Do Schools Kill Creativity?
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"They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities."
I think this is one of the reasons why start-ups and small companies are often more flexible than larger companies. In a small group you know that even if a person makes a mistake, that person can be great.
When you add more layers of people between an employee and the person who controls your career and salary, the employee is more likely to be measured using statistics. A failure will stand out and could impact the salary.
Corollary: While great people don't make the easy mistakes any longer, they'll focus on making great mistakes because that's where they're learning at.
Mistakes have consequences, great mistakes have great consequences. I do not therefore think that great people make great mistakes. Otherwise, we probably would not know of their existence.
By definition of what a mistake is, you certainly don't want to make mistakes as soon as you've learned how to do (what you want to do) without making them. By merely making mistakes, any mistakes, you won't grow.
But you know that you're growing in life when you gain new problems to replace the old problems. And when you're working on something new, you'll always be making mistakes. New mistakes. It's those you don't want to fear, disincentivize, or avoid.
If you don't make mistakes, you're either too shy to not challenge yourself on anything you might not know well enough already, or you're the perfection itself and you know everything already.
I do think many of us do not like mistakes, do not purposely aim for them, do try not to make mistakes, etcetera, but we still do make mistakes. Just because we dislike something does not mean that something does not occur.
I agree with you, we grow by making mistakes, where I disagree is that children should be free to do whatever they wish, yeah shoot that man, yeh boy go in front of the car, yes child do not do your homework, yes give the wrong answer to 2+2.
So I think my point is that mistakes are not a great thing, are not something to be romanticised, idolised, whatever. They have a use of course, but the consequences of mistakes can be painful.
Also, we have been taught all our life to be conformist, yet many of us do not always conform, we have been taught all our life to not make mistakes, yet many of us do not live in absolute fear of making mistakes, are not completely stagnant and do nothing but lay in our bed all day for otherwise we might make a mistake.
The companies do punish people who make the wrong decisions even though these people couldn't have known they would be wrong and just took a bold step. But in startups you also get penalized by losing your company and/or money.
This fear of mistakes is exactly the reason some people actually believe in projections. Sad but true.
"Schools can nurture creativity in children, but they can also destroy it, and all too often do. Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers."
....
"But we have not yet gotten down to the marrow of the matter. We have been talking as though there were something called "society" that defends itself against creativity by all the means we've mentioned above: education, specialization, fear of the new, fear of raw creative power. There is no such thing as society, there is no such thing as institutions, schools, the media, and the rest of it. There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs. The marrow of the matter is that however we might restructure society, however many resources an enlightened regime might bestow on the fostering of creativity and the arts and sciences and freewheeling education dedicated to the deep exploration of mind, spirit, and heart, we would still be in the same soup. There is something called growing up, which happens to us no matter what our circumstances. We all have learned what it feels like to be betrayed for the first time, the second time, the third time, when our innocence gets stripped away, and we jump from innocence to experience. There is a point, or rather a long series of points, at which our innocence and free play of imagination and desire collides with reality, with the limits of is and is not, with the limits of what can and cannot be.
"Everything we have said so far should not be construed merely as an indictment of the big bad schools, or the media or other societal factors. We could redesign many aspects of society in a more wholesome way--and we ought to--but even then art would not be easy. The fact is that we cannot avoid childhood's end; the free play of imagination creates illusions, and illusions bump into reality and get disillusioned. Getting disillusioned, presumably, is a fine thing, the essence of learning; but it hurts. If you think that you could have avoided the disenchantment of childhood's end by having had some advantage--a more enlightened education, more money or other material benefits, a great teacher--talk to someone who has had those advantages, and you will find that they bump into just as much disillusionment because the fundamental blockages are not external but part of us, part of life. In any case, the child's delightful pictures of trees mentioned at the beginning of this chapter would probably not be art if they came from the hands of an adult. The difference between the child's drawings and the childlike drawing of a Picasso resides not only in Picasso's impeccable mastery of craft, but in the fact that Picasso had actually grown up, undergone hard experience, and transcended it."
There is no question that part of this involves absolutely smothering creativity. Whether it is a primary goal or a side effect, I'm not sure.
Excelling in school is training to be a worker/consumer. I won't knock this lifestyle, but I wouldn't expect the most innovative artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, and leaders to be people who fit in really well in the mass education system.
School is simply a detention center for the masses, and we all know this, even if we're not willing to accept the facts and the consequences.
Remove the federal government from schools to stop the standardization of the school system and that might help.
