school kills creativity

This is insane! Tis' the most crazy wonderful video I've seen on Youtube for a long time, and a smart one at that.

Please watch this, if only for the animated medium which is really amazing. I also suggest every video under the Youtube channel of RSA Animate, if you have some time.




Yet, beneath all this pretty surface belies a real issue on about the inadequacy of the current educational system, which is almost the same in the Philippines as in the United States. I find it ridiculous that we have not updated this dysfunctional model for more than a century now. Every experience is character building, they say. We must be acutely aware though that the results can turn out either positive or negative. In this case, Sir Ken Robinson nailed it when he said that formalized education kills most of our potential for creative thinking as we get older. Or rather, our current measures for success in institutionalized testing (e.g., a perfect score in a written exam) promotes boxed answers and one-note perception of the world around us.

Nay, while this may be the best that standardized education can get, do we really have to succumb to mediocrity if we can invent something radically better?

A school dropout turned out to be the most idolatrised icons of the century, not because he aced the current model, but essentially because he broke free from convention. His name was Steve Jobs, and we either like him, hate him, or feel indifferent about him. Still, here's a guy who did not know how to code a programming language but, two decades later, owned a venerated computing company that is worth more than Exxon Mobil, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell, and Chevron, the world's biggest petroleum giants, or even Microsoft or Google. The handful of companies with market capitalization beyond 200 billion dollars are all listed here as my unrefutable evidence.

Formalized education will tell us that Steve Jobs was a statistical aberration, an obvious outlier, because that is what it wants us to believe. But those numbers are immutable, and one fact remains: he was a great idea-man, a diamond in the muck, and for many people, the world was made better because of divergent thinking.

So, can we really invent a learning-teaching model that is better than the current mire? Here's hoping we do.