Creativity

The other day i observed an episode with my 1 year old son. He was taking two of his toys and smashing them together. He found that to be hilarious so he laughed and looked really proud.

Then another person in the room said “No, Bastian, that is not how to do it.”

My son looked up and his face went from being happy to being very thoughtful. You could see he was thinking very hard about why the person said no.

That got we wondering. What he was thinking and why did he look so surprised?

Some days after i watched a Ted Talk about education and creativity (https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en)
The presenter in the video is besides being really funny also has some interesting experiences in regards to children’s creativity throughout their time in school.

So why am putting my son and this Ted Talk in the same context?

I believe he is right. That we need to make sure not to unlearn creativity from our children.
An experiment he talks about mentions that children will take a chance on a possible solution to a problem even if they have no clue. That goes away the older we get. Because we get more scared of being wrong. We should celebrate people that are wrong. Lift them up and let them know that we are happy they failed because they are on the right track. Anyone who is good at somethings once was bad at it and has made a ton of mistakes in order to reach the level they are at now.
This is oversimplified – but the study argues that we unlearn that skill because of how we the education system celebrates successes. Which makes it harder for us to think outside the box.

And that the episode was one where my son was told to not to something which could be the other way around. Why should the smashing of toys not be the way to play ? We are lacking creativity to see that.

So i will try to focus more on making sure he can explore things himself and teach us what creative solutions there are to problems – although at the moment they are his, in our eyes, trivial problems.