A Good School Does Not Stifle Creativity, But Rather Enhances Children’s Talent.
Often The educational system is criticized for using a methodology based on rigidity and in the memorization of content. Only in a few countries, such as Finland, is this model being questioned, and currently overcrowded classes and the impossibility of offering treatment adapted to each child are still normal.
But children’s minds have too much potential as if to try to guide it along the path of an education based on standardized tests and lessons in which teachers speak and students remain silent. It makes no sense that, in the life stage in which we are most psychologically flexible, we are intended to be limited in developing those skills through which we want to guide our vocation.
If we take a look at the brains of boys and girls of starting school age, we will see that Its number of neurons is not less than that of an adult brain How can it be, then, that they have so little mastery of certain psychological skills that are normal after reaching the age of majority? The answer to this has to do with the same phenomenon that makes children so quickly learning certain abilities: neuroplasticity.
This characteristic is the way in which the human brain (and its entire nervous system in general) adapts to the experiences that are lived During the first two decades of life, the evolution of the cognitive abilities that we experience is explained because, during this time, neurons begin to massively interconnect with each other according to what we experience.
If we are not born knowing how to speak, it is not because we lack neurons, but because they still have little relationship with each other. The same goes for many other competencies.
In other words, the little ones are especially capable of developing a potential that runs parallel to the way in which their nerve cells create a network of connections in the brain If they don’t know how to do many things, it is because they have the opportunity to learn all kinds of skills, instead of building on capabilities that they already master from the beginning and that would limit the ways in which they can express their creativity.
School as a place of opportunity
If the school must be a place where the capabilities of the youngest are enhanced, this project cannot do without the concept of creativity It’s not just that it is a pretty, fashionable value and that we like how it sounds; is that children’s learning is characterized by being fundamentally a creative process. Starting almost from scratch, asking questions that most adults ignore, creating new mental routes that link very different forms of knowledge, etc.
It cannot be expected that classrooms are a place in which academic content is transmitted as if it were data stored on a USB. You have to connect with the mental world of the little ones, those psychological kingdoms that they themselves have built and that do not have to be governed by the logic of adult thought, and make that learning meaningful within that framework of creativity. But what is usually done is not that.
There are several things that mean that creativity is not taken into account in school.
The first of them is that children’s creative thinking is uncomfortable if We only think about building students who get good grades In many subjects, lateral thinking tends to go outside the paths set out in exams.
understand them It would take a lot of time and effort to understand the mental schemas of each boy or girl, and in a society with mass classes that is not possible. It is easier to show that test scores reflect the quality of education and turn the page, even though these results are a consequence of memorizing content that is not understood and that will consequently be forgotten after a few days.
Those responsible are not the teachers, who do what they can with the resources they have; It is from the governments that undervalue education and those on which their power is based.
The second reason is that learning based on creativity is unprofitable if what you want is to educate to create future workers. Lately it has become very fashionable to demand that schools be places where young people learn what the world of work is like, but this has perverse consequences that are rarely questioned.
The labor market tends to reject creativity except in some very specific and well-paid positions. Most workers are paid to do very specific tasks and to do so by fitting well into the organization’s hierarchy, without questioning their superiors too much. Defending this idea only leads to limiting children’s options to those that are most profitable.
Are we training people, or future workers? At what point was it decided that education has value as preparation for the labor market?
Expanding the potential of children
Committing to an education that allows children’s creativity to expand instead of limiting it to fit into the world of adults is a challenge that cannot only be based on will and good wishes.
Material changes are necessary in the functioning of public education, such as requiring non-crowded classrooms and reviewing the evaluation format. In Finland they have already started doing it. When will our turn come?
