On Schooling, Education and Creativity

on Tuesday July 15, 2008 0112h by Jonathan
in Education

Just finished watching a talk on TED ( http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html ). Video is below if you’ve got 20 mins to spare.

The speaker touches on the interesting topic of creativity and how education effectively kills it. (Although his main point is education in the States/UK, I see some relationship with education here in Singapore).

Lets talk about the paper chase in Singapore schools. I’m sure most readers would be all too familiar with it. There, i just sneaked that one past you didn’t I? The part on paper chase. I think we’ve gotten so used to our education here being about chasing papers (for the unacquainted, ‘papers’ refer to paper qualifications, diplomas, degrees, masters, PHDs and what have you).

Remember your primary school days? Lower primary was fun. Discovering new things; making new friends. Then PSLE drew nearer, we stopped discovering and started studying because a good PSLE grade means entry into that ‘holy grail’ of secondary schools. Right? And attending that ‘holy grail’ of a secondary school means getting into a solid junior college! Wow! Then if you work hard enough and score all ‘A’s for the A’ Levels, you get to attend that prestegious University.

Ho Hum.

I guess the crux of the matter is that we’re getting too caught up in the whole process of doing well now to get to the next level that we start to lose ourselves. To put it another way, as Ken Robinson mentioned, “that public education is a protracted process of University entrance.”. Even Mark Twain once said, “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.”.

I really cannot agree more.

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2 Responses to “On Schooling, Education and Creativity”

  1. Bookmarks about Creativity on September 4th, 2008 06:01

    [...] – bookmarked by 4 members originally found by derekhty on 2008-08-12 On Schooling, Education and Creativity http://blog.jonaize.com/2008/07/15/on-schooling-education-and-creativity – bookmarked by 2 members [...]

  2. Education 2.0/3.0 - Permission to think, Sir? on December 5th, 2008 16:40

    [...] which Daryl and Mark have written on as well. If you ask me, this as a topic is exceedingly close to our hearts to generate all these thoughts amongst other Singaporeans. When I first read the RWW [...]

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