How School Hurts Creativity
In previous articles, I talked about the variety of ways that our society can be detrimental to creativity and highly creative temperaments. In this article, I want to go into detail about what I see as the number of ways that the school system hurts creativity.
Just a quick note: I will be discussing conventional schooling. I recognize that there are a number of alternative and progressive forms of school. The critiques mentioned here may not be applicable to them. Additionally, I am speaking mostly from a U.S. perspective, though I believe this will likely have relevance to many other countries, as well.
This is an important topic for educators, creative individuals, and others. In my opinion, many educators and school-related professionals are causing incalculable harm, have little awareness that they are doing so, and in some cases, their ignorance is willful. Since they don’t know any better, we shouldn’t blame or shame them. However, I do think it is their responsibility to become more aware and do better.
There are also many highly creative individuals who were not served well by the school system, remain gaslit and hurt into adulthood, and need some validation in order to heal. In many cases, their potential was radically impeded by this system, and they would benefit from doing some inner work to recover themselves (Many of the articles on this website offer advice on this. So, if this is you, I would encourage you to browse through them.). There are many more whose latent creativity was inhibited by the school system, even if they weren’t made to suffer quite as much.
This is also an important issue for our civilization, more broadly. Creativity is essential to our national and global prosperity, as well as our ability to solve the tremendous challenges we face as a species. We must remember that our school system processes almost the entire population. Thus its political, economic, and social implications are of tremendous significance. It’s easy to forget this, as the status quo of the school system is taken for granted, much of the time.
School Takes your Freedom Away
One of the most important and fundamental ways that school hurts creativity is by taking away the freedom required for creativity. On this issue, Einstein said:
“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom…It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”
By dictating what we think and do with the majority of our waking hours, there’s little room for us to decide for ourselves what we need to do. Following our interests and intuition is a requirement for creativity. This, in turn, requires freedom. School takes all of this away. Instead, authority figures tell you that the program foisted on you without your consent is good for you, and that those in charge know what you need better than you do. The vast majority of what you do in school is driven by someone else’s orders. This is a prescription for destoying creativity.
Status Quo Maintenance
School hurts creativity because it is geared toward maintaining the status quo, whereas creativity is about changing the status quo. When I was a teenager, I encountered an individual whose job was to fix kids that were deemed by particular authorities to be a problem. One idea that he consistently forced onto young people was that “a child tries to change the world, but an adult accepts the world as it is.” The message here was that ‘you will be accepted if you just go with the program and adjust yourself to the status quo in all ways’. Typically, the status quo maintenance features of the school system aren’t so explicit but are at least as potent.
Here are some of the ways the school system serves to maintain the status quo:
by teaching kids what to think, rather than how to think
by emphasizing obedience to authority rather than individual initiative
by relentlessly labeling poor kids as less intelligent than rich kids
by segregating based on family income level, race, and especially age
by taking away people’s freedom and self-determination from a young age
by discouraging and even punishing certain kinds of talents and intelligence that challenge the status quo or make authoritarian personalities uncomfortable
by inculcating passivity, outer direction, and emotional dependence
by teaching that one cannot affect their surroundings
Over and over again, schools indoctrinate us with the belief that challenging the status quo, even in creative or win-win ways, is not feasible or positive. Consider how schools regard kids that are labeled “disruptive”. This word is always used negatively and is usually used to describe kids that don’t display the level of reflexive obedience demanded by the school system. But in the real world, there are all sorts of scenarios in which disruption is a good thing. Can you really have significant creativity or positive change without disruption? Because of this aspect of schools, they don’t teach us how to challenge the status quo creatively and neglect the myriad of skills that might go along with that. Imagine if they did teach this. How would the world look different?
Critical Thinking
This brings me to my third point which is that schools don’t teach critical thinking, at least not effectively or sincerely. If they did, kids would very quickly start to think critically about what’s actually happening to them in the school system and what the implications are for their lives. For example, they would notice the contradiction between the fact that they are being robbed of their self-determination by an authoritarian school system and the fact that they are being told they live in a free country. If they raise this issue with authority figures, they are unlikely to receive an encouraging response.
Authority figures in and around school have to undermine the child’s critical thinking in order for their management techniques to work. A critically thinking young person is a real problem for social planners and authoritarian child managers.
