Do schools kill creativity? Have you ever wondered
that what you do at school is wrong? The way science is transferred by your
teachers is nonsense? Or that school or university has prepared yourself as a future employee somewhere in a company? Sir Ken
Robinson, a worldwide-known leader in development of creativity, has taken up
this rather interesting topic and explains his observations about it in this
very interesting and humorous speech.
Questions:
- What are your observations about school itself and do you think, looking back to all these years spent there, that educational system in Poland is perfect or does it need some modifications?
- What do you think about changes that government has introduced concerning school structure (removal of Secondary School)?
- Do you agree with Robinson stating that school kills creativity? Why/Why not? If you had an opportunity, what would you change in educational system?
Comments
I think our educational system kills creativity. How is it possible to treat each child individually if there are almost 30 kids in one class? And a teacher teaches about 4 classes on just one grade, and our primary school takes 6 years to finish. How is it possible to support individuality when you have 300 students? What is more schools are underpaid so there are usually no money for additional "hobby" classes.
I don't have an opinion about those changes yet. Primarily, I think we shoudln't have introduced Secondary schools. But we have done it, so I think we should just stick to it. Removal of secondary schools resulted in hundreds of teachers losing their jobs.
I was a student of International Baccalaureate programme. I believe this is way better that Polish educational system. It is set to encourage student to be creative, to think, to discuss, to base their opinion on many reliable and scientific sources. This approach is much better than teaching children to answer questions just like in mark-scheme.
- Schools do not have money to invest at resources so that's why courses like biology, chemistry or psychics are not quite interesting here,
- There is not something like "talent hunters" program. It happens very often that some great talents are just wasted. As I know there is no basically any feedback from school is someone is talented at sports, art or singing,
- Computer science classes are really retarded. You will not learn anything expect MS Word or Paint here.
Furthermore, there are no PE classes, it's just playing soccer. When we look at charts or rankings that shows which students are best in the world, students from Poland are probably at the top 3. It does not mean that our school program is so great, they just expect students to work a lot, without any help and that's why students from Poland have great knowledge. So in my opinion our education system has to be changed. Classes should be updated, classes like CS or PE should be totally different and there should be chances for people with talents different than math.
Changes made by our government are mostly meaningless, because those changes does not include new things. I never was a fan of secondary school, but I think that this removal accrued a lot of bad things ( a lot of teachers have lost their jobs).
I agree with Robinson. It's really hard ( or maybe even impossible) to make school suited for every individual, but it really should be more personalized. For example in Poland if someone is interested in Robotics, he will not have any chances to develop in that field before studies and I do not think it's good. Subjects at the school are too general, so if someone are for example interested in plants, he/she will not have any help from school.
Other problem is fact that a lot of classes does not make you learn new things - they just let you know how to pass some specific test. Maybe main problem is that our country does not invest in schools, but I dunno. If I had chance to change something I would make CS classes more professional. Also I would add new classes like: Economy, Psychology or Algorithms. Other thing that would be great is to give students some choice of selecting subjects. At the beginning of the school everyone should learn about everything at the basic level, then they should have possibility of choosing what they want to develop in.
Another thing I hated very early on was how languages are taught in schools. Without additional english classes I'd never be able to keep up the pace in high school in Sweden, even on the lowest level. One of the reasons is what Magda mentioned - you cannot focus on a student in there are 30 of them in a class. The second one is the way it is taught - I still remember that we focused very much on learning vocabulary and grammar rules, but did not do any speaking at all. The very most natural way of learning a language is speaking, the rest is acquired on the way. The worst thing is, many people know the names of 8 types of tables and know all the tenses in theory, but then they go on a vacation and cannot even order food in a restaurant. In Sweden I learnt more english in one semester than in 7 years of studies in Poland. During high school I went from barely being able to keep up (even though I had extra classes two-three times a week for the past 6 years in Poland) to actually getting a CAE certificate (naturally financed by the school, because it's unthinkable for anything study-related to be paid) with a near perfect result.
Last thing I want to mention is the difference in how the student is treated. In Poland, a student is generally treated as a youngster, assumed to be a cheater and definitely is treated as someone that's lower in the hierarchy. Teachers should really think about their school times and how they felt in situations where they did not have any say, or were treated very unfair because of the reasons I mentioned above. In civilized countries this is not the case. In Sweden you could ALWAYS have a constructive discussion with a teacher, you were ALWAYS treated equally with the person you spoke to. No titles before the name mattered. And if you actually complained about a teacher, the school would always look into it instead of assuming that the student complaining is shady and must want to get a better grade or revenge for a worse grade. This is the worst approach possible that makes young people feel like garbage, no matter how good their intentions are. And that in turn rejects all the good ideas of the young and creative generations and makes the whole educational system being run 'by the book', no matter how badly it has been written.
First of all teaching to think schematically is the main problem. When someone is creative and gives the right answer which doesn't fit the key - he's wrong. I mean - really? Entire educational system is growing many generations of robots which all think in the same way.
