Education in America

[coberst]

Education in America

 

It appears to me that there are two categories of educational techniques. One focuses on creating

graduates with large databases and the other focuses on the individual creativity of its graduates.

 

The US system concentrates on large databases and ignores (I think not accidentally) individual creativity.

 

The graduates of US education are great producers and consumers and almost totally without individual creative capability. Our economic system thrives on a policy of habit, pattern and routine. The workplace wants action and not time consuming thought. Thought must be of the kind that can quickly choose between ‘True and False’ or ‘A, B or C’. Thought should be “curtailed to a minimum”; quick action must be “accentuated to a maximum”. Any action delayed by excessive thought is to be discouraged. All thought beyond “T or F and A, B or C” is excessive.

 

The workplace, primarily the large corporation, needs expert specialists with finely detailed pattern recognition. The most valuable employee, at any single moment, is one with a readily available menu of routines who can--after recognizing the problem pattern—quickly choose the routine that will immediately reengage the wheels of production.

 

Our college graduates are primed for pattern recognition and choosing routines. If the workplace detects a situation wherein the available routines are inadequate quick action is demanded to correct that situation. Our workplaces are designed to accommodate workers who follow detected patterns with honed routines. The workplace must maximize routine and minimize the need for any thought outside that which is carefully calibrated by routine. The most efficient workplace functions like a military force wherein all actions are made in response to codified routine. Even when the need arrives to replace an ongoing routine with another, this action too, is codified.

 

We think of the private entrepreneur as a very creative thinker who wins because of a quick and creative brain. I suspect there is some degree of truth in this assumption but it is a very small factor for success. Someone said ‘success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration’. The major element of success results from correct business pattern recognition; followed by well-honed business routines that makes success a possibility. Luck then determines who succeeds or fails. Bruit force capitalization, I suspect, is also a big factor. Bill Gates and many others attempted to develop software in the early days of the hi-tech boom. One or another of these entrepreneurs would succeed magnificently. Gates happened to be the one.

 

So, when all our citizens are educated to be successful in the world of ‘produce and consume’, what citizen is prepared to make good judgement in life when faced with problems with no pattern and no routines?

 

I have more than 16 years of formal education. Within the American lexicon I would, I think, be considered “well educated”. In my opinion, our standard college degree does not advance our education but very little. I think that it advances our training a great deal. I think this college degree prepares us for our life as a producer and consumer and does little positive to advance our ability to be what I consider to be a “good and wise citizen”.

[Mokele]

How do you teach creativity, though?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

You don't teach creativity -- you just let students keep the creativity they start out with.

 

A fascinating TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

[Mr Skeptic]

Creativity can also be practiced. Or allowed to atrophy.

[coberst]

How do you teach creativity, though?

 

 

Great thinkers of the past have given us two bits of advice "the unexamined life is not worth living" and "know thy self" that form the essence for a creative life.

 

Our young people need to be taught Critical Thinking and to be encouraged to become self-actualizing self-learners when their formal schooling is over. The Critical Thinking self-actualizing self-learner has the foundation required of a creative thinker.

 

I shall post more details about these two factors shortly.