Does School Provide or Kill Creativity?
Nowadays, parents, students, and countless communities desire to focus more on creativity than just intelligence. Colleges reject students who are only smart, and do not possess creativity.
Therefore, many elementary, middle, and high schools have been preparing and encouraging their students to be more creative and focus on outside-of-the-school activities as well. Currently, in the United States of America, there are billions of schools who provide their students with more than enough opportunities to enhance their creativity. Many activities the students have to do or many classes the students have to take give the students the creativity they need in their ongoing life. Every school has at least one project to do every year and even though projects are greatly disliked by many students, it helps them use creativity. This is because most of the time, everyone is given a specific topic or area to do the project on, and therefore, many would use the same websites or programs to do their project.
It makes people think more, since they need to make their project stand out than others and they need to surpass each other to get a better grade. If everybody used the same programs and websites to do a specific project, then it is most likely for the teacher to not be appealed by them. So, in order to make an excellent project, students have to put their creativity into use and make theirs different from one another. A public school, called Demarest Middle School, is a very good example of this. Nearly everyday, there are projects assigned and completed. In one of the projects, students had to write a story about a disease that contains all the symptoms, facts, and how to overcome it.
Every student excluding one single student wrote the story and printed it. That one student used a website that creates online books and presented her story. The website was never used in the past before and the teacher was delighted to see a project that was both outstanding and unique. She gave the student more points than any others because she was the only person who was creative and made her’s stand out. So, in the end many projects make students and teachers alike to think outside of the box and see new things that they never knew before.
Also, many schools in the United States started putting STEM into their curriculum. STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and math, is another way of enhancing a student’s creativity. Students in STEM have the opportunities to find new ways to make a specific item, since there are hundreds and thousands of ways to create the item. The teacher never tells the students how to achieve the goal of creating the item, and therefore, students need to use trial and error with the given materials to figure out on their own how to construct the item. This makes the students think more and look at their assignment in every angle, not just one. One example of this would be the STEM class in Demarest public school.
There, the teacher told her students to create an item using legos and batteries that can make two rubber bands turn one in one direction and the other in the other direction. This, is very difficult to achieve, as no one makes it on first try. As a result, students need to be thinking outside the box and use every single method they can come up with in their head. This thinking surely involves creativity, since without one, no one can manage to make an appealing and well-functioning item. Also, without creativity, students would not be able to manage to make their final piece work like they are supposed to.
Last not not least, there are mandatory electives and optional clubs schools offer in order to enhance students’ creativity. Mandatory electives and optional clubs make students experience new things they have not experienced before and find out about new things they have never learned before. Students tend to choose things they like, and that makes their knowledge dwindle. However, as they take mandatory electives, they are able to experience things they do not like and maybe find a new liking to it. So, while students participate in those mandatory electives, they can also do the optional clubs where they do things they like.
These would in the end make students think in many perspectives and get to have a more variety of experiences to use it to make their projects or items. Art, music, technology, student council, and peer leaders are some of the examples a person can do as an elective or a club. There, they can strengthen their area of knowledge and get more diverse ideas from them. In a school in the United States, there is a school with a large variety of activities a person can do. And, a person might not have liked music before but when actually did it because it was a mandatory elective, he or she found out that they are actually good at it.
Moreover, if someone is in student council club, they can get new ideas for their school and would have to use their creativity to make their school a better place. As stated above, creativity is something all schools provide for their students with their many opportunities. A lot of schools are focusing more on creativity than intelligence. So, as students do the tedious projects, exciting STEM, and mandatory electives and clubs, their creativity will take on a whole new level even without them realizing that they are getting more creative and thinking outside the box. With schools offering more than enough opportunities for creativity for their students, many students enriched their creativity one way or the other, by doing clubs, or by doing a large amount of projects.
