Posted on 02/28/2015 3:44:04 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
[Summary: Progressive education tends to celebrate creativity at the expense of knowledge and the traditional curriculum.] Creativity has been a big theme in progressive education for more than 75 years: We are constantly lectured that kids need music, art, theater, etc. This theme is now metastasizing into an oppressive dogma. But why?
Ken Robinson, the guru of creativity, is famous for saying “We are educating people out of their creative capacities.” The premise seems to be: if kids do arty things, they will end up being artists. Empirically untrue. Conversely, Robinson says that if children do something rigorous and academic, they will be prevented from being creative. Dangerously untrue.
Rearranging knowledge in new ways is arguably the very essence of creativity. It follows that the systematic acquisition of knowledge is one of the best things you can do if you want to be creative.
Furthermore, there are habits of mind or consciousness that can be developed only through practice and discipline. It’s always been understood that students learn by mastering basic skills and then by completing more and more difficult projects, not empty make-believe projects, but real projects such as speaking French, understanding American History, or figuring out how computers work.
Professor Robert Weisberg wrote a book called “Creativity, Genius and other myths” where he stated: “There is evidence that deep immersion is required in a discipline before you produce anything of great novelty....There is this concept that genius has leaps of insight way beyond everybody else. If you look at the background of these people, there is much more of a progression They don’t make leaps--they build in small pieces.” In short, Weisberg says that drills do not stifle creativity. They engender it.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
This writer couldn’t be more wrong.
Creativity is having the wit to capitalize on your mistakes.
After deep immersion in a subject, and drawing on frequent immersion in various subjects, eventually your brain gets something mixed up between the subjects. Sometimes, that momentary confusion is a novel concept worthy of inquiry - creation, if you have the where-with-all to see it.
/johnny
And I think he couldn’t be more right.
I’ve never thought of creativity as something that must be learned and progressivism damn sure isn’t the place to learn it if it was.
If anything, progressives are desperately trying to bring about a new dark age by trying to constrain everything to one size fits all formulation.
The longer artists and leftists indulge in this mutual masturbation, the less focused they are on the rest of the world, which benefits us.
The dumb, stupid, you know, democrats will be left behind.
You have to understand the science of a discipline before you can become an artist in a discipline.
We are educating people out of their creative capacities.
A main pillar of the left is Rousseau’s NOBLE SAVAGE. European Pagans and natives of Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas were all good people with no problems until Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman imperialist ideas colonialized their brains. The main purpose of education is to liberate them from those imperialist ideas.
Most leftiss are the unabomber without the bomb...Bill Ayers without the bomb...just the desire to destroy our oppressive culture.
And a funny thing happened the other day. My 14 year old was fighting my 16 year old for a advanced chemistry book. My sixteen year old wanted to keep it and my 14 year old wanted to learn it.
How many teenagers in public school fight over a textbook about alkanes and alkenes?
You certainly need to drill information into kids. However, the design of corporate education is fundamentally flawed.
Ken Robinson’s main thesis is knowing what kids (and anyone else) are made to do. What brings them joy, what they’re good at, and what sustains them. He’s against one-size fits all style of education that’s designed to bring everyone into subjection through reward and punishment. Some kids really struggle in that conformity system. He actually has the best argument for homeschooling outside of God’s explicit command. I was in public school, creativity is not the enemy. The schools have an aggressive program of conformity. The Element is a great book.
Yep. We need to go back to what worked. Common Core is disastrous.
/johnny
Tax dodge.
Before producing anything creative in a field, one first must get a clue about the field.
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