Creative people are a rare breed... You think so? Nah! Actually there are many creative people but their creativity has been doused by our education institution and system.... with lots of cold water!
Creativity... the current definition - the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, originality, progressiveness, or imagination. Okay... that I understand but I don't see much of that in my students. My kinds of students? They open their mouths and wait to be fed! Then like the bulimic they regurgitate!
Do we need a creative population? The answer is clear for all to see. Yup! We need people who can churn out new and innovative ways of doing things, solving problems.... I think right now, if feedback from the employers are anything to go by, Malaysia is short of creative people. Yes man (woman) we have aplenty. Creative and independent workers quite susah to get.
Are Malaysians creative? I think the answer is probably no. If we take patent registration as a bench mark, I think we'd failed miserably. Japan is leading in this area... from a nation of copycat, they've become the world leader in patent registrations. It shows in the way they have been able to forge ahead and become a world leader in gadgetry. The US, UK Korea, Singapore are among the other notable countries with patent registrations.
Do we need to teach creativity? Some people argue that creativity is a natural tendency. If that's true than by pumping our young with facts and more facts will churn out naturally creative people. We go by the assumption that by the time the heads are crammed with facts, these kids are ready to be creative people. Fact is they are not. No amount of facts in the heads seems to be able to do that wonder of turning them into creative creatures. A little daydreaming might. Of course daydreaming is also an art these days as the kids tend to numb their brains with computer games with what little free time they have.
So, how do we teach creativity? I don't know... some of the stuffs that I've read... tolerate failures, teach them how to critique, develop empathy, nurture curiousity, encourage debate, discover and work on the talents, breaking rules for a reason, encourage risk taking, develop intuition... If you look at the list, a lot in our education system doesn't seem to quite move in that direction. Ours is a 'cram, more cramming, stuff, more stuffing... then rush from one tuition to another...
Our system of exams, emphasis on the number of A(s) are real dampeners to encouraging creativity...
My ramblings for today...
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2 comments:
Random Shots .... cramming...and everything the student writes must fit snugly into the Marking scheme, verbatim if possible, and so are the examiners marking the papers mechanically looking for points, disregarding creativity and other points of view.
it's not that m'sians are not creative. the educational and social system in m'sia ensures that anyone who is "different" gets a really hard time. what's sad is that there's a term for this kind of mass social behaviour - it's called "tall poppy syndrome".
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