society in a more wholesome way--and we ought to--but even then art would not be easy. The fact is that we cannot avoid childhood's end; the free play of imagination creates illusions, and illusions bump into reality and get disillusioned. Getting disillusioned, presumably, is a fine thing, the essence of learning; but it hurts. If you think that you could have avoided the disenchantment of childhood's end by having had some advantage--a more enlightened education, more money or other material benefits, a great teacher--talk to someone who has had those advantages, and you will find that they bump into just as much disillusionment because the fundamental blockages are not external but part of us, part of life. In any case, the child's delightful pictures of trees mentioned at the beginning of this chapter would probably not be art if they came from the hands of an adult. The difference between the child's drawings and the childlike drawing of a Picasso resides not only in Picasso's impeccable mastery of craft, but in the fact that Picasso had actually grown up, undergone hard experience, and transcended it."
jcw 16y ago
Grade school nurtured my creativity. The only way I could get through the boredom of it was through sketching and daydreaming.
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  I've thought that about my years in parochial schools. They're like training grounds or boot camp. Kids tend to either get molded into docile worker bees, or develop a skewed sense of humor and the mental wherewithal to get over without getting kicked out.
code_duck 16y ago
Yes, schools exist to teach social conformity and to prepare you for a lifetime of working for corporations. There is no question that part of this involves absolutely smothering creativity. Whether it is a primary goal or a side effect, I'm not sure.
kvs 16y ago
Mindless consuming kills creativity; whether at school or at home. Got to stop that and engage people to _do something_ of their own.
xenophanes 16y ago
Yes. http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/ http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/ http://groups.google.com/group/taking-children-seriously/ http://groups.google.com/group/taking-children-seriously/
TGJ 16y ago
Stop the trend of athletics over art and that might help creativity. Remove the federal government from schools to stop the standardization of the school system and that might help. Try to change the way smart kids are thought of in school and make it where they are the cool kids. Stop giving medals and trophies to every kid and only to those who win. If students realize that they are going to have to work to be #1 then they might get more creative. Just some thoughts.
pinchyfingers 16y ago
I watched this video a few times over the past couple years. Of course, schools kill creativity, but the real sad part is that schools were always designed to kill creativity and the nature of mass education will never change. Excelling in school is training to be a worker/consumer. I won't knock this lifestyle, but I wouldn't expect the most innovative artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, and leaders to be people who fit in really well in the mass education system. School is simply a detention center for the masses, and we all know this, even if we're not willing to accept the facts and the consequences.

51 points by rafaelc 16y ago

We don't need no education We dont need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone! All in all it's just another brick in the wall. All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

ks 16y ago

This quote should be printed out and put on the wall: "They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities." I think this is one of the reasons why start-ups and small companies are often more flexible than larger companies. In a small group you know that even if a person makes a mistake, that person can be great. When you add more layers of people between an employee and the person who controls your career and salary, the employee is more likely to be measured using statistics. A failure will stand out and could impact the salary.

yason 16y ago
Mistakes are essential for learning, growth, and becoming great. Corollary: While great people don't make the easy mistakes any longer, they'll focus on making great mistakes because that's where they're learning at.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  Mistakes might be great for learning, but that does not mean that they should be praised, or that there should not be disincentives for making mistakes. Mistakes have consequences, great mistakes have great consequences. I do not therefore think that great people make great mistakes. Otherwise, we probably would not know of their existence.
  - yason 16y ago
    They should be praised. Fear mistakes, fear disincentives, avoid any consequences, and you fear life! By definition of what a mistake is, you certainly don't want to make mistakes as soon as you've learned how to do (what you want to do) without making them. By merely making mistakes, any mistakes, you won't grow. But you know that you're growing in life when you gain new problems to replace the old problems. And when you're working on something new, you'll always be making mistakes. New mistakes. It's those you don't want to fear, disincentivize, or avoid. If you don't make mistakes, you're either too shy to not challenge yourself on anything you might not know well enough already, or you're the perfection itself and you know everything already.
    - Ardit20 16y ago
      Depending on the context not challenging yourself or being too shy might be a mistake in itself. I do think many of us do not like mistakes, do not purposely aim for them, do try not to make mistakes, etcetera, but we still do make mistakes. Just because we dislike something does not mean that something does not occur. I agree with you, we grow by making mistakes, where I disagree is that children should be free to do whatever they wish, yeah shoot that man, yeh boy go in front of the car, yes child do not do your homework, yes give the wrong answer to 2+2. So I think my point is that mistakes are not a great thing, are not something to be romanticised, idolised, whatever. They have a use of course, but the consequences of mistakes can be painful. Also, we have been taught all our life to be conformist, yet many of us do not always conform, we have been taught all our life to not make mistakes, yet many of us do not live in absolute fear of making mistakes, are not completely stagnant and do nothing but lay in our bed all day for otherwise we might make a mistake.
kaitnieks 16y ago
I'm not sure if those mistakes compare. When you fail at school's test it's because you didn't learn some facts or formulas, not because you took wrong steps in unpredictable markets and environments. The companies do punish people who make the wrong decisions even though these people couldn't have known they would be wrong and just took a bold step. But in startups you also get penalized by losing your company and/or money.
- ThomPete 16y ago
  Mistakes are part of life. Failing because you didn't learn a fact only shows that you didn't learn that fact. It shows nothing else. But children grow up and become managers thinking that mistakes is something to be avoided when in fact mistakes are something to be expected and accepted. This fear of mistakes is exactly the reason some people actually believe in projections. Sad but true.
Wilduck 16y ago
And yet, this is phrased to suggest we've made a mistake, and we should be fearful of its consequences. I guess he's speaking to educated people :).