Try to change the way smart kids are thought of in school and make it where they are the cool kids.
Stop giving medals and trophies to every kid and only to those who win. If students realize that they are going to have to work to be #1 then they might get more creative.
Just some thoughts.
I just graduated high school. My English teacher, who's class I found interesting most of the time, said for a final grade: memorize 25 lines of Shakespeare and recite for an A.
Fuck that, I'll go learn C or something. (To his credit, he didn't count the grade when I flat out refused to do the assignment)
School, for the most part, is about memorizing and convincing teachers to give you a good grade. That's all it is. It's a game where the goal is to get the highest GPA regardless of what it's supposed to represent. Every one once in a while, I would get a teacher who understood that the purpose of school is education, that students are there to learn. Definitely those were my favorite classes.
And while we're talking about schools I'd like to rant about AP Computer Science: I find it offensive that they actually have the balls to call it 'Computer Science'. I took the AP test, got a 5. It should be called "Can You Recall Some Peculiarities of Java Off Hand?". Thousands of kids have taken this class, they've memorized a few facts about Java, and now they think that's what Computer Science is all about.
When memorization happens out of convenience that's a great thing. I have no problem asking students to memorize the derivatives of transcendental functions after they have derived them. It's good to memorize things that appear frequently in the line of work.
For what purpose does memorizing Shakespeare serve?
That ordering of words might actually convey some insights into life, love, and other such follies. Maybe in the act of memorizing it this may come through.
Definitely. Hamlet has some amazing passages that are beautiful and thought-provoking.
Maybe in the act of memorizing it this may come through.
In my experience, understanding the text and memorizing it are entirely orthogonal endeavors.
Hmm. That can be said of any piece of text
Shakespeare is clever, bawdy, and often amusing, and you have to be even more clever to understand it. A lot his wordplay is based on idioms no longer in active use.
Take, for example, Act 1, Scene 1 (http://www.shakespeare-literature.com/Romeo_and_Juliet/2.htm...)
SAMPSON
'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I
have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the
maids, and cut off their heads.
The heads of the maids?
Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;
take it in what sense thou wilt.
Or Act 1, Scene 3
NURSE
And since that time it is eleven years;
For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood,
She could have run and waddled all about;
For even the day before, she broke her brow:
And then my husband--God be with his soul!
A' was a merry man--took up the child:
'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;
Wilt thou not, Jule?' and, by my holidame,
The pretty wretch left crying and said 'Ay.'
To see, now, how a jest shall come about!
I warrant, an I should live a thousand years,
I never should forget it: 'Wilt thou not, Jule?' quoth he;
And, pretty fool, it stinted and said 'Ay.'
It's crude, inappropriate, and -- at least to me -- pretty damn funny, in the story's context. It also has a hell of a lot to do with "words arranged in a particular order", and the nuances of the meanings of words. Memorizing it forces you to study the text more deeply than you likely have before.
I've never made use of Shakespeare as a programmer, but I still remember reading his works in school -- and the significant appreciation I had for the art and cleverness of it. I even memorized the entire Queen Mab Speech for extra credit (I'm glad I didn't refuse!). It did help that I went to a private school where the teacher was intelligent enough to explain the word-play to us, and didn't avoid the less appropriate aspects of it.
Memorizing Shakespeare, though, has nothing to do with this process. Of course one needs a working memory of the text to put it all in context, but rote memorization of a passage is orthogonal to understanding it.
I can only say that memorizing a large passage of shakespeare was demanding and interesting to me in ways I hadn't anticipated, yet still easier than I expected, and the passage and (positive) experience has stuck with me since junior high school (... and that's a long time).
If you don't think that incapable high school students ought to have a way to make the grade, you have a problem with a lot more than this teacher's assignment.
That said, I think there are much worse things a teenager could do with his time than simply memorizing passages of literature. The art that lives in my mind has given me great comfort and inspiration already in my short life.
Even so, as merely a mental exercise it was perfectly valid. When is the last time you exercised your mind by trying to commit that amount of data to recallable memory?
I think the conclusion is just that you and I have learning styles that work very differently.
It's not "data", it's Shakespeare. Memorizing and reciting Shakespeare is quite a bit different than doing the same with an arbitrary sequence of digits.
We could also have you spend the rest of eternity rolling a rock up a hill a la Sisyphus.
We could, and while it the first few weeks might teach me some lessons in Zen, it's still not the same thing as Shakespeare.