Our government isn't aware of importance of education, especially in early age of children.
I totally agree that schools kills creativity. And I don't mean that there is not enough art or music lessons. I mean that you can't be creative at school, because you're different than everyone and that's wrong. You think in a different way and of course is't bad and wrong. You have to think and do everything what teachers tell you. Other way you're a rude and impolite kid. It's pathetic.
I think that it was a really poor decision to remove secondary schools. For me politicians do not want to find real cause of the problem. They just glance, then find artificial reason and apply the most convenient (for them) method (which obviously doesn’t solve anything).
Yes, school kills creativity. There should be more experiments, interaction with world and subject personalization. Right now, everybody is stuck in the boring and exhausting system that won’t even prepare them to real-life. To become worthy, one must find and work on his/her own interests, because there is little to none support for self-development in current schools.
I feel that we are pushed to learn a lot of factual information but instead, we commit it to memory and most of what we are taught. I also think it is very interesting thinking that the public education system has arts on the bottom, valuing mostly core subjects and fostering a feeling of non-intelligence in some students because they do not do exceptionally well in those core subjects. This view of intelligence focuses on the knowledge and expertise in factual information, leaving those who do not have a knack in maths, science, etc. feeling incapable or even not creative.
In my opinion, secondary schools were unnecessary. First of all, you were wasting three yours to pass another exam. Secondly, you were loosing your contact with friends from primary school. Three years of secondary school is not enough to build strong relationships with new friends. Now you have 8 years of "stable" learning process and 4 years of high school. This one year more in high schools means a lot, because untill last year there was not enough time to do all the material for matura exam.
I agree with Robinson that school kills creativity. Schools kill creativity, because they do not teach kids of self-development. Kids just have some tasks to do and thats all. After the school they do nothing if their parents doesn't show them other activities.
I don't think there is much difference between new and old school system but it created some chaos for sure. Nevertheless, if we had secondary schools we should stick it, because there are many other much more important aspects of education that should be improved, i.e. underfunded schools, stupidity and authoritarian behaviour of teachers, etc.
There is one underrated aspect of having a secondary school - the change of environment, being able to soft reset your closest community, friends, relations was a blessing for me. Not only i went on to know more ppl i also could anew form my peer, friends group while being older and smarter about how i choose friends and how i form my relations.
School kills creativity because of one need- need to find a way to evaluate performance in non measurable tasks such as art classes, writing classes, etc... While easily measurable science subjects are easy to evaluate others not so much. I think having an option to choose our path (which subjects we want to attend) earlier in our school chain would be useful , i also understand of a need to know them all approach for young people.
I think that the recent government change is really good since as far as I can remember, secondary school was really unnecessary and brought many people -
young students - to the conviction that they are already adults and that they can do whatever they want. This was also the best possible place to either become a bully or be bullied. I really regret that I had to attend the secondary school where most of the people perceived being cool as more important than focusing on their own future.
I think that if we treat school as the only way of gaining some knowledge, we would certainly become limited in some ways. Schools are just institutions to give us some solid foundations in our knowledge to make it easier for us to gain some more knowledge in the future.
I don't think that removing of Secondary School can change a lot. I think that they shouldn't have introduce secondary schools at all but because they did it they shouldn't have introduce it again.
I think that schools are important but I don't know why our educational system is so bad. I think that teachers should be more educated and school rules schould be more strict. I had a lot of problems with learning on lesson because of my friends who were talking during lessons and teacher didn't even react.
I am not a specialist and I don't know how to fix our educational system but what is strange for me is fact that years miss and nobody knows what to do with this.
In my opinion that change was not nessesery. It won't change anything but it required a lot of money to apply this change.
Of course, as i said before school kills creativity (at least in Poland). Why? Because if your answer is different than the key but it's at the same time correct then from the teacher point it's wrong. If i had an opportunity to change something in our education system i would add more freedom to students. If you want to get some more lessons in Math you should be able to do that.
also those important things that might help them in the future to boost their start in the adult and professional life.
I think that the teaching system in Poland is not the best. Often, the school program is not implemented sufficiently, after which huge homework is asked, with which often a large part of the children have a problem. Certainly we should not carry out such drastic changes in the educational system as it is done now. Yes, I think we should remove the Secondary School, but in a planned way. Too much confusion during junior high school tests, and the scope of teaching is repeated. I also agree with Robinson that the school kills creativity and teaches only peeled paths.
My only thought was "If they didn't even put any effort into this, why should I do it?", and then I just copied the answers. I tried to be creative at first, but apparently no one gave a.. no one cared about it, and no one would actually read it if it didn't include the strict points from the answer key, so what was the point in being creative?
As long as we are using system that works on:
"Do A, B and C in the orderly fashion and you will score 100%. We don't care if your essay will have 180, or 1800 words, it just has to have those A, B and C points, or you will fail"
it won't promote creativity...
