Week 6: Do Schools Kill Creativity

Wow! What an amazing speaker Sir Ken Robinson is. That was a great presentation. That story about the ballet dancer floored me. It was so good. I really connected with him on a lot of what he was saying.

He mentioned that the main basis for grade school is for college entrance. That seems so true thinking about it. Of course, schools want to teach students topics they feel are necessary to be productive in one's community, but at the same time, geared toward college and the business world. I have a problem with this. Too much emphasis is placed on the business world. By business, I mean exactly that. A business company basically means, Money. Finance, accounting, banking, stock broker, etc. are all jobs that revolve around money. Business is also one of the most highly populated college majors for freshman students who really don't know what else they want to do. Why is this? What good are these people to society? Why is pushing money around good? Obviously, it's a job that can pay well, but what does it do for people aside from helping to grow their investments or retirement funds? We all saw and still see what these people did to the economy. I may be wrong, but these 21st Century Skills seem to be focused on the business world. It seems that we want to create better business people.

It's sad that the world revolves around money. Another thing Ken Robinson said was that there is an Education Inflation going on. Jobs that needed a B.A. now need a M.A. and soon they'll need a Ph.D. I feel this is because people are running out of skills that set them apart from other prospective job applicants. This allows colleges and universities to continue to drain students' bank accounts and further put them in debt by requiring them to take meaningless classes in order for them to graduate. I personally can't remember 75% of the content I learned in college. Mostly because it was meaningless. Did I really need to take two semesters of a foreign language being an Exercise Science major? I can't remember more than 5 words I learned in my Japanese 101 and 102 classes. I got an A in both FYI.

People must be allowed to be creative in choosing their classes in order to make themselves more attractive to potential employers. Why should I have to take the exact same classes as everyone else? How does this set me apart from others? Colleges, especially, should not be able to dictate what I take in order to get my degree. For example, if a school district wants their teachers to have taken a technology class, then it is my job to take that technology class in college. But what if everyone takes the technology class, what sets us apart now? This is why school districts can have thousands of job applications of teachers wanting jobs. Colleges take the role of saying, "We prepare our students to be top candidates in job application pools by requiring them to take all these classes that set them apart from the rest." This may be true, but why on earth would a school district care if I took Japanese if I'm applying for the Health and P.E. position? I loved taking Japanese and hope to go to Japan someday, but taking those classes was a waste of money aside from improving my GPA and knocking out six General Education credits.

Long story short, yes, schools kill creativity.