Across the vast majority of population, we see adults taking and giving orders and conforming to a set of rules. We do not take a step back to think, is there a better way to live?
We lament that our young ones who grow out of school, are excellent order takers and followers and are not much creative. This is not to say that following rules, conforming to the process is bad. It is important to keep things organised in school but not a sufficient condition to be creative.
This behaviour is from school and our education system. Our school expects us to conform and follow instructions. For example, consider the curriculum we have at school.
There are a set of hierarchy of subjects, for a lack of better word, that is, it starts with STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), followed by languages, music, and the last being drama and dance.
If we also look at the effort spent on these subjects, lot many hours are dedicated to STEM and language and hardly anything for the music, drama and dance.
This is not to argue that STEM or language are not important, they are but the entire population seems to be leaning towards these disciplines more and more.
If we dwell deeper into the characteristics of these disciplines, they expect children
to do things in a particular way, conform and do things in an orderly and instructed fashion.
Students who come out of every class is focusing on narrow set of disciplines. The current system of education is producing a set of students who look alike, score alike.
In short, you could measure the output of a class on a singular scale from lowest to highest, while the same students enter the school in the early years with varied set of potential and skills with multi dimension competency that can only be measured on multi-scale.
After schooling, it is reduced to a single dimension, stifling the creative side of the children when they leave the school.
If we look back why our education system turned out to be like that, the root can be traced to industrialisation in the early 19th century. Jobs were available only to those who could build tools, calculate, who could turn out something which could be put to use etc… We have gone 100-150 years past the industrialisation but our schooling system remains the same even today.
After all these, we start worrying why very few peo-ple are creative, why our children are not original. Pablo Picasso once said, every child is a born artist, the challenge is to remain one. We often seem to grow out of it through education!
World of IT
In the new world of information and technology, the world is not just looking at people who are good in STEM, but also are in search people with creativity, originality, idea generation and imagination, that can make a difference to the society we live in.
If we look around, we see corporates like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter etc which epitomises not just technology and engineering, but heavily on creativity and ideation.
The process of education has to be organic, that is, it should explore the capabilities of individuals are born with, not stifle them through our system of education which has only a scale of linearity.
Focus on STEM, in addition to humanities, arts and drama. The entire human society relies on multitude of human abilities.
For a society to work, we need all professions to be flourishing. Children are usually fearless in the early ages, they do not hesitate to explore, try out and be wrong. This characteristic is very important in the adult life, because if we do not have the courage to explore, we will not get anything done. Maintaining the status quo is not enough to make our children face the new challenges of the world.
Abraham Lincoln, in his annual message to the Congress on Dec 1, 1862, said, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise – with the occasion.
As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” While the context is different, we
can adopt this to our system of education.