I think it’s important not to blame individuals here. The problem is that the needs of these authorities in this system erode creativity. Critical thinking is essential for creativity because you need to be able to ask tough, subversive questions about the status quo of whatever substantive area you’re interested in. You need to be able to challenge existing ways of thinking about things. This is antithetical to the needs of vast, impersonal systems and social planners, which need to process and standardize young people according to their program. In order for this to work, they need obedience. Critical thinking just interferes with that machinery.
It seems the solution has been to propagate the myth that what is being done in school really does encourage critical thinking. And now that enough generations have been schooled, it is harder for us all to tell the difference between genuine critical thinking and what is taught in school.
Schools Run on Fear
A fourth reason why schools hurt creativity is that schools run on fear, and fear undermines creativity. Educator and social critic William Deresiewicz said that fear “is an agent of control, something that authorities instill to make you tractable.” School inculcates fear of doing the wrong thing, fear of being humiliated, fear of being different, fear of being deemed stupid, fear of others’ opinions, fear of being poor or in jail, fear of not getting laid, and so on. Simply put, fear plays an enormous role in shaping behavior and attitudes in school.
The unsettling part is that most people working in the school system seem to take this entirely for granted, seeing no real problem with it. My sense is that many, if not most, educators and child experts wouldn’t know how to do their job if they couldn’t use fear. Fear makes us easier to control and manipulate. The current schooling paradigm couldn’t function without fear. Without fear, you wouldn’t get compliance. And since the goal is really compliance rather than helping young people become all they can be, this would be a real problem. Even though there are many individual educators who sincerely want to help young people be all they can be, all too often, the logic of the authoritarian school system overwhelms their individual efforts and intentions.
Fear, when we can’t become conscious of it and learn to transform it, kills creativity. But in school, if we brought awareness to that fear so that we got our freedom back, we’d literally get in trouble. The kids in the school system that show fearlessness to authority figures aren’t treated with admiration for their courage and as showing great leadership potential, they are treated as a menace.
School Conditions for Establishment Paths
Another way in which school hurts creativity is that it teaches us that the only legitimate things to do in life are those preset paths that legacy institutions have set out before us. Just like school, these involve a hierarchical system telling people what standardized steps they need to take to move forward and get ahead. The school system isn’t really selecting for intelligence, talent, or skill-building. It’s mostly selecting for people that exhibit a high level of competence at jumping through someone else’s hoops. Those that succeed in this system move closer to future acceptance into the institutions that dominate our society. These include elite higher education, law, finance, the corporate world, and the medical profession.
In some ways, this may be beneficial for our society and necessary for certain professions. But imposing this on every single child is incredibly costly. It is harmful to future entrepreneurs, artists, innovators, and leaders. It not only doesn’t help them think about how to create their own path, but it also indoctrinates them into believing that such non-prescribed paths are illegitimate, inferior, less worthy, and untenable (or as some like to put it, “magical thinking”). In order to help prepare young people for paths that don’t exist yet, the system itself would have to be more student-directed and less authoritarian. As such, it would require a transformation of the whole system, something that most of us aren’t prepared to seriously consider.
The people that inspire us the most, that make enormous contributions to our species – for me, it’s people like Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Steve Jobs, Oprah, Ghandi – their paths could never have been predicted or prescribed by technocrats. In fact, many of these people describe in vivid detail the harm that educrats did to them. School didn’t teach them the intellectual and leadership skills they needed to become who they are, at least not directly.
Schools Psychologically Damage Creative People
School also hurts creativity simply by psychologically damaging highly creative people. School ruthlessly undermines the psychological well-being of hyper-creative personalities, and then it punishes and shames them for the results of this damage. First, authority figures pathologize kids for their innate responses to a system that is harmful to them. There are many, many ways that schools do harm to us, some of which I’ve already described, including:
Destroying our connection to ourselves and our gut feelings by exerting extreme control
Damaging our intellect by forcing us to memorize and regurgitate disconnected bits of information out of context, rather than helping us seek meaning. Award-winning educator John Taylor Gatto said, “Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek.”
