I ran across this video by Tom Peters. Watch it.
Peters makes some powerful points about education, but I don’t entirely agree with everything he says.
Creativity is not a refusal to color inside the lines. It is a conscious decision to color outside the lines, knowing what the lines mean and why they are there. Refusing to color inside the lines without knowing why you choose to do so is just being rebellious, lazy, stupid or demonstrating a true lack of motor skills. The teacher and parents should have perhaps dug a bit further into WHY little Johnny didn’t color inside the lines to determine the difference between making a choice and not having the ability.
I think far too much sloth is excused away as “being creative.” That is an insult to those who are truly creative and those who seek to explore and expand their creativity. Almost every English student or crappy blogger who fails to learn the rules of capitalization and grammar will cite EE Cummings. Every crappy art student who fails to learn technique will cite Pablo Picasso. These are the students who should be given a letter grade of “E” for Excuses. They are not stupid, but they are not industrious enough to put the time and energy towards honing a skill; to becoming a true creative genius. In the world of creativity, they will remain average.
I also think that there is an appalling lack of knowledge acquisition in the schools today. I fear that we will all swing so far the other way toward “educating creatives” that we will fail to have a common culture for conversation. We are already experiencing this with GenY and the march toward personalizing the Internet for the individual with local Twitter trends, newspaper Web sites that allow you to build a list of articles that only interest you and crowds of people, all walking together but talking to someone on the phone who is not present.
On the other hand, we should not be confusing education with job training. Job training is forcing someone to sit in a seat for hours, coloring inside the lines. Education is exploring why the lines are there and creativity is exploring why the lines should be there at all and if so, where the color should be relative to the lines. Just because the economy is swinging from an information one toward a “creative” one does not mean the schools should all swing education towards making everyone creative. That is about as dumb as making us all factory workers. I hope Tom Peters understands that little bit of irony.
Some people are not creative. Some people are built to be the 4.0 “fall in line” folks who do what they are told. The world needs them too. Who else will make sure the computer code that fuels the creative crap on the Internet is bug-free?
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RT @dogwalkblog In the world of creativity, they will remain average http://bit.ly/adUlwh LOVE Tom Peters..Great
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In the world of creativity, they will remain average [DogWalkBlog] http://bit.ly/aabWel
This comment was originally posted on Twitter