Sir Ken Robinson: do schools kill creativity?
Well... I wasn't feeling very inspired to write this week. Maybe because I realized we are a product of a wrong educational system. So, actually, the right feeling is disappointment. So I went to Google and did some research about this topic... And I found this video. Which made me even more disappointed, because there are more than 30 million views. So I think it would be safe to say that at least 20 million people watched the video (I'm not even considering broadcasting for large audiences, so...). And this is twice the population of Portugal! And what is more astonishing: we are still crawling to change this.
So I did some more research after watching the video. Gardner's theory of multiple types of intelligence is quite interesting, but the lack of empirical evidence made me doubt of it's scientific efficiency. It looked more like a different name for an already known knowledge that intelligence is composed by different capabilities. Just to make it clear: I'm not saying this theory is invalid; I'm saying there is a much broader theory that includes this one. And just to make an observation: who doesn't feel attracted by the idea that everyone is smart in some way? This play a big role in the acceptance of Gardner's theory... But anyway, let's move on...
The three-stratum theory
Just check the image below:
To keep this simple: the experiments made and the data collected from psychological tests, school marks and competence ratings showed some variations. Consistent, stable and observable differences. So a three-layers model was proposed, in which each lower level consists of variations and differences of the above level's capability. We could discuss the topic further, but this is not the purpose of this post. So I'll put some links here and you can access more information if you are interested.
My point is very simple: as you may have noticed, what we call intelligence is a composition of different factor and capabilities. Even though we can reach this common factor (what we call g-factor), it still presents significant and stable variations from individual to individual. And there is potential in this variations. The problem with educational systems (at least the most used ones) is that they don't really valorize these differences. This causes a huge loss when it comes to creativity and capability development, since we might be wasting incredible talents.
I don't have much more to add beyond what is said in the video, but this is something we really need to take in consideration. Ok, I understand it's pretty hard to overcome the legal limitations and requirements already established in the educational field, but... How about starting this at home? Children and teenagers are extremely sensitive to external stimuli, and the right ones will trigger some very good changes that will bring very positive results.
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