Jan 21 2010
Being creative
Lately Michal is praising creativity all the time. It turns out that being creative is good – not just because you invent startups and become rich – it’s also a great way to channel your energy, to overcome emotional and physical problems. In short – it’s really important to be creative. You don’t have to actually be good at it: you just have to practice it, really. Dance, play music, invent silly songs, write, paint, whatever.
There’s an interesting (and funny) lecture by Sir Ken Robinson, talking about this very subject. His main point – being creative is extremely important, but our school system simply kills our children creative drives. This is rather sad. And most likely he is right. It’s not just that school put a low emphasis on things such as arts and dance – the grade system is also very problematic. If you’re not good in music – you won’t do music classes. That’s horrible, ain’t it?
As a parent to a girl who’s going to school soon (4 years is not much time, eh?) I thought about it, and I don’t have a quick solution. I don’t want her to not attend school at all. But I want her to remain creative. I guess, as always, that Michal and I will have to support her in this – give her confidence enough to remain creative, even when teachers and fellow students bring her down. I believe that the best way for parents to educate is by example. So I’ll try to be more creative (like, inventing 3 silly startups a day, not just 2).
Here’s Robinson’s lecture, worth 20 minutes – it gets better as he gets along (thanks Edan for posting this on FB):
“We need to radically change our view of intelligence”