I think the conclusion is just that you and I have learning styles that work very differently.
I don't think that's really the conclusion.
Seems like you just want to be contrary here, but have never actually spent time remembering and reciting spoken word.
Regardless of the content or meaning of any text, you can memorize it without understanding it. Memorizing may be a proxy for understanding it (you have to read it over and over again), but it is not the same process at all. If you can recite Godel's incompleteness theorem verbatim from memory, does it mean you understand it? Similarly, you can memorize verbatim the Wikipedia article on String Theory, but does it mean you understand it? All you have committed to memory are the words which are pointers to concepts and places and bodies of knowledge (among other things), but unless you understand what those words mean (unless you dereference those pointers), the text is meaningless and opaque. Having memorized X lines from anything is a 'cool' feat to some people, but it's an entirely orthogonal endeavor from understanding what the text means.
Edit: Also, just because someone repeatedly disagrees with you, it does not mean they 'just want to be contrary'.
I hold that there's an understanding to be found in Shakespeare in both memorizing and reciting it, and that it impacts you in a far more lasting way than merely studying it.
Would you admit that writing a paper about a passage is more likely to result in your recollection of the meaning of a passage?
What about spending a week after school memorizing that passage? It is also likely to engender that level of recollection and comprehension?
It did, for me. I remember the Queen Mab speech to this day, and that memory seared into my brain serves as the anchor point for many additional recollections I have of studying Shakespeare. I don't have the same level of recollection for any other books I studied in school, from Heart of Darkness to Catcher in the Rye.
Edit: Also, just because someone repeatedly disagrees with you, it does not mean they 'just want to be contrary'.
Given that I'm effectively arguing in favor of my personal experience, and the individual in question has none to draw from and is merely extrapolating from off-the-cuff opinion, I'd say they're just being contrary.
One can memorize something and not understand it. One can understand something and not have it memorized. This is not a subjective claim. Memorizing may have helped you understand, but objectively (if you follow the previous logic), it's not a necessary component of understanding.
and the individual in question has none to draw from and is merely extrapolating from off-the-cuff opinion
I don't see how you can draw that conclusion.
Ergo, your teacher's assignment was stupid because you can go through the motions without actually taking advantage of the opportunity. QED.
By that measure, you might as well drop out.
Snark (and your painfully affected over-use of "orthogonal") aside, the two aren't orthogonal if memorization aids in understanding, and understanding aids in memorization, and both aid in long-term recollection.
That's assuming that every course I take is like that. If that's what school means to you, you're really missing out on the purpose of education.
the two aren't orthogonal if memorization aids in understanding, and understanding aids in memorization, and both aid in long-term recollection.
If my goal is to get to my house, and I am standing 10 meters from it in the diagonal, I must traverse ground both in the x and y directions. If the goal is long term recollection, a combination of memorization and understanding is necessary.
You're behaving with impetuousness of youth if you lack the insight to see the purpose of the assignment and thus assume there is none.
Yet, your teacher was wise to give you a pass on the assignment, because there's no value in harming you grade when someone isn't interested and doesn't see the point in something merely edifying. It is, after all, your loss, but it's not a great one.
Amusingly, however, you've probably spent more effort bandying about this example as proof of your intelligence and the creativity destroying nature of school than it would of actually taken to memorize the text to begin with.
I note that you latched on to the one comment here that would support your own opinion of your own relative intelligence -- the one that posited that memorization served as a proxy for the understanding of the text for students that couldn't understand it; thus, you required no proxy and clearly are more intelligent than the those who did require one.
At the exclusive (no low-IQ or low-performing students need apply) private school I attended, memorization and recitation in front of the class was provided as an extra credit assignment for those students who were especially interested in the text, not as some sort of booby prize for the non-existent less intelligent among us.
You're behaving like an impetuous child if you lack the insight to see the purpose of the assignment and instead assume that the goal of it is exactly what you decide it is.
Why do you assume the assignment has reasonable purpose? The teacher specifically said that this would be a good way to raise one's grade, "to get a nice fat A in the gradebook before the year comes to an end". School isn't a game to me. Asking someone to memorize something is a shitty way to get them to really think about what they're memorizing. Why not ask them to write a paper or lead a discussion about it? There are many better ways.
It is, after all, your loss.
That's quite presumptuous of you. That would assume the time I would have spent memorizing those lines was the optimal use of my time. In case you're interested, I spent that time studying for my AP tests. And hey, my lowest score was a 4 in chemistry and I'm going into college with 23 credits. You can decide if that was a loss.
