Week 6 (ish) - Inventiveness

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." - Thomas Edison

Overall, as Sir Ken Robinson said, we tend to train the imagination out of children in public school. Math and science tend to be given highest priority, and the arts the least. Math and science can be subjects that encourage creativity, but more often are taught to a test and/or textbook. In fact, most subjects in school are taught more to tests than textbooks than to figure things out on your own. Even English or writing classes teach more expository and research writing than narrative or fiction. I was lucky that my elementary school teachers really liked more creative writing, but "normal" English classes, in high school, are more focused on dry analysis writing than developing creativity.

My art teacher in middle school wouldn't ever give out perfect scores on art projects because apparently "art is never perfect." That always bugged me because sometimes I was really happy with my project and wouldn't have changed anything, yet apparently it just "wasn't good enough." To a certain extent, that seemed to stifle my creativity as an artist. Not that I really have much artistic/drawing skill in the first place, but that just frustrated me.

Creativity is one of the most important skills in the 21st century. Sir Ken Robinson talked about how so many people are going to college now that a degree means a lot less than it used to. It's the creativity that sets people apart. That's part of the problem with the US fighting for technological jobs with many Asian countries. Part of the problem with the US education system is that it doesn't focus enough on the creativity aspect of math and science.