Do Schools Kill Creativity?

According to Sir Ken Robinson, innovation extraordinaire, people are being educated out of their capacity for creativity. Human creativity spans a variety of disciplines and draws from a rich reservoir of interactions and experiences, a reality that is not being taken into account in world educational systems. We, starting from a very young age, all have a tremendous talent for thought outside the box. This innate gift is being stifled within the constraints of schools, whose unilateral approach produces students who can answer a factual question, but who aren’t necessarily intelligent. Traditional teaching methods are staid. Outdated. Ineffective. And they’re affecting our ability to produce critical thinkers who question. Who reason. And who strive to understand the greater meaning behind a concept, rather than simply regurgitating what they’ve been told. Education is supposed to take us into the future. What kind of future are we headed toward if everyone thinks exactly the same way? Check out his lecture here – it’s worth your time.

Now let's expand for a moment. Think back to the way you learned a foreign language. Was it approached creatively? Do you feel like you were challenged? How about entertained? I don't. Most people remember rote memorization, grammar drills and verb conjugations, reading long texts, writing exercises, and pointless partner activities that left both parties thinking "God, how lame". THAT I remember. A shame - today's administrators have a bevy of resources at their disposal. Technology is rapidly expanding into the educational sphere, making it possible to creatively engage learners through a variety of media. langoLAB takes this creativity into the foreign language learning space, giving you access to compelling, native speaker-generated videos with a set of interactive tools that lets you play with them. Check out this video in our French section - it left me in stitches. An exercise in creativity if I ever saw one, and great for beginning/intermediate learners.