Who Kills Our Creativity?

I wish I could use the tag line …”choose your school teacher with caution”. The reality is that we rarely get an option to select our school, let alone who would teach us.

A student has to write the answer exactly as teacher did or follow the steps of mathematics with precision to avoid deduction of marks. In such a system, a teacher has very little to contribute as the requirement is to repeat the same stuff year after year to a new set of students. This most certainly deters the bright minds from joining the profession. The personality traits of the teachers leaves a lasting impression on the student's life but the teaching hardly does. To inspire brighter individuals into the teaching profession, the profession itself has to be more innovative rejecting the “one size fit all” approach. We shall then have teachers who are loyal to what they do rather than how to make money. One who never dreams of teaching while growing up will rarely find the situation motivating and look up to monetizing for motivation. This is obviously, not applicable to the thousands of teacher who toil constantly to illuminate the life of their pupil. 

Mass education system is akin to factories processing a large population that can be operated by algorithms. Obedient, punctual, trained to receive instructions, harmless followers and most importantly doesn’t deviate from the set course through innovative ideas. A mass that could be easily manipulated by religious or political leaders will vested interests is another unfortunate byproduct.

The present schooling system worked well for centuries since its inception during early 18^th century. Fruits of this system contributed heavily to the industrial revolution under the British and went on to change India from an underdeveloped nation to today’s position of power. It also produced a large middle class, maybe the largest consumer base that any nation possess but with a disproportionately low number of industry leaders or innovators.

The writing on the wall is clear; our education system is not only flawed, its obsolete.

Today, we envision that the world will require less and less of such organised workforce. Businesses have drastically changed during the past decades and giant corporations have gone out of business without a trace. Organizations that employed people to carry out tasks with predictable outcome have either replaced their employees with less expensive ones or computers. This has already created unemployment and redundancies across the country and imagine the time when AI backed by machine learning completely takes over. Eventually all these tasks will be written with algorithms and operated by machines.

We need to change our system to nurture the child’s innovation, leadership and creativity traits. Our teachers shall teach them to research their own answers and guide them to look at things from a different perspective and not from a set perspective. We want our children to understand more and learn less. We can unlearn what we once learnt but having understood, one can never UN-understand! We want to prepare them to be adaptable to the changing needs of the world as no one knows what skill-sets will be necessary 20 years from now. But when today's child arrives at the job market, we want her to be creative, confident & ready.

Once in junior school, my daughter saw things differently. While the obvious description was a circus, she saw teamwork but unfortunately she was corrected. This is how children are conditioned not see or think outside the box and imagination is strangled. 

Once we succeed in changing the system, we shall witness more teachers making teaching their career choice and that too for their sheer passion for teaching. After all there ain't a profession nobler that teaching! The incentive /remuneration should be adequate but as the teachers knows better, money is not the key to happiness or fulfillment although a necessity!

The excerpt from her paper says it all.

This post is written as part of #IndiSpire269.