A Thought Regarding Early Education
I've been studying psychology now for almost four years, and I have been doing a little research into a matter which greatly interests me. I present the following information as a thought experiment:
A child’s imagination really begins to take flight and form at around the age of 6 or 7. This is the same age at which we install them in the public school system, where they are taught to sit down and shut up, stop daydreaming and pay attention. It’s a little like bleeding the confidence in their own creativity out of their system. It doesn’t necessarily stilt the imagination, I think, but it does teach them that there’s something wrong with indulging in it.
Consider my own daughter… creative, intelligent, and prone to flights of fancy in her youth, but by the time I met her at age 10 she was entirely incapable of losing herself in that creativity. She insisted on the firm boundaries between fantasy and reality, and she was embarrassed by her interest in the former. I’d even go so far as to say that she was stressed out by it, because the craving for escape from restrictive reality is quite literally in her blood (*grins*). She grew out of the embarrassment a little and is now able to look back on it dismissively as fond childishness, but her need for escapes is more powerful than ever. And now she has creative energy she needs to express, but she lacks the confidence to do so. (And I realize that her struggle with dyslexia was another mitigating factor in this equation, but I still don’t think that it obviates the pressures of the “real” world.)
Now that I think about it, I have similar issues… a breadth of creative need without the singular motivation, drive, and self-confidence to push beyond my meager limits. I remember, in 1st grade, when I missed every word but one on a spelling test because I was daydreaming when she announced the first nine words. At least, that's what she told me I was doing. I was so embarrassed... I had never missed a single answer on a spelling test before that, and my grade would now suffer because I wasn't paying attention. Not to mention the fact that the instructor berated me in front of the entire class, obviously to make an example of it.
I recently listened to an interview with Meg Baker of Night Sky Games, a tabletop RPG company. Meg and her siblings were - due to circumstances of their environment and options when they were younger - all home-schooled from the very beginning. They are all now confident, successful people in a creative industry, and she attributes some part of this to her parents’ emphasis on imaginative play and creative experiences (and eventually, of course, roleplaying games) during these critical years. She feels that they benefited from never being taught to “sit down and shut up and stop daydreaming.” She feels this so strongly that she is now home-schooling her own child.
I think that the values instilled by the current educational system are old-fashioned. For our parents’ generation, they represented a key to success… focus, be diligent, pay attention to the goal. But for our children… they’re going to grow up in a very different world, where endeavors that used to seem creative and new to us are now a dime a dozen. You can’t throw a rock in today’s society without hitting someone who could have been a computer programmer, an architect, a professional photographer, a writer… but in today’s world, they swim in a pool of millions of their ilk, struggling with trade skills that are no longer unique or ideas that get lost in a sea of mediocrity. To survive, future generations will need a new kind of work ethic, built on self-confidence and the freedom to shine on their own merits. As our consumer-driven world reaches critical mass, laborers and technicians of every stripe find themselves the victims of layoffs as modernization permits a smaller work force. New technology used to breed new technicians to master it… now it breeds new ways to make technicians obsolete. When our parents’ generation wanted to be successful, they studied to become doctors and lawyers and had an unquestionable ability to make something of themselves. Well… by the time I get my doctorate, I’m going to be struggling to stay competitive in my field amidst thousands of doctors just like me. No guarantees.
We need to teach our children to embrace the things that make them unique, not simply conform to a set of authoritative standards. No, I don’t see an easy solution… the discipline and academic values taught in school still represent an immense benefit to the growing mind, but at what cost? How do we balance these seemingly conflicting needs? Well, we can’t all home-school our children, nor should we all assume that we’re qualified to educate them. But it is irresponsible, as parents, to hand wave our obligation to oversee our child’s education and assume that the available institutions are doing it right. Not if we want our children to succeed.