Born creative

We are born creative and curious, but schooling soon changes that.

Babies are wired to explore with every sense, learning at a rate that is beyond measure. Toddlers devour the world, feeling, smelling and tasting with gusto - by 2 years old, they are expert learners. By age 4, children are brimming with questions - not just feeling and testing thier way but also stretching their limited vocabulary to ask about anything and everything.

The chaos of the JK classroom is proof that childrens' creative hunger is still driving them hard when we first expel them into the public school system. But 20-30 individuals sharing one small space and one teacher is too many, so that teacher is forced to preserve her sanity by immediately imposing order in whatever way she can. We teachers curb enthusiasm and quell excitement. Students are disappointed to have got the wrong idea about learning...what they thought would be fun actually happens in an uncomfortable chair, under stark lighting, pencil in hand. Learning quickly transforms from energetic, thrilling and colourful to silent, solitary and dull.

And children are rewarded for staying quiet, doing as they are told, and passively taking information in rather than seeking it out on their own. These children take pleasure in the positive reinforcement, but when there is no pleasure in learning, the pat on the head becomes their only motivator.

What does a successful preschooler look like? She is boysterous and loud, hurling herself into new arenas with curiosity and confidence. By grade 2, success starts to look very different.

A grade 2 student who earns her teacher's praise is quiet, waits for permission before showing interest and does as she is told without pausing to question. Sometimes, students awaken from this school-induced stupour sometime in highschool, and drop out.

The rest, the so-called "cream of the crop", heard off to university still believing that if you do as you are told and wait passively for the lecture to begin, success will somehow follow. Time to wake up, I think. Better still, time to stop puting them to sleep in the first place.