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"Those who dance were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music." — Angela Monet
In my last Psychology Today post I alerted readers, and especially parents, to the research and a new book by Professor Jim Flynn. He makes an excellent and well-supported argument that our children’s IQ can be significantly enhanced by enriching their environment. In a nutshell this means giving your children, beginning as young as possible, lots to think about and lots of challenging and interesting things to do. It helps to have the funds to send them to schools where classroom sizes are small and teachers have the time and training and the genuine passion required to go the extra distance with their classes; taking them outside the standard curriculum where they can explore new ideas. But most of us don’t have the money to send our kids to the most effective schools and instead need to supply the extras ourselves. Fortunately these extras do not always require money, but quality time spent with your children. Quality time includes conversation about wide-ranging topics, hopefully at the dinner table where the family gathers every evening (and family meal times are sadly rare in many busy and stressed families.) Quality time also includes sharing physical and creative activities with your children.
If you ask most people what they think of when IQ is mentioned, the answer is likely to include a reference to the core subjects taught at all traditional schools: how smart a person is at reading, writing and math. Perhaps they will add ‘the ability to think logically’. All of those abilities and many more make up the concept of IQ. These core abilities have certainly been viewed as essential since the Industrial Revolution, when public schools became widespread in order to educate the children of the working class. Today these core skills remain essential, but are they sufficient for success in the current and future world?
Children beginning school this year will retire—if the average person still works until 65—around 2076. What skills they will need during their working lives are impossible to imagine. So how can we educate them differently to ensure they have the best options available throughout an unknown and constantly changing future?
Sir Ken Robinson, a British educationalist with a talent for putting ideas across effectively and with a delightful humour, might have some of the answers. In a 2006 TED talk, he draws our attention to the entrenched flaws of our current traditional school system. In every school in every country, there is a hierarchy of subjects, from mathematics and language skills at the very top (often science as well), humanities and social sciences in the middle, and arts at the bottom. In that bottom tier there is another hierarchy, with art and music at the top (taught perhaps once or twice a week in most schools) and drama and dance at the bottom (often not part of the regular curriculum but offered as extra after-school options). Sport and gymnastics frequently form part of the curriculum, often inserted between the middle and bottom tiers of education.
Robinson suggests—tongue in cheek I think!— that the education system is designed by university professors to produce people just like them: people who “live in their heads and slightly to the left”; men (and occasionally women!) whose bodies serve primarily as a form of transport for their heads; a means of getting their heads to meetings. Although this is an amusing exaggeration, those of us who have spent years in a university environment know many such folk exist.
Up until the 1980s, a basic university degree did ensure better job prospects. Jobs that often lasted the whole of a working life. Today, a postgraduate degree is the minimum required for many traditional jobs, and even those jobs may well use very little of the information learned at university. Of course one hopes that a university degree, and certainly a postgraduate degree, also teaches students advanced thinking skills that will serve them well whatever job is taken on, and indeed for the many different jobs the average teenager of today will take on during their working life.
Robinson’s issue is the narrowness of this educational hierarchy. Where is creativity taught? Math, grammar and science, at least at school level, are not necessarily overly creative, although of course they can be (with my novelist’s cap on, I can say quite definitely that language can be up there with the most creative of skills). But in general terms, the ‘arts’ are the subjects we usually think of as creative. So why aren’t they on an equal par with math and language in our regular schools, or at least on a par with social sciences? Why are they not given as equal options right up there with math and language so that more senior students who have learned how to read, write, and even add and subtract, can choose to study drama five sessions a week and language skills two days a week instead of the other way around? If their interest and talents lie in the math, language or science areas, advancement in these areas would continue to be options.
Traditional education is meant to be useful, and useful is often conceptualized as meaning “useful for a career, a job, a way of making a living.” So we need to expand the education system’s way of thinking about the arts and creativity; extend it outside the boundaries of seeing it as a recreational activity, a way of giving pleasure.
Robinson defines creativity as original ideas that have value. To think creatively is to take chances, to risk being wrong. Young children aren’t frightened of being wrong—they haven’t learned yet that being wrong is ‘bad’— and so they are endlessly creative. If they weren’t they wouldn’t learn. Yet by the time they are ten, they are losing that delightful ability to be creative, try stuff out. And this is because of our traditional school system, our focus on the three Rs, and the stigmatisation of kids who are dreamy or prefer to draw or dance.
Robinson gives a wonderful example of how a child in the 1930s, who today might have been diagnosed with ADHD or some other learning disability and put on medication, was given the option to dance instead. Gillian Lynne was the child, and her worried mother took her to a specialist when she was 8 years old. The doctor listened to the mother’ s concerns of how Gillian didn’t seem to connect with her school lessons, had a poor attention span, wandered about the classroom instead of attending to the teacher. Gillian sat on her hands while they talked. Then the doctor asked her to wait while he talked to her mother outside the room. Before they left, he turned on the radio sitting on his desk. Outside the room he suggested to Gillian’s mother that they just watch the little girl for a while. But they didn’t have to wait; as soon as the radio music began, Gillian got up and began to dance. The doctor had his ‘diagnosis’. “She doesn’t have a learning problem or an attention deficit, she is a dancer. Send her to a dance school.” Her mother took that advice and when Gillian arrived at the dance school she found children just like her, except they were happy. Later, when she explained why dance was so important to her development as a little girl, she explained that “People like me who couldn’t sit still, had to move to think.”
Gillian Lynne went on to become a soloist ballerina in the Sadler Well’s Ballet, the predecessor of the Royal Ballet School, then began her own dance company. She met Andrew Lloyd Webber and choreographed numerous shows including two of the longest-running shows in Broadway history, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. She became a multi-millionaire and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2014 at the age of 87.
Of course not every child who has a learning disability or is diagnosed with ADHD can find a new way through dance or some other creative skill. But the point is well made.
This post is just a brief and rather pedestrian summary of Ken Robinson’s very amusing TED talk. Do Schools Kill Creativity? Do watch it; it is not only funny, it is inspiring and even educational!