You've probably spent more effort bandying about this example as proof of your intelligence and the ridiculous creativity destroying nature of school than it would of actually taken to memorize the text.
Even if that were true, so what? What point are you trying to make?
I'd be curious to know what your major is/was in college.
Just because I don't need to memorize something to understand it does not mean I am more intelligent. I don't understand why you've turned this into some attempt of mine to self-aggrandize. If you find that memorizing something forces you to understand it, great - I'm happy that works for you but understand that the understanding of the text is the end-goal. My point is that whether or not you've memorized something has nothing to do with whether or not you understand it. I think a real problem is that you don't understand that one can understand something without having memorized it first.
At the exclusive (no low-IQ or low-performing students need apply) private school I attended, memorization and recitation in front of the class was provided as an extra credit assignment for those students who were especially interested in the text, not as some sort of booby prize for the non-existent less intelligent among us.
I'm seriously glad I didn't go to your school. But I see now why you believe so adamantly in the virtues of memorization since it has so clearly defined your idea of academic success. The fact that your school handed out extra credit for reciting back text is ridiculous. That basically defeats any meaning a GPA would have.
[Edit: And wow can you stop editing your comments so wildy? If you have something new to say, hit the reply link]
I expect that he didn't substantiate his claim for the same reason the original poster didn't substantiate his claim that learning C is a good use of time - people around here who have done both likely appreciate the value of the task.
Meta-point: I think a lot of people around here who argue "school is worthless, why am I doing this useless task" will point to this sort of exercise without asking or understanding why it's done. I certainly felt the same way when I was memorizing Shakespeare. While it's important to think for yourself, it's also important to take the advice of those who have more experience than you do, and when I see these threads I think many of the commentators haven't learned both lessons.
I think you would understand my position better if I clarified that it was memorization of the lines I was being graded on not the understanding of what the lines meant. That is the issue I took with the assignment.
Learning C is an objectively better use of ones time than memorizing X because learning C requires that you think whereas memorizing X requires that you simply spend time committing the order of symbols to memory.
And the great thing about college is that if the prior statement is not true, then it's your fault. For the first time, you are responsible for your own education. If you only have easy classes, that's because you did not seek out the challenging ones.
I convinced the undergrad CS department to let me start taking CS classes first semester despite the fact that Exploring Engineering is a prerequisite.
Do you think you could help me get in to audit a few classes? I'm basically not allowed to take any more math/science classes this semester because I don't have the prerequisites. I was thinking about trying to get into MATH-3134 Applied Combinatorics.
Also, you might appreciate this web app/program that I wrote. http://hokienotify.me
It will notify you when a class you want has available seats. It syncs its database every 10 minutes or so with VT's.
If you want to learn more the best thing you can do is be a good student. If a topic interests you, stay after class and discuss it with a professor, or visit them at office hours. Opportunities abound for this sort of thing, usually in smaller classes though. I'd recommend getting used to college in your first year and then hitting up professors more when you have found your place at school.
If you're like me (it sounds like you may be), you're smart. Just wait until you figure out that there are other ways to gratify your intellect than coding. Take a class that has nothing to do with any sciences. One that you want to, not one that you're forced to. You just may enjoy it :)
Personal experience: I was very far ahead of what I needed to do in order to graduate very early on (credits that came in from HS combined with taking 17-18 credits a semester, every semester). As a result, I would either wind up graduating a year early, or I could take random classes in whatever I thought would be interesting (without falling behind!). I chose the latter. Due to that, I'm in what I think is a pretty unique situation; I can graduate in the next year with an undergrad degree in three completely unrelated fields, if I wanted to.
I'm actually taking a philosophy class that I'm really excited about. "Knowledge and Reality" which came highly recommended to me. Maybe I'll really like it and take a minor in philosophy. Currently I'm planning to dual major in EE and CS and maybe triple major with the addition of Math. Definitely not as varied as you, but we'll see. :)
EDIT: One last thing I thought of. You may be one of those people that will be able to get a 4.0 GPA and have time to work on creative processes. Your 4.0 GPA is still a waste of time. There is always more you can do that is ultimately more impressive than a high GPA (i.e. publishing in competitive conferences, starting a highly technical and useful open source project, working on the Linux/BSD kernel, etc).
I will say that I started my college career in the honors program and on the 5 year BS/MS track. I just couldn't wait long enough to start doing real work. ;)
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.