Slashdot Mirror
The Creativity Crisis
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from an article at Newsweek:
"For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. ... Like intelligence tests, Torrance's test — a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist — has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect — each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. 'It's very clear, and the decrease is very significant,' Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America — from kindergarten through sixth grade — for whom the decline is 'most serious.'"
> I hate even more those people that cry "all these rules just hamper my creativity".
They call themselves Libertarians. Don't worry, most grow up, just at a slower pace than normal.
Besides, we can't have kids do anything other than parrot the "scientific consensus", can we ? That'll just lead to ... oh the horror ... capitalism ...
It's the whole concept of "correct" that's the issue. How do we know that something is incorrect? Just because the "scientific consensus" says so? As you so rightly said, we cannot have our children "parroting the scientific consensus". We can not allow our childrens minds to be enslaved by the whims of a bunch of guys in lab-coats! No, we need to expand on the work of Brother Lenin, and establish once and for all that the views of all people are equally valid! Ignoramuses of the world, UNITE, and overthrow the shackles of the Academic Class! Together, we WILL be victorious!
Because he loves his kids and wants them to have a future.
He recognises that home-schooling will only serve to pass on his own biases and weaknesses, meanwhile completely stifling the child's ability to grow as an individual as well as killing their ability to learn new social skills in a mixed environment. This will ultimately isolate the child from their peers where they will not question the ideas that their parents have indoctrinated into them.
The type of personality that advocates "home schooling" tends to be less concerned with a child's growth and education and more concerned that a child does not learn anything that would contradict their parents beliefs. As the GP said, this is highly dependent on the teacher they get.
If a parent truly wants to help then they would provide an environment outside of school where creativity is encouraged. Just giving the kid a mecano or lego set is a great start or try teaching them something about mechanics or electronics. Better yet, run a bit of a clinic for all the child's friends, the absolute best thing you can do to turn your kid into a bitter husk is isolate them from contact with people their own age.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.