Do Schools Kill Creativity ? 10 IDEAs to transform the education system from uniformity to personalized education
Without repeating what I've written elsewhere, let me just establish as I make this list an underlying understanding. The word "educate" comes from the word "educe," which means "to draw forth from." Information, facts, even knowledge in general is not education. Those things are the tools of education, the mean by which we "draw forth" skills, abilities, capabilities, and characteristics. The basic problem with our education system is that it has ceased to be an education system.
Before it comes up, this does not imply that it has become an indoctrination system. A little digging in history shows it was modeled on Prussian schooling, which had the explicit intent of preparing a population to know just enough to serve as factory workers without knowing enough to be able to cause trouble to the rulers. It's not designed to indoctrinate; it's designed to pacify. It's a system designed for the industrial age following an agrarian calendar that we somehow expect to serve the information age and beyond. So when people say our education system doesn't work, they're wrong. It's working exactly as designed. Whether we have the will to change it is still to be determined.
1. Prioritize developing love of learning.
As Sir Ken Robinson said about creativity (paraphrased), we don't get educated into creativity, we get educated out of it. Humans are naturally curious, which means humans naturally love learning. But we mostly get the love of learning ground out of us by seventh grade. Make it a priority to support and encourage exploration, curiosity, taking chances, stretching, doing all the things that kids naturally do that game designers have learned to harness.
2. Do away with grade levels.
It's just a bad idea to have 20 or 30 people all the same age in a room with one person of a different age at the front. Aside from the lack of efficacy of a typical classroom, when they're all the same age, they pool their ignorance and gang up on the different one. One of the most effective classroom environment ever was the one-room schoolhouse. The children constantly interacted with people of different ages. As anyone who has ever taught anything knows, when you teach someone else you learn more yourself, so it's a great educational method. If we have to have classrooms (and we don't), at least find a way to do away with grade levels.
3. Don't tie rewards to grades.
Moving to the next grade level is such an award, and that should already have been eliminated (see number 2). Getting a scholarship based on grades is a reward. I'm not sure we can do away with grades completely, but treat them like we do speedometers in cars—they're just feedback mechanisms. When you make grades the goal as opposed to the metric, they become useless at best and an incentive to cheat at worst.
Bonus thought: in almost any setting other than education we recognize that when someone cheats, someone also gets cheated. Who gets cheated when a student gets feedback that s/he has attained something they have not? It doesn't hurt the teacher, who gets paid the same. To some degree it may be the ultimate employer or society. But mostly, the cheater is also the cheated if the education is worth anything.
4. Maintain portfolios.
Keep a record of projects, things attempted, lessons learned. Document failures and what is learned thereby as much or more as successes. Such records will matter far more than a diploma.
5. Project-based learning.
This works better than studying "subjects" for the mastery of skills, abilities, capabilities, and characteristics. Focus on projects that interest the student and use them to help the student figure out on his/her own what they need to know in order to complete the project.
6. Focus on collaboration.
It's important to learn to work individually, but also to learn to work with other people of different skills, abilities, capabilities, and characteristics. By the way, without traditional grade structures and tests, people would naturally work together to take advantage of "two heads are better than one," something the current structure must almost automatically discourage.
7. Focus on problem-solving.
This includes learning to evaluate which problems to solve.
8. Explain the need for basic skills.
In physical education, you don't do crab walks so you can learn to do crab walks better. You do crab walks because it develops certain muscles. You don't do scales on the guitar because you want to be good at doing scales. You do them because it gives you coordination, understanding of the fretboard, muscle memory, etc., to help you play songs. By the same token, it doesn't matter if you will ever actually use calculus. What matters is how learning to do calculus changes the way your brain works.
9. Remove oversight from government bodies.
Despite the rhetoric, they have a vested interested in maintaining a compliant population. They also care more about getting re-elected than about actually serving. How to divest education from the control of politicians is a difficult topic, but one that needs to be grappled with if we are going to truly help populations educe the needed skills, abilities, capabilities, and characteristics.
10. Foster mentorship, apprenticeship and student/teacher connections.
If it were just about the information, we would just hand students a book or send them to a web page. The relationship with the teacher/mentor/journeyman/master craftsman matters more than the information, especially since we're considering educing rather than merely informing.
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