Pushy parents and examinations ‘strip pupils of creativity’
Parents and schools are stripping pupils of their creativity, a renowned expert on education says.
“We have to personalise education, then young people will be equipped to earn a living in a world that is shaping around them,” said Sir Ken Robinson, a British author and academic whose TEDTalk on schools “killing creativity” has been viewed almost 50 million times online.
Mr Robinson, who was involved in modernising the education system in England and Wales in the 1980s and 1990s, was giving a special lecture at the Crown Prince’s Court in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday night.
He said curriculums across the globe needed to have flexibility and be broad enough to make room for creativity.
“You don’t get that from a purely science curriculum,” Mr Robinson said. “Education has social purposes but above all let them have their strengths to be able to live life.”
The answer is to invest more in teachers and focus less on tests, which he said limited a student’s ability to think creatively.
“The US made the mistake of thinking you can improve education by more testing and typed words, but if you do that you will not have engaged teachers and you will not improve,” Mr Robinson said.
But he said fault did not lie solely with schools and countries’ education authorities.
Mr Robinson said many pushy parents were driving themselves “up the wall” to make their children achieve good grades.
He showed the audience a photograph from the Indian state of
Bihar that made headlines across the world in 2015.
It shows parents standing outside school windows and even scaling the upper floors to hold up exam answers on sheets to their sons and daughters inside.
It highlighted the pressure some children are under and lengths to which parents will go for them to pass exams.
“This is corruption of what education should be but I show it to you because parents around the world are doing the same thing, driving themselves up the wall to make their children pass and earn high grades to get into the best universities and consequentially find a good source of income.
“We should put them in good universities and everything, but the human brain and ca- pability is much more diverse than that and communities do not depend only on academic work.”
An Abu Dhabi Education Council study of 20,000 parents in 2013 found half of them em- ployed tutors for their children.
Mr Robinson pointed to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque as an example of a beautiful monument “that was not constructed by essay writers on how to build a great mosque, but by people who saw a vision”.
“Cities are built on that but schools aren’t. They are very focused on academic work.”
It is also important to distinguish between education and learning, Mr Robinson said. While children might not enjoy education, they love to learn.
“This is evident from the amount of powers they learn to adopt in their early years. Nobody teaches them how to speak, they just take it into their own skin,” he said.
Once schools are transformed and result in more creativity and innovation, he said, we would find new ways to deal with issues that had risen from the industrial revolution and evolving technologies.
And for the equation to be complete, schools must communicate more with parents and involve them in the education process, Mr Robinson said.