Roisin Ingle on . . . killing creativity

Hey ho. That time of year again. When in certain quarters there’s enthusiastic fetishising of the outcome of an annual school exam. Eduporn, you might call it. Unfortunately there’s no internet filter for this kind of filth.

I was a slacker. Or at least I know there are plenty of people who’ll say the school hamster wheel, the big exam circus, didn’t suit me for that reason. But I know the truth: I didn’t shine under pressure in areas in which I had little interest. I didn’t care about delivering preordained versions of excellence on demand. I would have benefitted from drama, dance, music, art and possibly origami classes being compulsory school subjects alongside maths, Irish and history. I know I’m not on my own.

We are all out there you know, children and adults, skirting around the edges of what’s expected, wondering if our innate creative spark will ever be a roaring fire, figuring out how our light should really shine. But school mostly channels us one way and it’s the opposite direction to the one part of us suspects we should be heading in. So we grit our teeth and get through it, or we become slackers, all the while hoping it’s not too late to blossom into who we’re meant to be beyond the school gates.

To all the young people who weren’t happy looking at their bit of paper this week, I know how you feel. I’m going to tell you what I wish somebody had told me: It doesn’t matter. There’s something else in this world you love doing. Something else you should be doing. And there are other ways of doing it. Most importantly, there are so many things that can’t be measured by a bit of paper printed with letters and numbers, from A1 all the way down to the Bad Letters you didn’t want to see but knew you would.

The education system didn’t serve you. It stifled you. (It stifled the people who got 600 points too, if that makes you feel any better.) And I’ll tell you something else: it’s not your fault, however much people try to make you feel that it is.

In our 12-page results supplement this week, in an article about whether repeating is a good idea if you have “fallen short” of the results you were hoping for, one guidance counsellor said students should “ask themselves why they performed below expectations ... if you are going to repeat the bad habits of last year, it might be a bad idea”. Actually, never mind the students, this is something those in charge of our education system need to be asking themselves.

You've probably all seen creativity expert Ken Robinson's Ted Talk about education, which has had more than 17 million views on the ted.com website. This is an excellent week to return to it or discover it for the first time. Back in 2006, Robinson talked for 19 minutes about "How Schools Kill Creativity" and every word he said made sense. He said things like: "All children have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly." And "creativity is as important in education as literacy". He talked about an education system where the worst things you can make are mistakes even though mistakes are the key to coming up with original ideas. He maintained the system was "educating people out of their creative capacities". "If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatised. And I think we can't afford to go on that way," he said.

Robinson also suggested dance was of equal importance to maths: “Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting?” He talked about the sad fact that we educate people “from the waist up” and then focus on their heads and “slightly to one side”.

I’m probably talking to myself here as much as anybody else. Or to myself in the late summer of 1980-whenever-it-was that I got my own meaningless bit of paper. We missed a meeting. The dancing stopped. But those bits of paper are not the measure of us. Deep down we know that. I hope at some point we choose to do something meaningful about this sorry system. As Robinson said, we can’t afford not to.

roisin@irishtimes.com