As far as play, I think you are right to say it deserves more importance. I have some amazing memories of games I played as a kid — one involved creating and managing an entire city with my friends, another was a front stoop smoothie enterprise. Play can teach, inspire, and expand our minds unbelievably.

@ Trina – I think stories — e.g. fiction — do expand our creative capacity. Not only for improving our ability to communicate, but for exploring how life, relationships, and interactions unfold. I would imagine it also helps us connect different ideas and make broad links.

@ Matt – I love your personal examples! I wholeheartedly agree with you that creativity and curiosity can precipitate learning and literacy. I think the shifts you envision in your comment require an attitude change on our part — if our attitudes radiate new priorities, the values we demonstrate to our children will reflect that shift.

I was a very poor typist during and after typing class in high school. I learned to type because the keyboard was necessary for email and internet chat.

I was a brat in elementary school (and still am, according to some!) and refused to practice piano despite my parents paying for lessons. I started playing piano on my own several years later when I was trying to figure out what notes to tell my bandmates to play when we were learning Joy Division songs.

I retained very little from math classes in high school, though my grades were great. I took Calculus voluntarily in college and actually learned math when I realized I needed it to understand how to program music and sound on computers.

Sir Ken stated that creativity is as important as literacy. I’d go further, and say that creativity and curiosity can precipitate learning and literacy. When we are fully dedicated to and excited about making art or sharing our ideas, we find the tools and learn the skills we need.

The problem with so much formalized education: it ignores curiosity and creativity and the drive to share ideas that engenders a desire for learning, and treats learning as something to be forced upon an unwilling population.

Reading is just a skill. Wanting to be a poet is a life that requires a range of skills, including reading. If we inspire kids to want to be something in their life, rather than watchers of TV and munchers of candied cereals and purchasers of snazzy clothing, they will learn the skills and facts and histories and ways of thinking they require. And they will want to learn it.

PS: I’m not saying it’s easy to get kids excited about life. I have taught and know how hard it is, and am also aware of the legislative and systemic challenges in the US and elsewhere. I’m just setting it up as a goal.

PPS: I don’t intend to demean reading as ‘just a skill’ — maybe this formula is better: skill + wanting to do it = source of meaning and pleasure and joy.

Matt Blair´s last blog post..Peculiarity over Productivity

Not only are we stifling children’s creativity in the classroom, we’re taking away any options outside of the classroom.

Free play with siblings, neighbours and friends is now replaced with scheduled activities, measured by exams and results and rankings.

Primary (elementary) aged children are doing hours of structured homework, reading to tick a box, not for joy. Parents are struggling to keep up with the Jones’ kid and make a better and bigger project.

Schools too often teach how to pass tests instead of how to think, how to grow, how to live and how to love.

I don’t think this is how it should be. I don’t have the answers but there are too many children being left behind.

Rachel´s last blog post..Meal Plan Monday: What we’re eating this week

@ Nameless – The situation you’re describing shows that schools indeed help foster new ways of thinking and introduce inspiring material. There’s no question about that. But if that state of thinking and inspiration evaporates as soon as you are not in school (e.g., on spring break), there’s a problem, isn’t there?

The point of this post was not to say schools are bad and do not expand our ways of thinking. The point is that schools could be even better and more transformative if they nurtured our independent and innovative thinking, instead of our ability to absorb information like a sponge.

We’re talking foundational change here — starting from the beginning of the school system, with the little ones. Many schools do encourage creativity in various respects, but what our society needs now is people who can build and expand ideas that are not creative within a certain context, but that question the context altogether.