Assignment #2

111056 10b3 박정민

2^nd Assignment

092311 (FRI)

Mr. Garrioch

Mr. Teacher, You Ain’t a Factory Worker, Are You

“Throw this away!” There are always some defective products produced in factories as the machines churn out the same things over and over. The “defectives”, which look different from the original design that the company has wanted, are thrown into the trashcans. This process seems to be logical in factory working system since no consumer would want a deformed product. The thing is that, exactly the same process is happening at schools. All they want is to manufacture the same products, called “students”, in order to forcefully put them into the industrialized society. There is no such thing as creativity. School kills creativity.

Asked for what they are mostly concerned about nowadays, most Korean students would answer without any sort of hesitation, “definitely the tests!” Students are obsessed with test scores, which they get based on how much information they have drilled into their heads. For taking the standardized tests at schools, no creativity is needed. It is all about who has done a better job in cramming every single detail from the textbooks. Even KMLA, advertising itself as the only high school in Korea where students can study for themselves while developing their own creativity, has this very standardized examination and scoring system. As Sir Ken Robinson has said in his lecture, many creative and brilliant people think they are not, because they are neither valued at school nor valued by the standardized examinations.

Not only the test undervalues creativity and originality of students, but so does the whole mood of classroom. There are two things you are not allowed to do in class time if you are a student. Most importantly, you cannot ask anything that needs to be elaborated further than what the textbook says, because the teacher does not know it either, and gets insulted by the question. Also, you can never raise your hand to answer the teacher’s questions and be wrong. The teacher would get very frustrated and start to embarrass you, supported by other students who would also want to get involved in fooling the “wrong” friend. After experiencing this, now you are not able to try out for an answer in class, afraid of being wrong. “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.”- Sir Ken Robinson. Schools do not allow any creativity outside of information that they want to put.

As students, after the whole process of “cramming” information altogether into their heads, all they think of is how they can get into certain colleges and get a nice job that pays high monthly salary. For schools, public education is a way of standardizing students to certain types to fit into the society. For students, public education is a way of getting a stable job. Education itself is never valued. Though “educating” students in such a way limits their potentials, it has been like that since the beginning of public education. Because the original goal of public education was to make people fit into the industrialized society, they are still using the same strategy even now. The perception and ideology of getting into colleges and that being the final goal of education are ruining the possibility of students who could be much more innovative in the future.

Some could say, so what? Although more and more people have started to notice the problem, there is not really a clear way of creating the new education system. Standardization of test questions seems to be the fairest of all the methods. There are only few examples that show the system of developing students’ creativity, such as Finland’s. For now, no one knows what the most suitable program for students to both find their originality and learn classics at the same time is. There does not seem to be a definite answer for how the change should be done in order to replace the old one.

But, not having a definite answer does not mean having to stay the same. There are clear problems. Schools are killing creativity. The world in next 30 years would not be the same as the world in past 30 years. The next 30 years would not be the competition of having a degree and just cramming information in you head. “We must think anew and act anew.”-Lincoln. It is time to at least realize what’s problematic and start finding a new good method.