Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2012-09-20 06:47 pm
silveradept) wrote2012-09-20 06:47 pm
Entry tags:
Thinky-Thoughts: The Destruction of Creativity
[Thinky-Thoughts are perpetual beta. Even if they're completely fully formed - because there's always something not thought of. That's where you come in. Comment away.]
Children lose their creative impulses because they figure out that not making mistakes is more important than being creative. Which can create situations where an owl has to reassure an incoming freshman that failure will happen, but that it will not be the end of the world. Boggle, I love you for doing this. But, when this idea is twisted to its very darkest, you end up with children and adults who become so very in-tune with the feelings of others and start actively manipulating them because failure in that realm means abuse, even after they've long passed out of the abusive situation in the sense of "I no longer live with the abusers". But the techniques they've learned allow them to shape destiny and guide everyone around them toward optimal results, usually with their recipients not knowing how much has been done to help them.
You can also end up with me, the person who becomes actively afraid of failure because everyone seems to take great pleasure in watching you fail. I'm a type-LisA when it comes to measurable systems and scores being important. Which only sets the bar higher and prevents you from taking pride in your work unless it really is perfect. And sometimes also has you not contributing to things because being Wrong is removing the doubt about being a fool and everyone will remember that and use it. That also brings around the brainweasels and the depression just as much as the other condition. Because you're so busy maintaining your perfection that you start worrying about whether anyone will find you attractive for your actual virtues (whatever those may be)...but they'll also have to be okay with you making mistakes. As with many things, wider perspective often helps - there are a lot of people who like you just the way you are. Even if you make a mistake. And they're going to be quite interesting people, too. Trust me.
The brainweasels don't go away that easily, though - the depression and the fear can come back very easily if things start threatening to get out of control, regardless of whether they're the manipulators or the afraid or any other type of person that lost their creativity through relentless insistence on Right and Wrong. Have an excellent post about advice given to depressed people - and why it doesn't work and tends to engender anger or other unhelpful emotions. What works for you when you're sad may not work for depression - what will work for depression is something they may not be able to articulate or even understand at that point in time.
Anyway, back to the kids. The continued insistence on quantifiable outcomes and the insistence that school funding be tied to those outcomes pretty well kills any impetus to show to children what life can be like outside of Right and Wrong, and the less funding there is for students, the more the pressure is on to make the students able to parrot what is Right. We've seen what happens with this - continued insistence that only the subjects that come with "objective" wrong and right are the only ones worth studying and testing upon. Learning is reduced even further past regurgitation to the point where teachers alter their lesson plans and designs such that they're basically asking the questions that will be on the test in class. What room is left for creativity in such an environment? Certainly not in dress of in behavior, as anything that sticks out gets hammered down in service to conformity, although it can be named any other way but that, depending on whether the peer group or the administration is doing the hammering.
And the worst part of it? Even though we sacrifice their creativity to the demands of the tests, such things do not actually improve the scores. We kill the spark and reap no benefit - and then people complain that the people they're hiring show no initiative or problem-solving abilities and have to be trained how to think again. (Then again, some of them prefer their workers that way.) It also becomes trivially easy to turn an otherwise competent person into a scared child again just through the threat of making them Wrong and punishing them for it. We couch our politics in Wrong and Right and how much Ideological Solidarity is important...even though they're all running manipulative games against us, pushing on our fears and pulling on us with promises.
Soon enough, we'll have the world that we wanted, where conformity and creativity have been properly stamped out so that we don't have to deal with anything different in our lives. (And then, listening to This American Life this week, I realize we're already really close to that point - but that occasionally we do actually pay attention to things outside of the cognitive realm and the impact that those things have on kids...)
Children lose their creative impulses because they figure out that not making mistakes is more important than being creative. Which can create situations where an owl has to reassure an incoming freshman that failure will happen, but that it will not be the end of the world. Boggle, I love you for doing this. But, when this idea is twisted to its very darkest, you end up with children and adults who become so very in-tune with the feelings of others and start actively manipulating them because failure in that realm means abuse, even after they've long passed out of the abusive situation in the sense of "I no longer live with the abusers". But the techniques they've learned allow them to shape destiny and guide everyone around them toward optimal results, usually with their recipients not knowing how much has been done to help them.
You can also end up with me, the person who becomes actively afraid of failure because everyone seems to take great pleasure in watching you fail. I'm a type-LisA when it comes to measurable systems and scores being important. Which only sets the bar higher and prevents you from taking pride in your work unless it really is perfect. And sometimes also has you not contributing to things because being Wrong is removing the doubt about being a fool and everyone will remember that and use it. That also brings around the brainweasels and the depression just as much as the other condition. Because you're so busy maintaining your perfection that you start worrying about whether anyone will find you attractive for your actual virtues (whatever those may be)...but they'll also have to be okay with you making mistakes. As with many things, wider perspective often helps - there are a lot of people who like you just the way you are. Even if you make a mistake. And they're going to be quite interesting people, too. Trust me.
The brainweasels don't go away that easily, though - the depression and the fear can come back very easily if things start threatening to get out of control, regardless of whether they're the manipulators or the afraid or any other type of person that lost their creativity through relentless insistence on Right and Wrong. Have an excellent post about advice given to depressed people - and why it doesn't work and tends to engender anger or other unhelpful emotions. What works for you when you're sad may not work for depression - what will work for depression is something they may not be able to articulate or even understand at that point in time.
Anyway, back to the kids. The continued insistence on quantifiable outcomes and the insistence that school funding be tied to those outcomes pretty well kills any impetus to show to children what life can be like outside of Right and Wrong, and the less funding there is for students, the more the pressure is on to make the students able to parrot what is Right. We've seen what happens with this - continued insistence that only the subjects that come with "objective" wrong and right are the only ones worth studying and testing upon. Learning is reduced even further past regurgitation to the point where teachers alter their lesson plans and designs such that they're basically asking the questions that will be on the test in class. What room is left for creativity in such an environment? Certainly not in dress of in behavior, as anything that sticks out gets hammered down in service to conformity, although it can be named any other way but that, depending on whether the peer group or the administration is doing the hammering.
And the worst part of it? Even though we sacrifice their creativity to the demands of the tests, such things do not actually improve the scores. We kill the spark and reap no benefit - and then people complain that the people they're hiring show no initiative or problem-solving abilities and have to be trained how to think again. (Then again, some of them prefer their workers that way.) It also becomes trivially easy to turn an otherwise competent person into a scared child again just through the threat of making them Wrong and punishing them for it. We couch our politics in Wrong and Right and how much Ideological Solidarity is important...even though they're all running manipulative games against us, pushing on our fears and pulling on us with promises.
Soon enough, we'll have the world that we wanted, where conformity and creativity have been properly stamped out so that we don't have to deal with anything different in our lives. (And then, listening to This American Life this week, I realize we're already really close to that point - but that occasionally we do actually pay attention to things outside of the cognitive realm and the impact that those things have on kids...)