Radically limiting our perspective about our own lives by telling us what our potential, intelligence, or prospects are based on questionable metrics created by technocrats we’ve never met
Preventing us from developing our inner authority by having us spend a majority of our time demonstrating obedience and compliance
Kids can have an intensely negative reaction to being forced to act against their own interests. This should be treated as a good thing. Would you, for example, want your child to simply obey if they found themselves in a relationship with a sociopath? But the harm of being forced to submit to the school system is tame when compared to the derangement of then being pathologized for this reaction. That is when the situation goes from wrong to atrocious.
For their natural reactions to an outdated and harmful system, there is a large class of experts (educational consultants, educational psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.) ready to label the child as defective, and then sell “solutions” to the parents. It’s difficult to question this because we’re told it’s backed by “science” or is “evidence-based”. Aditionally, because such labeling falls into the box of “mental health”, it is assumed that this will be good for the child’s mental well-being. What is ignored here is the substance of what’s actually happening. Labeling the child as defective in such a situation has the potential to radically undermine their connection to themselves and their sense of self. Unless they are really able to understand that the “diagnosis” is complete bullshit, this could damage them for life.
Despite propaganda to the contrary, the focus here is entirely on the child’s behavior, with the context taken for granted. The values, feelings, and motives that drive the behavior are ignored. It is unfortunate, even tragic, that so many parents get lured into accepting such interventions for their child, by experts that are serving the system to the clear detriment of the child.
When you do this to the future members of our society’s creative class as children, you potentially destroy them and rob society of their contribution. Given that these are the people that will generate our future prosperity, help solve our most intractable problems, and make the world a more beautiful place, such an approach does a disservice to the collective. A disservice that is so large, it’s difficult to capture with words.
Instead, what such people need is for their natural reactions to the school system to be met with understanding, validation, and a sincere attempt to meet their actual needs. Some of us got so little of this, that we found ourselves under a heavy layer of brainwashing that lasts well into adulthood. Without the right guidance and support, we could very well stay under that for our entire lives. If this is you and would like more resources on this, please explore this website, as it is dedicated to helping people like you.
School Undermines Self-Awareness
Another way that school hurts creativity is that does not encourage or model self-awareness. In fact, it even undermines it. Award-winning educator John Taylor Gatto showed us that the institution of modern schooling is totally at odds with self-awareness, because emotional dependency is a major component of the hidden curriculum.
But self-awareness is essential for creativity and innovation. Brene Brown said, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” If we can’t bring awareness to our vulnerability, we won’t be able to do anything new of any significance. But in school, our vulnerability is being used to manipulate us.
The trouble is that it can be easy for people to convince themselves that there is an emphasis on self-awareness when there really isn’t. For example, encouraging kids to develop “grit” or a “growth mindset”, could easily be confused as a self-awareness practice. In reality, what is likely happening is that the child is being forced to bury their natural reactions to the program forced on them and adjust themselves to the situation. Self-awareness, on the other hand, would involved bringing awareness to these natural reactions, even if the authority figures don’t know how to deal with them. So if the goal is really to get rid of the kid’s authenticity so that they fit into the system, self-awareness is actually a problem and needs to be discouraged.
A lack of self-awareness is also frequently modeled by authority figures in school. They will often have emotional reactions to various situations in the institution. Yet rather than bringing awareness to the feelings inside of them and then responding to the situation in a more grounded, empowered way, they make it about the external stimulus. This often happens when kids show disrespect or lack of appreciation for the teachers. If they took a moment to nurture what is going on in their own hearts, they might then see these behaviors more accurately and respond in a way that could actually help both the child and themselves.
Conclusion
If the school system is so bad for creativity, why do we not deal with these issues at scale? One reason is that, due to the incredible momentum of the school system, people are essentially indoctrinated into the status quo. Most people have bought into a narrative that they continue to perpetuate. Similarly, we struggle to imagine anything being different and habitually invalidate notions of major, systemic change. Many people in a variety of professions have built careers on denial of these issues and suppression of the kids that surface them. As I described above, they misinterpret symptoms of an outdated system as defects in children. Given how morally objectionable this is, there will naturally be some resistance to seeing these things for what they are.
It’s essential for adults that were processed by this system as children to wake up out of it and see it for what it is.
