Does the education system need a make-over?
My contention is “Yes, it does.”
By “education systems”, I intend to refer to education systems all over the world. One may argue that education systems are not globally the same, but what I am referring to, herein, is the method of imparting education…that is, via schools.
A child, when born, is an artist. He is a creator. He has an inherent capacity to innovate and to give life to original ideas. A child does not analyse whether what he is creating is going to serve any purpose or not. He does not analyse the congruity or relevance of his creation. Most importantly he does not evaluate how his creation is going to be perceived by others. He just creates whatever comes to his mind. It is by virtue of being human that he has learnt to think and to imagine and he has no hesitation, no shame whatsoever, to put his thoughts into life and materialise his imagination and share it with others. In other words, he creates regardless of the fear of making mistakes.
However, as a child grows and goes to school, he starts adhering to a “Make-no-mistake” concept. How many of us, as adolescents or adults, have hesitated to ask a question or propose an idea in front of a distinguished audience? Everyone, I am sure. While thinking of an idea, we subconsciously think of how it may be perceived by our audience. We grow up in a system where making mistakes is a taboo. But, many of us do not realise, a mistake could be an inception to a process called creation. (I am not talking about serendipity). “The fear of making mistakes obstructs creativity” as Ken Robinson pointed out in one of his talks.
Classrooms in schools, open spaces in offices…these kinds of crowded infrastructures which aim to encourage competition, actually inhibit creativity. It is not the crowd that is the problem; it is the mentality of the crowd that is a problem. If we were taught in classrooms to share mistakes…if exams were not based on how many “right” answers you got but how many “creative” answers you could think of….companies may not have to spend millions on setting up an innovation agenda. As IBM points out, in a CEO study “What will be the enterprise of the future be like?” innovation and global integration are the two biggest challenges facing businesses today. Only those organizations that encourage innovation and prepare to address the new realities of the integrated market will be able to harvest its full potential.
Only education can ensure that the creativity within each one of us is protected because one lost, it can hardly be restored. Schools are not meant to make professor-like individuals out of us all who know everything. After all, all of us do not become professors in the long run. So, we do not need to get everything right. What schools should emphasize on is the need to teach people to participate, to contribute and to share within the groups they belong to. This alone, I believe, is the key to creativity. Hard to accept as it may seem, but creativity does not begin with “thinking” alone, it begins with sharing “thoughts”.
And to end this article, here is some food for thought…
A fear that we develop early in life are hard to abandon and the same goes for the fear of making mistakes. We all know how to make mistakes; let us learn to share them :)