Education is Killing Our Hopes of a Successful Future

Schools Kill Creativity

The beginning of this clip is led by a comment that we don’t know what the world will look like 5 years from now and yet we are supposed to prepare children for it. I never really thought about it in that way. We can search for trends across history, but with the way that technology is growing every day, who knows what education, or the world itself, will look like 10 years from now. I think that because of the fact of an unknown future, the education system needs to allow for more flexibility when it comes to content. A million things can change between yesterday and tomorrow, but it can take years to get curriculum and standards changed…just a thought.

Another interesting statement that came up was about the willingness to be wrong.  If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. Originality means taking a risk. If nobody has ever done it before, there is no way of knowing how it is going to work. You can have all sorts of theories or assumptions, but there is no way to be certain.

Kids have the awesome ability to not be afraid of being wrong. They are quick to jump to conclusions and if they are incorrect the first time, they will guess again. It’s as we grow up that we become intimidate by being wrong. Somewhere along the line of elementary school and middle school, students develop the fear of being wrong. I think that this fear goes more deeply into the fear of looking dumb. By this age students know what grades mean. They know if they are performing well on state testing and they know if their peers are not.

On top of causing kids to be threatened by an incorrect answer, we also steer kids away from doing the things they like because we draw the conclusion that they would never get a job doing that activity. We circle everything back around to the fact of whether or not someone can get a job doing a given activity. I do it myself. When I heard about fellow classmates in college who were majoring in Music Composition or Outdoor Recreation, I was always confused. I always wondered how someone could make a life for themselves with degrees in those fields.  

That is the problem. This is how the schools are killing creativity. We need to allow for variety. We are mining the earth for the specific children who possess minds that we believe will best serve us for our future. There’s a problem with this effort though. We do not know what the future holds and if we gradually eliminate the knowledge that we don’t feel is important, we could be greatly missing out on a vast amount of opportunities. We will not be around for this future that we are preparing the next generations for, so we need to make sure that they are capable of flourishing in it. We need to change.