The significance of creativity seems to have been underrated greatly in modern education, which has led to people’s inability to tackle complicated assignments: “decisions-makers routinely reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as an important goal” (Mueller, Melwani and Goncalo 16). Being confused when facing any situation that in one way or another differs from a traditional one, people fail to handle emerging problems, which has led to considerable deterioration of the state economy and finances. Because of the recent issues regarding the solution of non-standard economical and financial tasks, the need to spur creativity in people has emerged, which can be solved by teaching creativity in schools; however, the given solution demands that the current educational system should be bent, which may result in students’ performance deterioration.
Though creativity is not something to be taught, it still allows for approaching problems in a new and innovative way. In that sense, the statement concerning the need to restructure the current educational setting with a distinct focus on creativity gains more significance and reasonability: “We need to rebuild our educational system from the ground up – and on the principles of creativity and creative economy” (Florida 391). Indeed, by boosting the students’ creativity, one can expect a number of positive outcomes.
To start with, the To start with, the students will be provided with motivation for studying, since the concept of creativity in learning will appeal to their unique goals and aspirations. Thus, it will be possible to reinvent the process of studying, making it less grades focused and with more emphasis put onto the process of knowledge acquisition and training of the recently learned skills. However, by far the most important effect of introducing the principles of creativity into schools concerns the concept of lifelong learning, which students will be able to pursue once their motivation is boosted by the opportunity to create: “We should use the creative minds – ideas, imagination and innovation – even in the absence of external pressure” (Sahlberg 54).
The given idea looks quite inspiring as a concept; its implementation, however, will most likely spur a number of questions, to answer which, one will have to carry out a vast research at best and engage in guesswork at worst. The questions listed below are only the few that will have to be answered before the educational system is changed:
- Is it possible to create the conditions in which students’ creativity will be boosted?
- Are there the conditions that sour students’ creativity, and can these conditions be technically defined?
- Does creativity work only in the positive conditions, or are negative types of creativity reinforcement also required?
- Is it reasonable to demand that every student should be creative, or should a teacher pick specific students for developing their creativity skills? If so, what will be the criteria for measuring students’ creativity?
Unfortunately, only some of the questions mentioned above can be answered once corresponding researches have been carried out; the rest of the questions, such as the last one, will most likely be debated over and over again in the future, with no definite answer provided. Therefore, the lack of information concerning the factors that enhance students’ creativity, as well as the inability to measure students’ creativity, begs a question whether the possibility of building an education system, which is based on encouraging creativity, is actually viable. To answer this question, one will have to not only conduct all-embracing and time-consuming researches, but also make educational experiments in school setting, which may possibly affect students in a negative way, reaching the exact opposite result and driving their creativity to zero.
Despite the difficulties specified above, creativity can and must be enhanced in students as one of the key qualities that will allow them to approach new tasks easily and solve various problems by adopting a complex synthesized approach based on their previous experience. By showing the students that, apart from the traditional approaches to problem solving, there are other alternatives that demand an integrated and, therefore, more difficult yet all the more interesting approach, teachers will be able to encourage students to explore their creative possibilities.
Even though the new educational system based on spurring students’ creativity may be flawed, it will still give an opportunity for students to try something new and decide whether they want to train their creativity skills. With that being said, creativity classes should remain an option instead of a compulsory element of the education system. It is worth keeping in mind that being creative is fun only as long as the freedom of choice is involved.
Creativity is one of those qualities that can hardly be taught in school; however, teachers can provide students with the environment that sours their creativity. Once tutors start focusing on designing the environment, which is favorable for students’ creativity, instead of foisting the need to be creative onto the students, the latter will most likely stop focusing on their scores and pursue self-expression in learning instead, thus, developing creativity and learning to approach professional issues in an innovative manner.
Works Cited
Florida, Richard. “Every Single Human Being Is Creative.” The Rise of Creative Class. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2012. 383–400. Print.
Mueller, Jennifer S., Shimul Melwani and Jack A. Goncalo. “The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas.” Psychological Science 23.1 (2012): 13–17. Print.
Sahlberg, Paul. “Creativity and Innovation through Learning.” Lifelong Learning in Europe 1.5 (2009): 53–60. Print.