JOIN USEver since the teacher announced the clock making project, my eight-year-old daughter’s tiny brain got ticking with multiple ideas. She began concentering materials for the same safely in her cupboard. After countless hours of designing and decorating without any help, the little cuckoo clock was ready for submission.
Taking the bag containing her hand made clock and brimming with joy, she got ready early for school that day. Little did she know that within hours, it would be lobbed across the class and criticised as a dummy model.
On the lookout for a more professional job, the teacher was more interested in a working model. A work of art so to say, which can decorate the classroom walls in perfection. Many in the class beamed with joy as they were lauded and praised for bringing working models. It was outlandish for these eight-year-olds to have made a working clock. The school projects are nowadays subcontracted to merchandisers, who have made it a lucrative business. This experience crushed my daughter’s creative enthusiasm and the learning associated with it. Tears rolled down as she returned back and narrated the tale to us.
The path of creative thinking involves taking risks and making mistakes too. The learning happens only when the bridge is crossed by one’s own effort. It takes imagination, determination and enthusiasm to reach there. Driven by self-motivation, this road is not risked by many. Outsourcing the child’s work may help the vendor’s business, it slays the child’s creativity and imagination.
Any creativity to be shunned is actually damaging it permanently. It takes no effort to criticise or condemn….but it takes character and self-control to be understanding and compassionate.
The system becomes a failure when someone else’s credibility or work pays off. In the words of Einstein “Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought”. Give that chasm of creativity a fair chance to prove itself.