How can an educational system prevent you from advancing

From an early age, we are introduced to cinema and especially Hollywood cinema where we watch youngsters working and making money and studying at the same time. In my case, it was a TV show called “Everybody hates Chris”. A 14 years old teenager who works at a local shop and excelling academically. And personally, I projected that idea on my own self. I’ve become more interested in making more money, who doesn't want to make extra bucks by the weekend, right? and that's where the dilemma comes.

We’re stuck in a school system that goes from 8 AM to 6 PM with 13 years of basic education and a minimum of 3 years of higher education with endless assignments. Or we can alternatively call it “The rat race”.

There has been much criticism of our education system because it seems like it hasn’t been adapted to current times or even improved upon. The idea of creativity has been just one of the topics that are often covered in these discussions In our Tunisian educational system but never dealt with, from an early age of as young as 13 years old, you’re forced to choose a field and only that field for the rest of your life (in most cases). Creativity is not a single thing but in fact a whole collection of similar, but different, processes. Creativity in mathematics is not the same as creativity in visual art. This is the first reason that killed the creativity of the majority of our young teenagers, a non-progressive system.

In addition to that, the lack of integrating extra-curricular activities and the few youth organizations, you’re cemented in a Virtuous circle that prevents you from working and kills your creativity by limiting your fields of thinking and numbing your judgment.

But how do we define creativity ?

Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others In order to be creative, you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective. Among other things, you need to be able to generate new possibilities or new alternatives. Tests of creativity measure not only the number of alternatives that people can generate but the uniqueness of those alternatives. The ability to generate alternatives or to see things uniquely does not occur by chance; it is linked to other, more fundamental qualities of thinking, such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, and the enjoyment of things heretofore unknown.

What specialist think of this subject ?

In the most-watched TED talk of all time, educationalist Sir Ken Robinson FRSA claims that “schools kill creativity”, arguing that “we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it”.

Add all this up, from loads of school hours to being unavailable most of the time, our educational system limited our chances of working and gaining experience working in different small places or on small projects. Furthermore, our government does not encourage the youth on advancing in the professional field nor the research field, which puts students in a cornered situation that only relies on their academic performance, and through time it created huge inflation in unemployment records due to the vast availability of similar university graduate.

Is there a perfect school system that doesn’t kill creativity ?

Actually, there is no perfect school system but some are better than others. Schools can diminish creativity by the teaching style they use. Most of the subjects in school like math, science, and history require structured right or wrong answers. While classes like art are available at schools they are usually taught as an elective and not a core subject. Maybe the procedure in which the above subjects are taught can increase creativity in young children.

So do schools actually “kill creativity”?

The short answer is ‘no’, although they certainly can if they forget two important things:

First, schools need to develop and encourage rich and various curriculum that includes creative subjects which helps children to show their true skills and creativity like in arts, music, photography and writing.

And second, to start designing curriculum from a student stand-point, the integration and studying the tendency of children and education should be put on the same level.

But in the end governments and social parties are starting to realize this. And now young people are starting to realize this problem too! and started acting upon it, and with the technological advancement of E-learning, people started learning different things, discovering different fields, and also investing resources into specializing in those fields. This created new chances for our generation, and we can see that with the startups that are being launched on daily basis in very different fields by very young entrepreneurs. So don't be consumed by the system, and try to put your creativity in actions and learn everyday more so you can improve of yourself, literate yourself and sharpen your skills to create better chances and opportunities.