Jan 25
Creative freedom allows us students to become fully human
In order for students to learn how to think rather than be told what to think, creative freedom should be allowed in the classroom.
We live in a society where high schools seem to produce industrial factory machines disguised as teenagers. The way students are taught nowadays resembles the way engineers program their machines. We’re expected to listen to our teachers, comply with their ideas, and adapt to the content that we’re being taught. We have no control over what we are taught, but rather, we sit through the mundane lesson and memorize facts that we don’t really know are true. While we should not disregard the current education system completely, we need to understand that there needs to be change. In order for students to learn how to think rather than be told what to think, teachers should abandon the rigid structure of passive instruction, and instead, move towards an environment of creative freedom.
From personal experience, instead of being treated as a human being with a mind of my own, most of the time, I feel like an empty bucket, waiting to be filled up with information. In math and science classes, teachers seem to inject you with a variety of formulas, expecting you to mechanically substitute numbers into the appropriate spot to generate an answer. “Where do those formulas come from?” was always a question I found myself asking. I soon realized that our current education system, for the most part, revolves around using passive teaching methods. In his speech, “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace believes that we’re trained to build a capacity to think, rather than be given the choice of what to think about. Information is simply imposed onto students by a person of higher authority, which in this case, is the teacher. To ensure that students don’t permanently become mindless receptors, teachers should move away from passive teaching and encourage reflective learning. Paulo Freire said it best in “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” — that both men and women, should they reflect on themselves and the world, will finally increase the scope of their perception.
While each course has its own curriculum, learning targets, and lessons, that doesn’t mean teachers should strip away or minimize students’ creative power. After reading “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, I believe that schools would be more effective for more students if they were given creative freedom. Throughout the novel, it was evident that Holden Caulfield is a good descriptive writer. Although it was mostly colloquial, the content was still there and it definitely did its job of bringing different characters to life. What’s unique about Holden’s descriptions is that he has a keen eye for noticing things other people don’t, such as Allie’s baseball mitt, and with Phoebe, her ability to know whether a movie is “lousy” or not. Thus, when it came to his conversation with Mr. Antolini about digression, it became clear that school wasn’t effective for Holden because it hindered his abilities to be creative. Holden believes that he has a “problem” with digressing — a practice that was highly frowned upon in his Oral Expression class. However, digression isn’t always a “bad thing” as it can sometimes help one develop his or her writing skills, which is effective in Holden’s case.
Although many high school teachers have moved away from passive learning, specifically English teachers in my personal experience, it can unfortunately not be said for some teachers. It’s true though — my high school English teachers have abandoned passive teaching and they have given us students more creative freedom. We aren’t restricted to five-paragraph essays anymore and we’re given the choice to write about anything we want. We’re allowed to digress in discussions. We’re allowed to ask why something happened rather than gloss over it. For me, this method of schooling has taught me how to think. Or, as Freire says, has helped me become “more fully human.”
