Author Topic: What Progressive Educators Get Wrong About Creativity  (Read 174 times)

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Offline Kamaji

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What Progressive Educators Get Wrong About Creativity
« on: January 31, 2023, 03:04:04 pm »
What Progressive Educators Get Wrong About Creativity

Originality requires both knowledge and technical mastery.

Daniel Buck
30 Jan 2023

Surely, with the dawn of the Internet and the rise of artificial technology, schools must change, perhaps radically so. Most Likely to Succeed, the popular education documentary makes this case using the story of Watson, the Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer. By 2011, after four years of designing algorithms and programming, computer scientists had developed a machine that could beat Ken Jennings, who had won the TV quiz show 74 times.

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The documentary recommends progressive education as our societal savior. With little evidence or causative connection, it gestures in the direction of ideas such as discovery and project-based learning—anything that rejects traditional classroom learning such as whole class instruction, formal coursework, sequenced curricula, lectures, and the like. How exactly these “revolutionary” approaches to education better foster creativity or critical thinking is unclear.

This is, in fact, an old contention. In the early 20th century, John Dewey proffered a similar argument to defend his progressive educational vision in The School and Society. Pointing to the changes wrought by the industrial revolution, early mass communication, and globalization, Dewey argued "That this revolution should not affect education in some other than a formal and superficial fashion is inconceivable.”

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Progressive creative thinking

An educationally progressive understanding of creativity is premised upon a romantic view of childhood, a state supposedly unblemished by society’s stultifying rules and expectations. It is exemplified by phrases such as “Children are always asking why” and “Children are naturally curious.” From this view, the child’s mind is inherently creative and traditional schooling only snuffs out that inventive spark; if we simply allowed the child’s mind to unfold like a flower, creativity would flourish. University lecturer Larry Vint succinctly expresses this view when he writes that “Creativity is not learned but rather unlearned.”

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Evidence for this is limited, however. For example, in an essay analyzing creativity, the renowned educational psychologist John Sweller noted that there is a “paucity of data from randomized, controlled trials providing evidence of an increase in critical and creative thinking following instruction.” In fact, he went even further, and wrote that “the absence of such strategies suggests that teachable, general, critical and creative thinking strategies do not exist.” Whatever the promises of promoting creativity through progressive education, there’s currently limited evidence for it.

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Source:  https://quillette.com/2023/01/30/the-perils-of-progressive-education/

Offline Fishrrman

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Re: What Progressive Educators Get Wrong About Creativity
« Reply #1 on: January 31, 2023, 11:41:05 pm »
"ChatGPT" (I think that's what it's called) is going to change EVERYTHING.