Removing the secondary school, while might seem good at the beginning, isn't actually that nice. It all boils down to the class you had in your primary school- if it was nice, then yet another 3 years will also be nice, otherwise you're stuck with them for 3 more years. Personally I liked my secondary school, meeting new people and all the fun some of them did, was much better compared to my primary school.
If I could, I would fire all those bored and imperative teachers- their main goal is to teach kids something, not just assess them as if they were some excel rows.
Then, I would fire most of the "relics" a.k.a "Mr/Ms PROFESSORs", with teaching methods back from the good ol' soviet union, who got upset if asked about something without that "Ms Professor.." prefix. These methods don't work anymore and there are far better young teachers, with modern ways of learning. Also I would lower the hours for some subjects, as well as made some of them voluntary. For example, if one feels that s/he wants to go "technical way" rather than "philosophical" one, why not limit e.g. polish to grammar and basic stuff one needs to know to properly speak and write without grammar errors?
On one hand I think it might be beneficial for the students. From what I remember from my own education, it could be divided into 4 3-year-old cycles. Each cycle would build open the previous one, further developing certain skills, e.g. nature classes in the 2nd cycle would constitute a basis for the biology/chemistry/geography basics classes in the 3rd cycle, which would in turn serve as a basis for more advanced biology/chemistry/geography classes in the 4th cycle. The problem was, that the 3-year period wasn't long enough to go through the entire material. The hope is, that with more time in each cycle, the teachers won't have to rush the classes so much to keep up with the material, and will have a bit more time for the students that didn't grasp some topic at the first glance.
The downsides of such changes are obvious. For one its a change, so it requires the whole curriculum to be adjusted. Moreover the transition presents a huge logistics problem for everyone involved.
In ideal conditions each child would have enough time to play, learn math, dance, play an instrument, read a book, etc. everyday. Unfortunately that's not very feasible. Not unless we want our children to graduate from grade school at the age of 17. The hope is that maybe by correctly recognizing each child's strengths at an early age, we could tailor the education system to that child, to further develop the skills it shows aptitudes for. After all 30 years from now most physical jobs will be made by robots anyway, and we can't really afford an future where 70% of people are educated to work as university professors, it won't work.
The other thing I don't like is splitting students into groups by age. In my opinion, every student should have individual teaching approach. Todays approach kills the creativity in young students.
It should be more mathematics at school, more traditional classic literature and more physical exercises. I would like there would be also more flexability – for example more practical classes, individual classes for interested and especially clever students. I think schools should strongly and consequently support individuals.
I guess the whole educational system needs no further organizational changes, but rather changing society’s attitude to education as a mission. The school’s role should be somehow modified in people’s minds. Society just doesn’t understand, what all of that is for and how it influence all of our further life. Our system needs some kind of soft revolution, maybe we could inspire with Scandinavian model, where there are no traditional notes for describing ones, and where the talents are developed rather than the same standards (good for everybody….) are used to all the pupils (like we have in Poland).
My strongest experience in this respect comes from secondary school. I had a physic professor, for whom his work was a life mission. He was also a passionate about philosophy, and wanted to teach us more than the educational system required – i.e. discipline, hardworking, regularity, consistency in action. But the most important thing he expected from us, was logical thinking. As a result, he was exceptionally very strict teacher, famous for his requirements, forcing non-logical-thinking students to change the class or even school. As an effect, he met the resistance of the parents, who wanted to protect their kids. I wonder, protect from what?? Anyway, in this class, where he met such reaction, he had to change his way of teaching. But I remember how angry he was, he told us: „They want school without stress… well, ok. But if they think that their life is possible without stress, they are totally wrong.”
Now I know he was the most inspiring teacher I met and one of the extraordinary man I met. I still remember his rules of solving the tasks, and I still keep in mind his philosophical attitude to life, which helped me in many situations.
2. I guess you mean the last change, but I was against the previous change. In my opinion we shouldn’t change the things, which work good. There were no logical arguments for that and in fact financially we paid twice for zero effect… Definitely, we need modification, but in our minds, as I mentioned above in point 1. As a result, I guess some organizational changes would be needed, but I insist on saying that their cost would be very low (only some legal issues concerning the notes and additional lessons).
3. I definitely agree with Ken Robinson’s arguments. My son is in 4th class of primary school and I fast discovered (4 years ago) that: 1. contemporary educational system less prepares children to professional life, and 2. In adult life we are expected to be creative, while at school we are required to move between limits and we are taught to act schematic – otherwise this is difficult (or impossible) to judge us and to assign the grade. Some people can cope with that, some not. For many humans, anyhow, our educational system does not give any chance to develop their potential, because they are expected to obey the rules and follow the instructions. Sad. Adult life is more difficult, and the school in the form it exists now in Poland is something artificial, some kind of “micro-world” no corresponding to “real world”.