Red Tory v.2.0
I am enjoying my first day of the March Break.
I don't think individual schools kill creativity; the school systems do. When I think about the education system in Ontario, practically every student learns the same things. They take the same standardized tests in grades 3, 6, and 9 to see how well they perform--how productive the school system is. Just north of Toronto students attend schools that look like Home Depot buildings. I'm not kidding.
Schools do focus on literacy and mathematics because they are quantifiable--they are measureable. I hope I spelled "measureable" correctly. They do not focus on educating the whole child. As Sir Ken Robinson mentions, "We are educating people out of their creativity." We want children to perform well on standardized tests so we can measure our assembly-line process of educating them.
I don't think Sir Robinson wants students to learn dance, drama, music, and art because he wants them to become Bohemian slackers busking on our streets. I believe that he wants them to be able to think of new ideas in different ways and implement them by using their creativity.
Many of us have heard of Korean students who can pass a TOEFL exam so they can attend a US or Canadian university. At the same time, those Korean students have a difficult time conducting a basic conversation in English about general every day things. They can think mechanically in written English; they can't think creatively in spoken English.
A few weeks ago, I read a [i]Toronto Sun[/i] by former Ontario education minister, John Snobelen. I was upset by his column because he seemed to imply that we could have better teachers if they improved their own performance and increased the productivity of the students. He treated teachers as assembly-line workers rather than as [i]sensei[/i]s who can improve the creativity of the students. If only we could speed up the production line like the chocolate candy line on [i]I Love Lucy[/i].
No more factory outlet schools in architecture and thinking!
There’s a conventional bias against the humanities and “liberal arts” majors in business, but I found it to be entirely unwarranted in my experience. Coming from an art school background myself, I certainly never discounted anyone on that basis when hiring and was frequently surprised at how well they performed in a business environment; often much more so than people who had more ostensibly relevant “training” for that sort of activity. For one thing, their heads weren’t cluttered up with a lot of preconceived notions and theories about the way things “should be done.” For them, “thinking outside the box” wasn’t a problem because they never had much awareness of “the box” and its limitations in the first place! On the other hand, I always found the business-school types to be a real drag, more suited to being bureaucratic functionaries than anything else.
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