The good school does not stifle creativity

Often The education system is criticized for using a methodology based on rigidity and in the memorization of contents. Only in a few countries, such as Finland, is this model being questioned, and currently Overcrowded classes and the impossibility of offering a treatment adapted to each child or little girl.

But children's minds have too much potential enough to try to guide it along the path of an education based on standardized tests and lessons in which the teachers speak and the students are silent. It does not make any sense that, in the life stage in which we are more psychologically flexible, we are tries to limit when developing those skills through which we want to direct our vocation.

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the child brain

If we take a look at the brains of boys and girls of school age, we see that its number of neurons is not less than that of an adult brain. How can it be, then, that they dominate so little certain psychological skills that are normal after the age of majority? The answer to this has to do with the same phenomenon that makes children so quick to learn certain abilities: neuroplasticity.

This characteristic is the way in which the human brain (and its entire nervous system in general) adapts to the experiences that are being lived. During the first two decades of life, the evolution of cognitive abilities that we experience is explained because, during this time, the neurons begin to interconnect massively with each other according to what we are going experiencing.

If we are not born knowing how to speak, it is not because we lack neurons, but because these still have little relationship with each other. The same goes for many other competitions.

In other words, the smallest are specially trained to develop a potential that runs parallel to the way in which their nerve cells create a network of connections in the brain. If they don't know how to do many things, it's because they have the opportunity to learn all kinds of skills, instead of build on some capacities that they already dominate from the beginning and that would limit the ways in which to express their creativity.

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The school as a place of opportunities

If the school should be a place where the capacities of the youngest are strengthened, this project can't do without creativity concept. It's not just that it's a nice value, fashionable and that we like the sound of it; is that children's learning is characterized by being fundamentally a creative process. Starting almost from scratch, asking questions that most adults ignore, creating new mental paths that link very different ways of knowing, etc.

It cannot be claimed that classrooms are a place where academic content is transmitted as if it were data stored on a USB. You have to connect with the mental world of the little ones, those psychological kingdoms that they themselves have built and that do not have to be governed by the logic of adult thought, and do make that learning meaningful within that framework of creativity. But what is usually done is not that.

The limitations of the educational model

There are several things that mean that creativity is not taken into account in school.

The first of these is that children's creative thinking is uncomfortable if You only think about building students who get good grades. In many subjects, lateral thinking tends to stray from the paths set out in exams.

understand them it would take a lot of time and effort to understand the mental schemes of each boy or girl, and in a society with overcrowded classes that is not possible. It is easier to show that test scores reflect the quality of education and turn the page, even if those results are the consequence of a memorization of contents that are not understood and that will therefore be forgotten after a few days.

Those responsible are not the teachers and teachers, who do what they can with the resources at their disposal; it is from governments that underestimate education and those on which their power is based.

The second reason is that learning based on creativity is not very profitable if what you want is to educate to create future workers. Lately it has become very fashionable to demand that schools be places where young people learn what the world of work is like, but this has perverse consequences that are rarely they question.

The labor market tends to reject creativity except in some very specific and well-paid positions. Most workers are paid for doing very specific tasks and for doing it while fitting well into the organization's hierarchy, without questioning their superiors too much. Defending that idea only leads to limiting the options of the small ones to those that are most profitable.

Are we training people, or future workers? At what point was it decided that education has value as preparation for the labor market?

Expanding the potential of the little ones

Commit to an education that allows children to expand their creativity instead of limiting it to that fits into the world of adults is a challenge that can not only be based on the will and good wishes.

Material changes are necessary in the operation of public education, such as requiring non-crowded classrooms and reviewing the evaluation format. In Finland they have already started to do it. When will our turn come?