It’s like Merlin Mann always says, “You can’t run a marathon your first day off the couch.” (There is a lot of paraphrasing going on there.) Doing really meaningful, creative work takes a lot of time, patience, and practice. Gosh, if only there was kind of place where people—preferably of a young age—could practice at creating really exciting things in a low-risk environment.
School is as good a place as any.
It’s a low-risk environment on the grand scale of things. Kids don’t have to refinance their mortgage, pay the gas bill, buy groceries, and support families (usually). Yet, we do the exact opposite. As Sir Ken Robinson puts it, we do everything in our power to suppress natural creativity.
Instead, we have this sick obsession with what Dan Pink calls right-brain activities. We focus on stuff that can be either outsourced or automated. The worst part is that we’re focusing on stuff that may one day be automated or outsourced, if it hasn’t already been. We have kids memorize stuff that you and I would just look up on the Internet real quickly. As an aside, we spend relatively little time teaching our kids the information literacy skills necessary to rely on external resources. We spend very little time teaching kids how to separate the wheat from the chaff on the Internet.
We don’t have our kids practicing tackling the really tough questions. We don’t have our kids practicing the craft of storytelling, which is becoming increasingly more important in our information-rich world. Data is a abundant. We need people who can help us make sense of that data. We need people who can provide a narrative that brings the data to life.
Creative work doesn’t happen on it’s own. We ought to use school to serve as an incubator for doing creative and meaningful work.
