Reading # 4 Creative & Expreiences

After watching the documentaries on John Dewy and issues with today's education system I realized how blessed I am to have had an untraditional education. John Dewy's views on education are similar to my own. From my personal experience and what I have observed in others I believe that education is best instituted by experiences that relate to the subject. It has been said that words are nice but a picture is worth 1000 words. So what does that make an experience worth? The answer to this question is priceless. Through experiences we learn. You can teach facts but true knowledge is only obtained by experience. I have found in my own life that whatever I learn from a book or class is not quite the same as real world application. In my opinion learning would be most effective if classroom teaching was accompanied by experiences that reinforced what was learned such as field trips. It is a shame that creativity is being beaten out of children. I agree with much of what Sir Ken Robinson said. In today's society we label children instead of focusing on the child's behavior and directing it to make them successful. ADHD is a term that we label children with in order to drug them so that they conform to the system. The truth of the matter is that it is our fault for creating a system that is undesirable and unsuccessful at truly educating children. It is not the child who should conform but rather the system. We have taken so much of the creativity out of education which makes our children suffer. While mathematics and science is very important it does not have to govern the entire education system. Creativity is what drives mathematics and sciences. If creativity had not existed then no breakthroughs in technology would exist either. It is in fact creativity that is responsible for  innovation.  This past year I had the privilege of having  a student by the name of Rotson Kho-Yute as my lab partner in Geotechnical Engineering 1. On one occasion i asked him what he thought of the education here as opposed to the Philippines. What he said was that in the Philippines they did not teach art or give students the chance to be creative and that he wished they were more like America in that sense. This left an impression on me; the one subject Americans are slowly doing away with is the one subject he desired more than the others.  With this new  perspective I will no longer take art or the ability to be creative for granted and I will make sure my children always have the opportunity to be creative.