Schools should nurture students’ creativity, not restrict it.
There’s a reason why so many kids don’t want to go to school in the morning. For many elementary and high school students, a day at school consists of listening to teachers speak for hours on end, time spent on some assignment and going home with even more work assigned for completion before the next day begins.
It’s tedious and draining, and it takes away the essence of what it means to be a child.
Children are naturally more explorative than adults. There’s a sense of discovery that comes with childhood; as the newest members of society, it makes sense that they would be keen to learn about the world around them and see what it has to offer. It’s a shame that the system that many children are legally forced to engage with is so restricting in creativity.
Why are the youngest members of the world – those who are often the most creative by nature, with many adults striving to be more like them in this regard – burdened with nonstop monotonous schedules, due dates and guidelines? Shouldn’t these students be encouraged to embrace their creative intuition so that we can reduce the corporate blandness plaguing the lives of so many adults within the next generation?
By burdening our youth with constant restrictions reminiscent of those experienced in adult life, we are stripping them of the joyful freedom that should be a natural baseline across any child’s life.
There’s certainly something to be said about teaching kids to be responsible, and this isn’t to suggest that kids should be free from discipline and accountability. Learning about responsibility is a quintessential element of eventually becoming a cohesive part of a functioning society, but an overreliance on arbitrary rules is harmful to the “childlike innocence” that society claims so hard to want to protect.
There’s a reason why so many kids claim that recess is their favourite subject. Perhaps it’s time that “regular classes” take a few hints.
Lectures might seem like a method of fostering a collective group of students’ learning, but the act of speaking at a group of students is an authoritative ideology when the real focus should be on the children. Teachers who take up the role of facilitator or delegator, however, encourage students to take their learning into their own hands.
This idea could be pushed even further. In a hypothetical classroom where students are encouraged to focus on their own interests, and a teacher’s role is to incorporate those individual interests into a means of gentle instruction, students could become representatives of their own learning.
The concept of the open classroom is an excellent example of this. Rather than traditional instruction, the open classroom allows students opportunities to experience “interest centres” where students focus their learning on their own topics of interest. The teacher is expected to focus on each student individually rather than as a collective and must work with them to format their interests in a way that students can still learn something meaningful. There are no whole-class lessons and no standardized tests; rather, there is a focus on each student as an individual with personal interests that deserve to be nurtured.
It’s worth asking ourselves if we maintain our currently-established ruleset because it helps the people of the future, or if we just keep these rules around because they’re all we’ve ever known. It’s not the children’s fault that they struggle to stay focused or interested in what we’re teaching them, it’s the fault of the education system that constantly restricts them.
Contrary to what many educators seem to believe, a teacher’s job is not to teach. A teacher’s job is to ensure that their students learn. A person can stand at the front of a lecture hall and “teach” any subject they want, but if their pupils aren’t actualy getting anything from the lesson, then the instructor has failed to do anything meaningful.
We must restructure the way we think about our education system if we wish to give young students the creative freedom that they deserve.
