Creativity-centered schools

in #education7 years ago (edited)

Some people asserts that our school system should reward creativity and risk taking instead of studiousness and abstract thinking. This is a reasonable suggestion, after all creativity and risk taking are at the core of innovations and outside the box thinking - two valuable assets in today's society. One can then ask himself why creativity-centered schools do not exist.

A creativity-centered school - why is this not a thing?

I do not think the answer resides in our school system or its members since most of the teachers agree that creativity is a very important skill. It is more deeply rooted than that. First of all, one could argue that creativity is a skill that can not be taught, since teaching is presenting well-known ideas while creativity is all about going beyond those concepts to find new and unique ideas. This is why a creativity-centered school could turn out to be ineffective.
Furthermore, creativity is a slow and unreliable process which makes it particularly tricky to evaluate reliably. In fact, a creativity-based evaluation should not be related to the course, otherwise students could just use what they learnt which is a memory-based activity. This means there would be no incentive to follow the course and the difficulty of the tests would go through the roof.
Finally, creativity is not a very effective way - it is much more reliable to to use proven methods than to invent your owns.

Conclusion

A creativity centered-school system is great in theory but almost impossible to implement.
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