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by msluyter
4884 days ago
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"We need to find a better way to teach children, one that doesn’t kill their innate sense of curiosity and play." But how do you objectively measure creativity and play? You can't. So it's not surprising that American public education is moving in exactly the opposite direction, drifting ever closer to a system where high stakes standardized tests determine your entire future. At the root of this is some deep seated hysteria about being overtaken by China or whatnot. It's madness, but I have no politically viable ideas for fixing the system. Anyone out there tried home schooling? |
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I think that there is merit to rote learning. When I practice piano, most of the time I practice scales. Not creative at all - mind numbing, really, but fundamentally important. When I play a piece, it in theory the rote learning (ie. scales) gives me the dexterity and muscle memory to be creative within the piece of music.
I believe that this translates into education as well. I think it's important that people can do mental math quickly. I think that it's important that a computer scientist can implement merge sort or a min heap without having to resort to Wikipedia. They should be able to explain it too, naturally, but I think that the baseline of knowledge is required to be creative with more difficult problems.
I think that the important thing though, which music gets quite well yet academics mostly don't, is to separate the two. You practice scales, and mechanical exercises, so that you have the ability to be creative when playing the pieces. If they were more clearly separated, I think that it might be better, instead of confusing the two constantly. This is where I think the fear of failure comes from. With the mechanical side, failure is almost always bad. If you are not able to play the scale correctly, you haven't practiced enough - this is your own failing. With the creative side, failure is not necessarily bad, and success is not necessarily good. It's an experiment, an expression, and if it falls flat, you get knowledge from it, and if you're always succeeding, you're not pushing your limits. When the technical and creative get blurred, I think that it becomes natural to mistake the creative side as the technical side, and assume that failure is always bad.
My favourite course in school was computer graphics. The final assignment, worth 20% of your grade if I recall correctly, was this: "Make something awesome with what you learned. You'll have 10-15 minutes to demo it to the professor. You have 3 weeks." So you had better be darn comfortable with perspective transforms and normals and writing shaders, which you are, because you've built up that knowledge over the rest of the course. Now with it, you are given a platform to be creative. We were tested on the rote learning stuff - the exams required us to transform vectors and decompose matrices and write down lighting equations, but this was a test of ones creative ability. I think it's almost perfect in this regard, in getting a lot out of both worlds in a way that is focused and guided but not on rails.
I had friends who wouldn't take this course with me in school because they were worried that the courses would hurt their GPA.