Creativity (Noun): the use of imagination or original ideas to create something.
This is the definition of creativity that I found on Oxford Dictionary. It doesn’t seem so special, but why, why are people so interested in this little word, creativity, especially in the 21st century? I was trying to figure out things that have changed society that requires creativeness. I once read a book written ‘People in society began to look for different things from others after they successfully maintained stable basic needs.’ Yes, it is also written in many other books too. What I want to talk about is not a redundant or cliché words that are written in such books. Instead, I want to focus on human’s feelings rather than usual facts.
In the Ken Robinson’s lecture, he mentions that modern education is actually depriving children’s creativity. Before moving on to the result, here I want to scrutinize the reason. Schools are most likely to not provide an individual lesson for each student. The education system that schools use is not for the individuals, but for the whole student group. It is not specialized to each student, because it would be waste of time and money if the education system is adjusted to manage every single different kind of students. Realistically, it is almost impossible to do this. Therefore, government made a big blast furnace called ‘school’, which melts students’ individuality and solidify as a same shape.
Therefore, students lose their own shapes they originally had. They are watching, listening, learning and acting the same way. In this situation, their thoughts are being standardized. The reason that creativeness become important is because every single person living in this world is different. Succeeding in maintaining basic needs is only a minor fact. The facts that every person is different, their brain is different and their genes are different are the most important ones. The people are now realizing that they are very different, making them to put emphasis on creativeness-thoughts that they had since they were born, their originality. Creativeness is an originality that has not been contaminated by social disturbance.
This creativeness comes out from people’s original and genuine thoughts. As people grow up, they learn to be the same. They learn to act in a social structure. This binds and restricts people’s thoughts to stay inside the social tune. Their frequency of thoughts are being retuned to be normal, or thought to me the normal. For example, as mentioned in the lecture, kids are not afraid of being wrong. Even if it’s wrong, they keep try to think and act as they thought, because they’re not bound to social rules. Unlike grown-ups, kids can think that are behind normal, but which doesn’t mean it’s bad. It means ‘different’, not ‘wrong’.
The driving force that develops society comes from different thoughts. At first it may seems wrong for other people. For example, democracy in medieval ages was thought to be insane. However, now it is the standard in modern ages. Schools now are unifying students’ ideas, thoughts and action with standardized education. When this social bind is removed from education, students will be able to develop their creativeness.
