Does Teaching Kill Creativity?

What do you want from your school?  If your school was a restaurant, would it be Aria, or would it be McDonald's?

My wife and I are fans of Aria.  The degustation menu is an experience like no other.  A group of passionate people, led by a visionary, have worked very hard to create something truly mind-blowing.

At Aria, freedom to innovate results in a sublime experience.  At McDonald’s standardisation rules.

If Matt Moran was a teacher, I suspect that he’d have left the profession long ago.  Standardisation dulls creativity.  It feels safe, but it kills initiative.  Programs that attempt to raise standards simply add paperwork.  The requirements are mind-numbing.  Do you want a teacher with a numb mind?

In Alan Moore’s 2011 book, No Straight Lines, he describes the outcome of this way of thinking on education.

“Government edicts describe in several educational courses not just the scope of the learning but the minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow instructions as to exactly how lessons are to be run.  If anyone is good at their job, are they going to want to work like that?”

If you stood behind Matt Moran, telling him how to cook, he would be pretty cranky (he’s a big guy, so I wouldn't try it).  If you do it to teachers, they become discouraged and move their creative efforts elsewhere.  Matt Moran, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay are all excellent cooks.  Their excellence is derived from their individuality and creativity.  Would you tell them how to cook?  Would you tell them to comply to a bewildering set of criteria that have little to do with their day to day work and have been shown to have no substantive benefit to the desired outcome?

Let teachers teach.  Provide them with resources and get out of their way.  Train them meaningfully and give opportunity to improve if there are problems.  

Incidentally, in preparation for this post, I typed “Why teachers” into Google.  Before I could type “quit”, Google suggested the word “drink”.

Are you literate?

When I was at university studying composition, I had to write the music by hand. I'm left-handed, and the ink used to smudge as I moved my hand from left to right over the copy. To counter this, I had to guess how many bars I was going to fit on a line, do the first bar of each line and then go back and do the second bar and so on. This took a long time. It wasn't creative, it was simply what had to be done in order to communicate.

Computers came along and before long I didn't write music by hand any more. I now write faster, revise quickly and get automatic feedback. I don't know where my osmiroid is. I suspect I threw it away long ago.

I am literate. What is the essence of my literacy? Being able to write by hand? I don't really do that any more. Does that mean I'm no longer literate?

This is from Prensky: "Communicating using writing and reading is hard . . . What many people, particularly educators, often forget (or ignore) is that writing and reading – although they have enjoyed great success and primacy for several hundred years – are very artificial and unnatural ways to communicate, store and retrieve information... ...As a result, a great deal of our school time is devoted to training young people to use written media – first to decode the squiggles and then to extract meaning. And still, aside from our top-tier students, we are only marginally successful at it."

Prensky is saying what a lot of us are thinking. Handwriting is unnatural. It's good to learn but should it be a primary method of communication?

He goes on... "...a large part of our population has already switched to media easier than reading and writing for almost everything. ...Speaking and listening are much more ‘‘native’’ to the human brain. Now that we have technological alternatives, written communication, except in certain areas, is rapidly on the wane... ...This massive rejection of reading and writing – and substitution of other media – is, of course, not the case for the top 10-20 percent of our population (which includes almost all teachers.) But it certainly is true for the remaining 80 percent."

You can read the rest of Prensky's paper here.

The NSW BOS Syllabus for 7-10 English states: "Literacy is the ability to communicate purposefully and appropriately with others in a wide variety of contexts, modes and mediums. Different contexts require general and specific skills, knowledge and understanding as students compose meaning for themselves and others."

The focus here is on composing (making stuff up) and meaning (the essence of something).  It has nothing to do with handwriting.   When I think about my son, I want him to be able to communicate; to be understood and to understand. I don't know how he is going to do that, any more than my mum in 1975 understood how I would be doing it in 2012 (yep, I'm that old).

Technology in education means freedom. Freedom from having to write things longhand. Freedom from linear text.  Freedom from text as the only key to understanding.   Freedom from the one-size-fits-all classroom.  Freedom from the limitations and assumptions of the straight line.

Is technology the death of literacy?  Or has technology freed literacy from the bounds of pen, ink and parchment?