What aspects of American education kill creativity?

I am one that believes that not enough is being done to increase the learning of creativity in our schools. In fact I believe the approach we use does destroy creativity.I like to read and engage in discussions on ideas on learning reform and its instructional implications. The following is an excerpt from an article by Marion Brady in the Washington Post (via Scott Mcleod). I am sharing it with you because I strongly agree with Marion’s thoughts and hope it will stimulate some discussion within this community: I have strong feelings about what kids should learn, which is why I’d put them in charge of their own educations. Experience assures me they’ll get where they need to go, and do so more efficiently than will otherwise be possible. Experience also tells me that won’t happen as long as they’re fenced in by a random mix of courses required because they’ve always been required, by courses based on elitist conceits, by courses shaped by unexamined assumptions. The core’s boundaries are far too narrow to accommodate the collective genius of adolescents. Kids bring to the curriculum vast differences – differences in gender, maturity, personality, interests, hopes, dreams, abilities, life experiences, situation, family, peers, language, ethnicity, social class, culture, probable and possible futures, and certain indefinable qualities, all combined in dynamic, continuously evolving ways so complex they lie beyond ordinary understanding. Today’s reformers seem unable or unwilling to grasp the instructional implications of those differences and that complexity. They treat kids as a given, undifferentiated except by grade level, with the core curriculum the lone operative variable. Just standardize and fine-tune the core, they insist, and all will be well.That’s magical thinking, and it’s dumping genius on the street. Don’t tell me I’m naïve, that high school kids can’t be trusted with that much responsibility, or that they’re too dumb to know what to do with it. Would it take them awhile to get used to unaccustomed autonomy? Sure. Would they suspect that the respect being shown them was faked and test it out? Of course. Would they at first opt for what they thought was Easy Street? You can count on it. Eventually, however, their natural curiosity and the desire to make better sense of experience would get the better of them, and they’d discover that Easy Street connected directly to all other streets, and that following it was taking them places they had no intention of going, or even knew existed. What do you think?Mike Schoultz is the founder of http://www.digitalsparkmarketing.com/, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/102420440797566956191/102420440797566956191/posts, https://twitter.com/mikeschoultzhttps://twitter.com/mikeschoultz, and http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=44339949&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile.

The growing gap between the rhetoric of college admissions and the underlying reality should receive some of the blame for de-emphasizing creativity.  Year after year, acceptance rates at top-ranked American college have hit record lows.  This year, the acceptance rate at Stanford was 7.2 percent.  At Harvard, it was 6.2 percent.  These figures, along with the inevitable newspaper articles detailing the accomplishments of students admitted to such schools, send a powerful message to applicants:  attain a "perfect" résumé or be relegated to the rejection pile.  The pressure to compete with the apparent paragons at the top of the applicant pool, combined with a lack of meaningful guidance, sends students on a mad scramble to find a nonexistent "magic formula" for success. What never seems to be discussed is how one can take immediate, practical steps toward realizing the sorts of accomplishments so breathlessly praised every admissions season.  Not surprisingly, this informational gap leaves applicants in a dilemma.  On the one hand, they are expected to reach the finals of the Intel Science Talent Search or the Siemens Competition, or to attain comparable titles in other fields.  On the other hand, an ambitious student at the typical public high school is likely find him- or herself confronted with a less-than-impressive selection of extracurricular activities.  I would venture that most high schools offer little more than the standard selection of sports, bands, Science Olympiad, and a smattering of other activities with some academic bent.  While these activities are all respectable, the problem that few, if any, offer a meaningful shot at the sort of national recognition that top-ranked colleges seem to demand. Our aspiring student thus begins to get the distinct feeling of being boxed in to a losing situation.  While the peerless leaders so lavishly praised in the newspapers discover new forms of life or write award-winning literature, our hypothetical student tries to figure out how to make the best of a limited extracurricular palette.  Perhaps she would like to do her own scientific research, but her teachers have no idea of how one might secure a position in a professional lab, much less write a scientific paper.  Perhaps he would like to create the next YouTube Instant, but the school has no advice on obtaining the requisite level of skill in programming and web design.  While one might forge ahead on a completely independent basis, this course of action entails significant risk.  Unfortunately, the top colleges seem to have little regard for risky ventures that don't materialize into concrete success.  Independent exploration--and any creativity that might arise from it--looks less and less viable. Our student thus turns to the alternative:  achieve as much as possible within the confines of the established activities.  The calculation is as follows:  being the drum major in the marching band or the captain of the Science Olympiad team admittedly doesn't have the same level of prestige as the Intel Science Talent Search, but it seems plausible that one could equate several smaller distinctions with a single large distinction.  Unfortunately, the established activities each demand many hours of commitment a week.  More likely than not, our student ends up exhausted and with no inclination to work on anything not structured by the school. If students are to make full use of their creativity, then schools need to do a better job of promoting worthwhile projects outside the standard selection of extracurricular activities.  The prevailing myth is that the "superstars" of the admissions process are somehow superhuman.  In reality, their accomplishments are the results of significant (but not superhuman) effort combined with meaningful advice from experienced people.  With the right set of tools, that 6.2 percent acceptance rate can seem a lot less daunting.

In the United States, anyway, schools are based off of a system to educate students for — and find those who excel at — war. The entire educational system in the U.S. is based off of the atomic era when the world was racing for the moon, or nuclear weapons, or powerful science to wipe our enemies from the Earth. That hasn't changed as the rest of the world has. It's why math and science are prized education resources while music, art, and sports fall behind. To re-invest in a truly creative education, the U.S. would have to put themselves at risk of falling behind in terms of science. Unfortunately the lack of focus on true education and innovation has already left most of the U.S. behind!

Education in the United States is typically treated under a one-size-fits-all policy with very little individual empowerment.  In fact, the very mechanism we use to evaluate students, being standardized testing, further demonstrates this singular treatment. To fix the education system, one can merely look to the lessons that are currently transforming the business world- empowerment (i.e. Crowd-power). The fact of the matter is that creativity requires empowerment in any setting. We must create systems and environments that empower students to learn and create in new ways.  Students create daily on numerous sites (Instagram, Facebook, etc.); however, they're not empowered to do the same thing in school.  How do we fix this?  We empower teachers to 'flip' their classrooms and use technology and new forms of media to transform the way content is taught and learned by students.  In addition, we must recognize that each student learns differently, and create gamified systems that enable different speeds of learning.