Some people may think that education issues have nothing to do with them but, one way or another, we are all part of the educational labyrinth even if we are not directly engaged in the system. At the least, we are all affected by the educational system as we grew up; we may be in school or we may have kids, brothers or sisters who are in school. Furthermore, it is common knowledge that the world is going through a big paradigm shift. In contrast to the stability one felt through most of the second part of the 20th century, this shift brings in a lot of confusion and creates a world that constantly tries to adapt to changes. The field of education, like most other fields, suffers from instability and from the rapid changes that go with it. As a result, we end up doing things that are sometimes extremely conflicting. This reminds me of two consecutive workshops I attended a few years back. The first was about merging critical thinking with content learning. The second focused on exam standardization, while the first encouraged qualitative assessment; the second asserted the necessity of very detailed and irreversible exam models. Such extreme poles are overwhelmingly confusing for children and young adults as well as for teachers. What do we really need from education? To answer such a question, I think it is wise to focus on attainable short objectives since things seem indefinite in the long run. Do we need as much memorization as used to be required in the past? Do we make kids lose their individual traits? Do we have confused concepts of hard work and of laziness? Did we — and do we still — take creativity out of the kids as Ken Robinson claims about what schools are doing? And, do we need to awaken creativity? Why and how? We often tend to think that giving children enjoyable learning tasks is encouraging them to become lazy. We forget that babies learn to walk and talk and everything else because it is fun and enjoyable. When creative people like Picasso or Monet experimented with their paintings and when scientists came up with the great discoveries and inventions, they went through a lot of hard work and many failures to come up with great results; they trained and trained and trained and went through a lot of hardships but one common denominator they share is works were self-motivated and therefore enjoyable. Our school system, however, does not believe in the joy of autonomous learning. More often, it penalizes creativity and stigmatize kids who do not do well in standardized exams. But the stories of the people who shaped our time tell us again and again that creativity is not a synonym for laziness and that real learning is not a synonym for hard work. We cannot have creativity and standardize it as well. It will cease to be if we do so! Human creativity by itself is elusive and varied. Creativity does not flourish in a still, standardized environment. (The author can be reached at [email protected]) __