ThomPete 16y ago

This exactly what Seymore Papert talks about in Mindstorms. he uses debugging as a method to teach children to not fear making mistakes. In fact mistakes are the norm. Written in the eighties. That's how education should be done.

tkahn6 16y ago

School only kills creativity if you let it. Unfortunately, in general, to really succeed at school (and I say 'at school' to mean school as a system), you cannot take risks. It's a simple transaction: You give us your time (and that is really what you are giving up) and we give you a good grade. Points off for deviating from or questioning the standard model. I just graduated high school. My English teacher, who's class I found interesting most of the time, said for a final grade: memorize 25 lines of Shakespeare and recite for an A. Fuck that, I'll go learn C or something. (To his credit, he didn't count the grade when I flat out refused to do the assignment) School, for the most part, is about memorizing and convincing teachers to give you a good grade. That's all it is. It's a game where the goal is to get the highest GPA regardless of what it's supposed to represent. Every one once in a while, I would get a teacher who understood that the purpose of school is education, that students are there to learn. Definitely those were my favorite classes. And while we're talking about schools I'd like to rant about AP Computer Science: I find it offensive that they actually have the balls to call it 'Computer Science'. I took the AP test, got a 5. It should be called "Can You Recall Some Peculiarities of Java Off Hand?". Thousands of kids have taken this class, they've memorized a few facts about Java, and now they think that's what Computer Science is all about.

julius_geezer 16y ago
Frankly, there are a lot of worse ways to spend your time than memorizing some lines of Shakespeare. Of course, one would prefer to have one's choice and not get stuck with a real dog of a passage.
- GiraffeNecktie 16y ago
  I wish I could upvote you higher. The ability to commit complex information to memory is an immensely valuable building block for creativity. It's sad when education is only memorization and it's equally sad when education neglects memorization.
  - tkahn6 16y ago
    I fail to see how lines from Shakespeare are 'complex [pieces of] information'. They're just words arranged in a particular order. When memorization happens out of convenience that's a great thing. I have no problem asking students to memorize the derivatives of transcendental functions after they have derived them. It's good to memorize things that appear frequently in the line of work. For what purpose does memorizing Shakespeare serve?

boredguy8 16y ago

Not much more than any other source of growing up. From "Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art" by Stephen Nachmanovitch: "Schools can nurture creativity in children, but they can also destroy it, and all too often do. Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers." .... "But we have not yet gotten down to the marrow of the matter. We have been talking as though there were something called "society" that defends itself against creativity by all the means we've mentioned above: education, specialization, fear of the new, fear of raw creative power. There is no such thing as society, there is no such thing as institutions, schools, the media, and the rest of it. There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs. The marrow of the matter is that however we might restructure society, however many resources an enlightened regime might bestow on the fostering of creativity and the arts and sciences and freewheeling education dedicated to the deep exploration of mind, spirit, and heart, we would still be in the same soup. There is something called growing up, which happens to us no matter what our circumstances. We all have learned what it feels like to be betrayed for the first time, the second time, the third time, when our innocence gets stripped away, and we jump from innocence to experience. There is a point, or rather a long series of points, at which our innocence and free play of imagination and desire collides with reality, with the limits of is and is not, with the limits of what can and cannot be. "Everything we have said so far should not be construed merely as an indictment of the big bad schools, or the media or other societal factors. We could redesign many aspects of society in a more wholesome way--and we ought to--but even then art would not be easy. The fact is that we cannot avoid childhood's end; the free play of imagination creates illusions, and illusions bump into reality and get disillusioned. Getting disillusioned, presumably, is a fine thing, the essence of learning; but it hurts. If you think that you could have avoided the disenchantment of childhood's end by having had some advantage--a more enlightened education, more money or other material benefits, a great teacher--talk to someone who has had those advantages, and you will find that they bump into just as much disillusionment because the fundamental blockages are not external but part of us, part of life. In any case, the child's delightful pictures of trees mentioned at the beginning of this chapter would probably not be art if they came from the hands of an adult. The difference between the child's drawings and the childlike drawing of a Picasso resides not only in Picasso's impeccable mastery of craft, but in the fact that Picasso had actually grown up, undergone hard experience, and transcended it."

jcw 16y ago

Grade school nurtured my creativity. The only way I could get through the boredom of it was through sketching and daydreaming.

jamesbritt 16y ago
I've thought that about my years in parochial schools. They're like training grounds or boot camp. Kids tend to either get molded into docile worker bees, or develop a skewed sense of humor and the mental wherewithal to get over without getting kicked out.

code_duck 16y ago

Yes, schools exist to teach social conformity and to prepare you for a lifetime of working for corporations. There is no question that part of this involves absolutely smothering creativity. Whether it is a primary goal or a side effect, I'm not sure.

kvs 16y ago

Mindless consuming kills creativity; whether at school or at home. Got to stop that and engage people to _do something_ of their own.

xenophanes 16y ago

Yes. http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/ http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/ http://groups.google.com/group/taking-children-seriously/ http://groups.google.com/group/taking-children-seriously/

TGJ 16y ago

Stop the trend of athletics over art and that might help creativity. Remove the federal government from schools to stop the standardization of the school system and that might help. Try to change the way smart kids are thought of in school and make it where they are the cool kids. Stop giving medals and trophies to every kid and only to those who win. If students realize that they are going to have to work to be #1 then they might get more creative. Just some thoughts.

pinchyfingers 16y ago

I watched this video a few times over the past couple years. Of course, schools kill creativity, but the real sad part is that schools were always designed to kill creativity and the nature of mass education will never change. Excelling in school is training to be a worker/consumer. I won't knock this lifestyle, but I wouldn't expect the most innovative artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, and leaders to be people who fit in really well in the mass education system. School is simply a detention center for the masses, and we all know this, even if we're not willing to accept the facts and the consequences.