4 ms·
Do schools kill creativity? Very much so. My son is a school teacher and over the years he has had roles that were supposed to encourage teachers to be more eff
by oldandtired 3y ago
Do schools kill creativity? Very much so. My son is a school teacher and over the years he has had roles that were supposed to encourage teachers to be more effective in creating an environment for helping students to be more interested in learning.
The vast majority of teachers that he had to deal with have no interest is seeing their students become more interested or creative. The teachers were there time-serving their job or focused on political activism.
He and I have had discussions over the years and one of his concerns is that creativity and interest in learning had to be encouraged in the younger students (primary school, grades 1 - 4). Instead it appeared to be beaten out of the students (figuratively speaking by teachers having little or no interest in providing such environments).
Certainly, teachers were encouraged to do certain activities but these things were not focused on encouraging students to think, to be creative or to be interested in learning.
His view was that by the time students reached grade 7, they were no longer interested in learning or thinking as all of this "stuff" was just plain boring and had no applicability to their social lives.
- atoav 3y agoAs an educator who repeatedly gets feedback how good my classes are I have no problem sparking creativity. But let it be said: Teaching is damn hard. Now I teach at the university level, but this only makes certain things (the material) harder and others (the teaching) way easier. Maybe after the pandemic some people understand this more than before — the hard part isn't the material, it is getting a group of wildly different people (kids) on board with the material you are teaching, help them to focus, to see the light, to get through material they don't understand etc. If you don't totally burn for the material (and doing so is unliklier with the typically stiffer curriculum on schools) — it will take a lot of effort to pull this off in a good way. Effort that not every teacher will be able to muster under crunching work loads, where the preperation has to be done at home. Effort that doesn't pay the bills better. Good teachers are purely idealists. They receive no incentive to be good teachers other than their own intrinsic motivation. So the problem the system has to prevent first and foremost is to enable average educators to teach better, because finding enough exceptional educators will not be possible. And you do this by adjusting the incentive structure.
- ahazred8ta 3y agoUm... teachers who were focused on political activism had no interest in seeing their students become more creative? That sounds counterintuitive. Can you clarify?
- oldandtired 3y agoIf you look at any sort of political activism, there tends to be a tendency for the promulgation of dogma. Now not every activist does this and you will find that these kinds of people tend to be willing to discuss and defend their positions in reasonable and logical manner. But many activists don't seem to be able to discuss and defend, they want to shout down and heckle. As for many teachers who are focused on political activism, when challenged by their own students, they seem to just get very upset at their students or the students' parents if taken to task over the particular activism taken. Now, if you haven't seen this then you have been very fortunate.