Creative Schools summary

If you gave a brand new, unknown digital device to several different friends, you’d find that each of them approached the object a little differently. Some of them would start by reading the manual, while others would search the internet for information and still others would simply turn it on and play with it. The point is, as much as our schools might think otherwise, humans can’t be standardized – and education shouldn’t be either.

After all, from this little thought experiment it’s clear that your friends don’t learn the same way, and neither do schoolchildren. Yet, schools treat them as if they do. For instance, they are all expected to learn by sitting in class and listening to teachers explain things, even though this may not fit their personal learning styles.

It’s easy to think about our education system as a factory and just as easy to see it as a factory pig farm – all about outputs. As long as the pigs grow fast enough, factory farmers don’t care if the animals are sick or the farm is harming the environment.

And while today’s students aren’t being fattened up, mass education is all about yields. It’s overly focused on test results and the number of graduates produced.

If you walked into an average classroom, you’d see students who are bored silly by just about everything that’s presented to them. While this sight might seem normal, it shouldn’t be. After all, kids are natural born learners.

Babies are so eager to explore the world that they grab any new thing they can reach. They also soak up language, often becoming fluent by the time they’re two or three.

When approaching education, it’s important for us to consider what exactly we want our kids to learn. Up until now, we’ve answered this question with a never-ending list of subjects from French to algebra. But to guide students in later life, we need to teach them competencies, not subjects.

That’s because the future is uncertain and there’s no way to know if the subjects we teach students today will help them in the real world tomorrow. So, a better strategy is to teach skills that will enable them to learn what they need while dealing with whatever social or economic situations they might encounter.

We expect and deserve a great deal from our schools. So, how can we ensure we get it?

Well, education serves four main functions.

Education isn’t just about schools, teachers and students. Naturally, a school’s principal is also essential to shaping the learning environment.

Creative principals don’t just manage schools, they lead with a vision and search for new ways to improve their school. Just take Richard Gerver. When he became headmaster of Grange Primary School he truly had a vision and it began by transforming the school into Grangeton, a model town run by students. He wanted the students to learn through real world activities.