The recent resurgence of interest in educational reform is a step in the right direction. At least this time around, the concern appears to be reforming the system, rather than the students. However, reform needs to go beyond what is taught in the classroom. There has to be a reappraisal of the purpose of education. We are all born with individual identities and unlimited creative potential. But from an early age, upbringing, and education stifles those unique human attributes. We test the success of schooling by way of exams that favour academically inclined students with a retentive memory.
They cannot measure creative potential. As a result, far too many students are put down as failures. Research into group behaviour,* has found that being “put down” results in adversarial revenge or withdrawal and that it takes many “uplifts” to counter one “put down”. This is not to say that students should not be challenged – far from it – but that we use a different yardstick to measure their progress and offer alternative subjects to release their potential. Valid criticism can be an encouragement to do better, whereas derision makes matters worse. Creative work requires discipline and the artist or skilled artisan is his own ruthless critic.
Unfavourable behaviour traits manifest themselves in a child before the age of five. The home environment is the main contributing factor and negative peer pressure, during school years and adulthood, escalates the problem. Although sport is a compulsory subject that is considered remedial, it is not a catch-all solution. However, the wide spectrum of arts and crafts can benefit all. The term “Useful Arts” went out of fashion over a hundred years ago, along with the skills that went with it. Only one in a thousand students with a degree in art end up working as an artist. Had they acquired a skill their lives would have been more productive and rewarding. But skills are learnt by way of apprenticeships, and apprenticeships went out of fashion along with the concept of useful arts.
As a result, we have lost a major contributor to education, income earning, and social well-being. This is not to say that the academic subjects should be neglected. Students that are academically inclined will benefit from exposure to the arts. Creative thinking enhances academic qualifications. Due to the high incidence of dyslexia in Afro-Caribbean communities** and given the fact that dyslexia and creativity go hand in hand, we should have an abundance of creators and creative thinkers. But alas, dyslexia is regarded as disability rather than ability. The response from the Ministry of Education when I offered to help teachers understand dyslexia, was that they already have programs to assist slow learners.
What appears not to be understood, is that a dyslexic student is not a slow learner – far from it – but a different learner. Dyslexia accounts for many of the world’s greatest artists, scientists, and thinkers. As an inventive engineer, painter, and sculptor, I would be handicapped without my dyslexic idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, exams cannot measure the creative attributes of a dyslexic student. At the age of ten, I designed and built a model aircraft with a 30” wingspan that could fly the length of a football field. Yet in the same year, I failed the UK eleven plus exam.
To think and work creatively demands courage, vision, initiative, innovation, and resourcefulness. It thrives on doing rather than theorizing. Creativity fosters individuality and resists regimentation. Specialization and rote learning hamper the all-embracing aspect of creativity. My suggested approach to education is not new. It dates back to when Herbert Read published his ground-breaking book “Education Through Art” eighty years ago. His ideas extended to the design of schools, with emphasis on creative spaces. But to this day our school buildings remain a warren of identical classrooms.
In Dominica, the first step in education reform should be the abolition of the Common Entrance Exam. It is an antiquated colonial hand-me-down that no longer serves a purpose. Force-feeding children to pass exams at the age of nine and ten is a form of child abuse. In relation to the role education can play in combatting anti-social behaviour, I quote this thought-provoking passage from Erich Fromm’s book “Escape from Freedom”.
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportional to the amount to which the expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this I do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man’s sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed,
to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted, the energy directed towards life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed towards destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors, but are in a reverse interdependency. The more the drive for life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.
References:
* “The Practice of Creativity” by George M Prince.
** “Dyslexia from a Cultural Perspective” by Asher & Martin Hoyless.
Institutions are formed by ideas and ideology, and those ideas originate from individual and collective experiences that shape perspective. However because of mans nature to become entrenched in ideas that are comforting to his perspectives and to avoid those that threaten those comforts, education, like religion has become dogmatic and stagnated. The greatest discoveries and achievements of mankind were not birthed within the walls of any educational institution, but rather from the hidden and sometimes open curiosity of those who dared to awaken out of the trance of established comforts. To brave the new world which confronts us, education must now break free from the mold of institutionalized doctrine and run free once again to challenge the comfort of entrenchment.
Thankyou Tyrone, We’re singing from the same hymn sheet.
Education is the advancement of knowledge. It is about gaining the requisite knowledge and skills to become a better person.
The present formal education system still relies too much on recall and retention of what is read or heard. It also caters almost exclusively to those who are academically inclined. Education should awaken one’s curiosity and a deep desire to solve problems while having plenty of fun doing so.
If we are to do much better, as a people, education reforms should take on some level of urgency. Sadly, under the archaic, fossilized thinking of the present Minister of Education, expect the status quo to remain in place at the detriment to our children and nation.
You comment negatively on every topic, your cup is always half empty, never half full. It seems you are just one of the trolls trolling DNO. I respect retirement but you take it to another level. Leave a little space for others to express instead of being like the Greeks that claim they invented everything (ha ha) from scratch.
Nicely put! Ibo is not a troll, though. He is a too oft-rejected politician who is forever booway. This explains his daily tirades and his unfettered access DNO’s blog.