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.
