No one refutes the enormous advantages of education to humans, and for thousands of years, schools have been considered the most powerful representative of education. Parents always have a desire to send their children to prestigious schools with the belief that kids will benefit the most from the educational programs offered at schools. However, it remains controversial whether schooling systems all over the world are really the best place to educate our modern offspring. It seems to have an obvious answer to it, but many educators now regret saying no. I believe that schools have more disadvantages than we traditionally think, which are creativity limits, potential deterioration, and natural learning restrictions. This essay will focus on those limitations and point out clearly the reasons behind them as well as make some specific recommendations on overcoming those existing drawbacks.
First of all, schools fail to foster students’ creativity. Creativity here is defined as an essential cognitive process by which ideas are generated, developed, and transformed. Creativity is well developed through the way children make a diversity of questions to draw newly profitable conclusions, nevertheless, in the majority of contemporary schooling systems, teachers impose their knowledge on their students, which eventually makes kids neglect to ask why. Most Vietnamese teachers, for instance, only train youngsters to solve equations with repeated formulas or write an essay with a detailed given outline but do not let them come up with anything original. Thus, all that children can do is become a copycat since they are forced to obey the rules as well as the formats of provided paradigms, and any novel idea made by children on their own that do not meet the mold is highly rejected. This passive teaching deprives students of their curiosity and the ability to “discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution” (Gopnik, 2011). In other words, current methods of teaching at schools are likely to make children become learners lacking their own initiative, hence not only do they not advance their creativity, but they show less interest in researching and extending their grasp of school subjects as well.
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In the famous Ted-talk, “Do schools kill creativity”, Robinson (2007) claimed that “schools kill creativity”, arguing that “we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it”. Like other recent studies, Robinson’s statement proves that children's creative ability is hindered by schools. According to Runco, Acar & Cayidgag (2017), there was a discrepancy between creativity displayed in and outside of the school. Significantly more creativity was reported in the activities occurring outside compared to in school. A number of students surveyed say that they can obtain practically handy knowledge and trigger their imaginativeness thanks to outside experience rather than sole rigid lectures in class.
Secondly, the public instruction system is gradually oppressing children’s endowments. The hierarchy of subjects which mostly prioritizes Maths, Science over Art or Music orients children to invest their efforts in the seem-to-be-crucially-important subjects and weakens their true potential. Case in point: there are students who have talents in Arts, but they do not have favorable conditions to further develop their skills as what they are good at is often ignored or even stigmatized at schools. Instead, children must mindlessly follow career paths laid out in advance for them by adults.
In addition, public education places a lot of emphasis on testing which requires lots of memorization. Not only do these grading systems evaluate students’ limited understanding of their wide ranges of knowledge outside schools, but they also cause intelligence loss (Peter, 2015). These examinations only assess students based on their academic abilities rather than other kinds of intelligence. Without successful test achievements, the school system deems kids a failure. Consequently, many highly-talented, brilliant people who perform poorly on academic tests often fail to recognize who they really are and what true abilities they can accomplish. For example, Gillian Lynne, a choreographer, was thought to have a learning disorder when she was at school as she could hardly concentrate. It turned out that she had an aptitude for dancing and the normal schooling system was not suitable for her. In short, our curriculum, as well as an assessment system, continuously contribute to the negative traditional stereotype that not-left-brains cannot succeed.
Furthermore, even grading systems are currently marked as faulty sometimes because of increasing grade inflation happening at various schools throughout the world. In the article “Grade Inflation Gone Wild” by Stuart Rojstaczer, he states “Today grades continue to go up regardless of the quality of the education and “A” is average at many schools.” Grades thus can no longer reflect exactly and effectively students’ capabilities as A now is much easier to achieve. What is worse, the inflated grades have had negative influences on students and led to potential deterioration, which includes students tending to give minimal effort in class and spend much less time studying as they assume that only with little effort can they easily get an A in their exams. This may result in a generation of students with bad habits of learning and poorly-educated background.
Moving on to the next point, school is separating children from the real world, which narrows their ability to natural learning. Children are compelled to be in school for at least 4 to 10 hours a day, so they just have only 3 to 6 hours out of school. But that is not all, moreover, the schoolwork does not end there; they have to waste half of their imagined-free time finishing homework and other extra tasks. A simple calculation reveals that children have only 2 to 4 hours available for self-discovery. However, compelling research indicates that natural learning without top-down instruction and coercion helps children absorb knowledge much better. Buchsbaum et al. (2011) wrote that it was self-directed learning, not forced instruction, that elevated both learning outcomes and creativity.
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