Finding Your Howl

     In this first story Flaum talks about an endangered species of wolf and what was done to save them. He tells the story of a wolf named Mumon, who has just been released back into the wild. Mumon and his pack don’t have a leader because they’ve forgotten how to howl. Mumon leaves the pack to go on a journey to find his howl. Mumon comes across a deer and instinctively kills and eats the animal. He feels sadness when he finds that he needs to kill to survive. Mumon feels the deer’s’ spirit inside him. He feels his old being strip away. Mumon has found his howl.

     There are a series of videos that RSA has made of which I believe helps me understand the creative process a little easier. These videos are speeches that have been illustrated to maximize the entertainment and learning value. Each video showcases ideas from innovative research. There is one specific video that demonstrates how education works and why it suppresses creativity rather than encourage it. It is a speech given by Sir Ken Robinson titled Changing Paradigms. Understanding how education works can really open your eyes to new ideas. Robinson demonstrates how the “Arts” are the victims in today’s society.  The arts are what he calls an aesthetic experience, meaning your senses are at their peak or when you are fully alive. Anesthetic experiences are when you shut yourself off, or deadening of the senses. These experiences are what we are constantly exposed to at school. Another point Sir Robinson makes is that this is not entirely the schools fault. Our children are prescribed drugs to help them focus and learn and no one seems to have a problem with that. He says that now is the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. Today, kids are exposed to advertisement and different technologies that ultimately become too much information to process. We see that a child is struggling in school, so we medicate them. He says that we go to school to be standardized and believes we must go in the opposite direction. He then talks about the notion of “divergent thinking”. This type of mindset is related to creativity but it’s not exactly the same. He describes it as an essential capacity for creativity, meaning the more you think divergently, the more creativity you will have. It is the ability to think of lots of possible answers to a question, or being able to interpret a question in many different ways. It’s being able to not think in the typical linear or convergent ways. A study was done to measure the level of divergent thinking in a kindergarten class. Ninety-eight percent score above the genius level. Five years later they were tested again. The results were cut in half. Only fifty percent of the kids scored above the genius level. This suggests that the education system in the United States is very left-brained in its teaching. Another thing I’d like to add is that we must understand that being accessed individually is also detrimental to our learning abilities. Robinson says the best type of thinking is group thinking, or collaboration. After hearing the entire speech I must say I completely agree with Sir Ken Robinson’s ideas, as he was very persuasive. This really speaks to me as a creative person in that we must defend creativity. Our right to think has been replaced by standardization. If everyone truly what “education” is doing to us, there would be, I would hope some sort of revolution where an alternate system would be built from scratch. Robinson has a way of being able to open our eyes to a false reality and I found his speech very moving.