“Humanly speaking, the school, the college, society, make the difference between men…When a man stupid becomes a man inspired, when one and the same man passes out of the torpid into the perceiving state, leaves the din of trifles, the stupor of the senses, to enter into the quasi-omniscience of high thought–up and down, around, all limits disappear. No horizon shuts down. He sees things in their causes, all facts in their connection.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson in Emerson on Education
What is a school, why do we send students to school and when in school, what must be achieved? The outcomes of each of these questions are difficult to ascertain, but my foundational belief is that schools must be inspiring. An inspired school creates excited and energized students who spread their wings and develop the muscles of their minds. The growth of the student can then quickly allow for personal development and expansion of their lives to experiences that were never considered before.
Schools must be inspirational.
Quantifying what it means to be inspired is especially difficult at first. The term inspiration has so many different definitions. As Emerson indicated in the opening, that with inspiration, comes a unbroken horizon and the facts (of life) are omnipresent. Creating a goal of inspiration for schools will allow for freedom of thought and permit students to see their own lives as they are without fear and restriction. Students are encouraged to see academic material not as a limiting experience, but as a basis for something that is bigger and better and important to them.
The goal of school must be to encourage creative thought and use the permission of creativity to see connections in life.
We must send students to school so they can be inspired. The goal of school must be to inspire students to be a productive members of society and learn to expect the best out of themselves and their fellow students. Graduates must understand it is up to them to create inspiration in the communities they themselves live in. My school of inspiration will be a mixture of Perennialism and Progressive educational thought as mentioned in Kauchak and Eggen (2011).
Inspired problem solving and development of the self will occur while using the teachings of the humanities to develop the capacity for inspiration and creativity.
Yet, most of all, we must respect the student as Emerson taught us in the Emerson on Education Essays:
“I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out ofhis own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.”
The school must believe that teaching creativity is a long process and one that does not encourage a one size fit all approach. Schools must share with students the foundations of classical thought and then allow for opportunities to use this foundation in the development of his or her own life.
There is no one way to encourage creative thought, thus a framework of Perennialism must be present and encouraged via Progressivism.
A school simply being labeled as inspired is simply not good enough. The goal of creating inspired students and learning environments must be proven as effective. Evaluation of an inspired school must not rest merely on Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) Accreditation Reviews or No Child Left Behind (NCLB) due to the problems associated with the reliability of the respective standards (Rothstein, 2008). Currently, there is no way that SACS or NCLB processes can successfully measure creativity attainment. Thus, outcomes tracking must go beyond filing in bubble sheets and opaque statistical analysis that frequently produces questionable results.
It is time to return to the best source of information that we may have available at this time in the educational research and evaluation fields, the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Rothstein (2008) indicated that NAEP provides information about what students know in a variety of subject and life; thus in my view, using the current process as a foundation for measuring implementation of my creative philosophy will be a start. During the 1950’s Dr. Paul Torrance proposed multiple ways to measure creativity that included measuring the influence of the person, process, products and environment that contributed to creativity (Ferry, 2003). One problem with the approach is that using the NAEP only measures student learning outcomes; it does not evaluate the schools success in adapting a commitment to independent and inspired thought. Perhaps the SACS Accreditation process could be modified, along with the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) process to promote and evaluate school success (AdvancED, n.d).
Using existing NAEP Standards and including a creativity measure within the comprehensive testing process may be a way to begin the documentation process of proving a commitment to creativity related to student learning outcomes.
Funding my creative school will be difficult. Current political winds within the educational world support instruction that is focused on NCLB standards (Rothstein, 2008). Encouraging creative thought does not seem very important to current educational leaders. Equally unimportant is the theory of Perennialism in public education at this time. Add the two together and one will be challenged to fund the school.
Reality sets when matters of money are presented, thus a network of charter schools may be the only hope for my effort. Charter schools that are funded via public and private resources, hosted throughout the nation or state as a shared effort and given at least ten years to prove themselves and their curriculum. Funding will not be based on the number of students enrolled, but on a dollar amount that, based on research and prior experience, is determined to support the operational aspects of the school regardless of enrollment. Thus, the school will be given the creative license to serve the number of students that they believe is effectively possible within the funding amount.
A creative school will be one that places the current educational paradigm on its head. All presumptions are on the table and the school must use creative problem solving itself, as a living example for students.
My school will create immediate problems for all involved. First and foremost is how to ensure public and private funding of a school that is based on creativity instead of a tangible skill or accepted test score. Creating a national or state system of new schools will prove expensive, and the schools surviving the trials and tribulations of economic and political pressures will be challenging (for a period of ten years). There are those that will scoff at the inclusion of public and private funding; yet a creative school will entertain all ideas of support and will embrace alternative approaches, even with the surrounding community fails to agree.
How does one show adequate progress toward creativity? Even with the strengths of the NAEP, there will be much to be desired even with redesign (this adds more to the cost of my effort of course). While there is available research about how to measure creativity in our students, the material is still scant and frequently unsupported by large groups of academics. Thus, if academia is struggling to define and evaluate the concept of creativity, how can a brand new school address the same issue?
Perhaps the biggest challenge to my new system of education is that of a lack of public will. Our society currently appears unwilling to say there is something wrong with our educational system and willing to support that the idea that testing our students into a solution is the way to go. If we as a society do not model creative problem solving, how can we effectively create a large scale system of learning that does value creativity?
Thus, I fear that my school of creative thought will only remain that inside the mind of Emerson and within small enclaves of communities that value the ideas presented here today.
References:
AdvancED (2011). AdvancED Website. Retrieved June 21, 2011, from http://www.advanc-ed.org/
Emerson, E. (n.d.). Emerson on Education. Retrieved June 21, 2011 from
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/ranscendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/education.htm
Ferry, S. (2003). Creativity Assessments. Retrieved June 21, 2011, from
http:// www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~stferry/
Kauchak, D. & Eggen, P. (2011). Introduction to teaching: Becoming a professional. NY: Pearson.
Rothstein, R. (2008). Grading education: Getting accountability right. NY: Teachers College Press.
This post was first made on Jan 14, 2012. – CJE