In the Race, We lost Creativity
Pakistan is rapidly on the way to development. Each sector is getting on the up and some are facing lows. Education is also rapidly evolving with the passage of time with the inclusion of the latest technologies and trending new fields of studies. One thing which is still not changing and remained the same is the importance of grades. Each and every student is running after this thing resulting in lacking quality knowledge, skills, and creativity.
Education is not confined to achieving good grades but it is to grow the habit of learning and making difference in the life of people surrounded by you. According to Albert Einstien “ Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school”. It means that education is far more than achieving higher grades. Education is the process of learning habits of life for yourself and the people around you. Education is not confined to schools, colleges, universities, and madrasas but it is a lifelong process of learning.
Assessment has delt way worst than one can imagine in our educational sectors. The grading system has no space for creative individuals not giving them any chance to express themselves in ways like arts and drama. In a TED Talk that went viral, Sir Ken Robinson (2006), the renowned expert on creativity and education argued, “My contention is that creativity is as important in education as literacy and should be treated with the same status.”
In the last several years, a good deal of public discourse was devoted to describing the effects that more than two decades of education reforms, the current iteration of which is known as Race to the Top, has had on teaching and learning. It is widely argued that coupling teacher evaluations with students test scores, enforced standardization, and over-reliance on testing
results in a deadened curriculum hyper-focused on math and ELA achievement, divorced from lived experience, the arts, sciences, and history (Giroux, 2012; Ravitch, 2013) limits creativity.
As Professor Dylan Wiliam explains in his 2013 paper Principled Curriculum Design: “A huge amount of research on skill acquisition has found that the skills developed by training and practice are very rarely generalized to other areas and are, in fact, very closely related to the specific training.”
References:
Bloom, E., & Vanslyke-Briggs, K. (n.d.). The Demise of Creativity in Tomorrow’s Teachers Introduction: Creativity in Education. In Journal of Inquiry & Action in Education (Vol. 10, Issue 2).