Topic: To what extent do you agree with the statement: “School is bad for children?” Support your claims with appropriate grounds and warrents.

That famous quote “Every child is born an artist” by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) emphasizing the importance of raising children’s imagination and intuitiveness in art now still has a much argued issue that is formal education whether simultaneously kills or cultivates human creativity. In fact, that school is mostly focusing on left-brain thinking and suppressing creativity in young learners is considered bad for children.

From an angle, it is claimed that schools and educator actually kill creativity in terms of teaching method. Firstly, there is a high tendency to seek for an ‘answer that is known before the question is posed’ in formal school, thus depriving students from addressing the issues on their own. Unfortunately, Christensen, Johnson, & Horn (2008) suggest this method should be introduced to academic students, at which point all students and all abilities are not engaged in lesson; and it is focused on imparting on memorization rather than understanding, notions rather than skills (Robinson, 2001). Secondly, current teaching method has created a so-called culture named ‘only relevance accepted’. The nature of creativity is its value, or appropriateness, hence, its relevance, but originality is also crucial. The newness in school is eliminated for the sake of contextual relevance. However, Beghetto ( 2007b) asserts that relevance is emphasized essenstial by all Maths secondary school prospective teachers. Consequently, it is obvious that in actual teaching culture, that students are required to acquisite knowledge technically and follow standard answers rather than creative ones is definitely not an ideal starting point for promotion of creativity.

From other angle, it seems undoutedly that students are educated out of creativity on account of schooling competition and test-based accountability. Competition among schools is significantly believed to be a particular approach to educational change in that students have motivations to obtain better academic outcomes. Specifically, most parents would prefer the school ranked as top in the list of schools according to student achievement and education quality. Therefore, the competition has forced schools and students to find a way in which academic orientation will be the top-priority and shools where most students obtain the best academic results will gain an advantage over other schools in the race for the best students, resources and public reputation. Many schools in England, the United States and even in Finland, for example, have recreated their educational profiles. However, the main rationale for doing so is not fostering a creative learning environment for students but competition in form of academic ability. Furthermore, it is the emergence of the educational accountability movement and international student assessments, such as the OECD PISA that testing and measuring the performance of individuals (both students and teachers), schools, districts and nations have been boosted (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009; Sahlberg, 2010). This leads to narrower curricula, more teacher-centred instruction, rote learning among students and even malpractice and corruption, one of these is damaging for trust, risk-taking and especially creativity in schools. It can be clearly seen that such a competition among schools and rougher test-based accountability are certainly not the good ways to promote creativity in classrooms.

In conclusion, there are some complicated barriers including teaching method, competition among schools and strict test-based accountability from which prevents schools investing more in student’s creative knowledge but intelligence and left brain. Thousands original ideas will not be discovered and developed to help our society unless the basic intellectual models of education are reconsidered.