School's Effect on Creativity and Curiosity

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Recommended: The inquiry teaching approach

In the beginning I had such a hard time trying to find a topic to write about. I walked around outside, and observed everything yet I couldn’t find anything that sparked my interest at the moment. My mom always told me that when I was younger I constantly asked questions so I wondered why I was having difficulty finding a question to ask now. Later on that day two of my cousins came to my house one is five years old and the other is eight years old. My five year old cousin continually asked questions and I could see his older sister was really getting annoyed by it, yet I remembered a time when she was in his shoes and I wondered why that changed. Then my five year old cousin told me about how much he loved school and my older cousin told me she hated school now. These observations have brought me to the conclusion that as children move up to higher levels of education their curiosity and creativity starts to diminish. This is because schools don’t do enough to cultivate curiosity and creativity.

When a child first enters kindergarten, after they get over they get over being shy and nervous everything is dandy. They might say the ABC’s and count a couple times a day but mostly it’s all about having fun and expressing yourself. I have never heard a five year old tell me they don’t like going to school. Yet as children grow older and move into higher grades the idea of “having fun” and “expressing yourself” become a distant memory. Teachers start to look for specific answers and give you specific ways to find your answers. The child who tries to find a different approach to questions is soon labeled as a “trouble-maker”

I think that is because creativity and curiosity is seen as something that is “cute” and acceptable in younger c...

... middle of paper ...

...many others decided that formal education wasn’t for them. It’s sad that this led to them dropping out because I feel like school has something for everyone if it is implemented properly. Yet the point I’m trying to make here is that they still became successful. They relied on their creativity and curiosity to lead them in whatever career they wanted to pursue and things worked out great for them. I strongly believe that we would have a lot more success stories like these if creativity and curiosity were cultivated in schools.

Works Cited

“The creativity crisis”, Newsweek, October 12th 2013

Tegagno, Deborah, Moran, James, and Sawyers, Janet Creativity in Early Childhood Classrooms United States, 1991, print

Todd B. Kashdan, Ph.D , “3 ideas to prevent schools from killing creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking” Psychology today October 13th, 2013

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