How do you feel when you have the opportunity to create something new or expand on an existing idea? Does it make you feel alive? Do you feel motivated? Or do you not remember how this feels because the life you live now rarely requires you to think this way?
Creativity is everywhere. It works closely with its best friends: perseverance; effort and confidence without whom it would never thrive and reach its potential.
I, like many, follow a well known television show in the UK where celebrities pair up with a professional dancer and perform each week. Some, despite all the hard work, were never going to win. But the one who won the event turned out to be brilliant. What is amazing is he never knew he could dance. It made me think of all the untapped potential we all possess and especially our children.
Children arrive into the world as explorers and masters of the "why" question. I don't know why we allow our education systems to downgrade the explorer “gene” as something childish to be left behind. Some get through with some of their creative faculties intact but not many.
Creativity has an arch enemy - stress and anxiety. The constant pressure of exams,assessments and tests squeeze the creative juices out of our children. It also creates a palpable fear of making mistakes. Experience in the creative realm shows you the value of mistakes but a mistake is failure in the strict world of exams and tests.
We all know children are individuals and they are living their lives right now. Being creative is one of the ways our children will be able to distinguish himself or herself from their peers.
We live in a world full of uncertainty. Creativity at its heart is about coping with and adapting to change. It is about exploration without fear of falling, confident in our ability to find a solution. The ability to be creative can make us more certain in times of uncertainty.
Creativity is vital. It is not a novelty. Our children need to leave their formative years behind with a strong belief in their ability to solve problems. They need their creative juices to flow to solve social challenges, to understand how people and ideas connect and how to deal with conflict. It is not all about the arts or design as beautiful as they are at times. It is about the “nitty gritty” of real life. Being able to find creative solutions helps to make our children more future-proof.
What do we do? As educators, parents and young people we need to keep one foot in the national curriculum and one foot in the real world. We need to see that their time in school is taken into context and if they can’t be explorers in school then make damn sure they carry on being explorers outside of school.
What right do we have to take this away from them?
If we stop them exploring and being creative, our children might never truly know what they are capable of and they might never fully appreciate who they really are.
John Hassall
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