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Creativity & NEP

Creativity & NEP
Photo by Kimberly Farmer / Unsplash

This week in IP Wave we take a look at creativity, education, and how NEP can transform IP in the country.

A few decades ago, an experiment with far reaching implications for educational pedagogies took place when the systems scientist George Land, while working with NASA, devised a test to ascertain creativity levels in individuals. Taking off from there, Land went on to examine creativity in a group of 1600 randomly selected preschool kids and found 98 percent of them to be in the genius category. He persisted with the testing of their creativity levels right through their years of formal schooling and into their early 20’s and saw the number of creative individuals dwindle to less than 3 percent of the group. I have personally witnessed this decline in creativity-with very young children over time-in the realm of art. I have consistently found them to be highly creative and yet the same children after a few years of formal education seem to lose their abilities to use colours in an out-of-the-box fashion. In fact, Picasso was categorical when he said that every child is a born artistic genius and yet we have very few adults who can express colours and art in delightfully creative ways. I also recall the case of a girl child-from several years ago in the United States-who had steadfastly failed to learn to talk in her growing up phase in spite of not having any physiological reason to be mute. At the same time, the girl had displayed an extraordinary talent as an artist. As luck would have it, her parents subjected her to the training of professional educators who succeeded in getting her to talk-like the rest of the world. In the process, her artistic genius was lost completely and forever.

What goes wrong? Why are so many adults so incapable of creativity? It seems evident that the onslaught of formal schooling takes its toll by subduing the creative impulses of young children over time and this settles them into a comfortable groove of mediocrity in adulthood. This happens because-as things stand-children are compelled to conform to the set expectations of their formal programmes of education reinforced repeatedly by the pedagogical practices of teachers. Has the work of Land and others who followed in his wake led to major rethinking in education policies and planning? Not really, in spite of much awareness and acceptance of Land’s work. Therefore, while it is worrying, the near indifference on the part of educational institutions-and even educators-to do anything very enterprising to remedy the situation should not come as a surprise.

Let me begin by listing here a number of extraordinarily creative individuals from the pages of history. Mahatma Gandhi, Kabir, Michael Faraday, Newton, Einstein, Sachin Tendulkar, C. V. Raman, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Pele, Don Bradman, Muhammed Ali, Richard Feynman, Gautam Haridrumat, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Joseph Fourier, Rosalind Franklin, W. B. Yeats.

The precepts and examples emanating from many of these individuals have stood me in good stead for my personal journey in life. In fact, there are many valuable lessons that can be drawn from the lives of these great  personages that shall also help us identify characteristic that engender creativity.

The most important feature common to each one of the names above has been the fact that they had found their inner calling or inner drumbeat-as I put it-that propelled them to do what they did in life. It must be added that they had pursued this calling with enormous dedication and to the exclusion of most other things in their lives. For instance Mahatma Gandhi, at a very tender age, had vowed to adhere to the truth for the rest of his life no matter what the cost. Muhammed Ali had at a very young age made up his mind to be a boxer and had dedicated his most formative years to extraordinary discipline and hard work to achieve his goal. My contention is that this discovery of their inner personal drumbeats and the marching in step with it, no matter what the price, is what makes them great and extraordinarily creative beings.

Thus the trick and challenge in life for any individual to become creative-when they are entering college-is to seek to discover the inner drumbeat and then to march in step in the real world in harmony with this drumbeat. This begets the next question. How does one discover one’s inner drumbeat? For more than a decade, I have personally experimented along these lines with students who have entered college. I have encountered enormous success in getting these students to discover their personal drumbeats. All I have prescribed, and with much good effect, is the simple idea of getting each individual student to be exposed to several existing drumbeats in the world around us and then letting their hearts find the one that resonates best with their inner drumbeat. This is akin to getting two tuning forks whose emanating tunes are in harmony with each other. And how does one find these drumbeats of the world? All that is needed is to expose our students, through the curriculum, to the needs and challenges of the world and of society around us. Young minds are very idealistic and take to the understanding of societal problems in a dedicated manner. These needs and challenges of the world encode within their ambit a large number of drumbeats. This, simply put, shall provoke the thought processes of the student through external stimuli and she shall-if motivated enough-find that which strikes the right chord such as when Gandhi was stimulated to find the drumbeat of truth by the external stimulus of watching the play ‘Satyavadi Raja Harishchandra’.

We are then naturally led to redefine education as that process which first allows an individual to discover his inner drumbeat and then this process of getting educated requires the individual to march in the in the world in harmony with this drumbeat. I must add that for most of us who are fortunate to get onto this path of education this is a lifelong journey.

Hence my prescription-based on much experimentation-calls upon the embedding of the curriculum with the following important features and the learner must imbibe most of them through the process of getting educated since they will be critical to acquiring good and true education. This prescription-in my personal experience-has led so many individuals so productively to the path of true education by helping them to discover their respective drumbeats and then also led them to march in harmony with these drumbeats:

·The learning process must be well balanced between the use of hands and of the mind. In other words, skills and knowledge should be the two sides of the coin of learning. Thus, the learner must become very adept at the use of his hands and there must be deep communion between his hands and his mind.

·The curriculum must, as much as possible, use a trans-disciplinary approach to tackling the specific problems that emanate from the much broader themes centred around the needs and challenges of the world.

·Students must largely work in groups on focussed and specific project based issues within the much larger domain of the needs and challenges of the world. These issues must lead to very specific and manageable projects that deal with problems under the umbrella of general themes such as climate change, the energy crisis, health and nutrition challenges, conflict resolution issues, social transformation, tribal and forest management issues, transportation challenges, quantum computing, space technologies slum and village redevelopment, environmental degradation, reclaiming and protecting habitats that harbour wildlife, managing the oceans and the polar regions, building and connecting in smart and integrated ways villages, towns and cities, becoming adept at sporting activities. This list is just a representative sample of what could be included but it is not exhaustive.

·The curriculum must have embedded within it, in natural ways through such projects as above, the acquisition of skills and knowledge for the learner in

o Productive and efficient communication strategies,

o Handling various IT tools with fluency,

o The analysis and use of data to good effect.

If we were to examine the lives of almost all of the great ones on my list above they illustrate many if not all of the features that are needed for finding and imbibing true education. For instance, on the matter of being adroit in the use of hands almost all of the names have displayed exceptional proficiency.

The process of education will lead nowhere unless knowledge is linked to action. The ancient Mimansa school of Indian philosophy states categorically that knowledge without action is meaningless. Mahatma Gandhi, who would only pronounce an opinion on any issue after having experimented first hand-had said emphatically and repeatedly that in the context of education what you do with your hands enters your heart.

Gandhi was always using his hands in everything that he did. He was a highly creative and inventive person. He invented the special portable spinning wheel that allowed him to spin yarn even in prison or when travelling. Mother Teresa used to tend to incurably sick patients by washing their bodies with her own hands. Very few of us are aware that Einstein was an exceptionally skilled craftsperson and a good project manager. He designed and successfully made the world’s first automatic camera and the first safe refrigerator. He also successfully managed his father’s electrical goods factory during his father’s illness; so much so that he contemplated giving up his career in physics to run the factory. His ideas on gravitation owe much to his fascination for electromagnets. If one were to examine Newton’s life, almost the same features become evident. The great Indian mystic poet Kabir of medieval times was also very adept in the use of his hands. In fact, he was a skilled weaver. Kabir was also very well versed in practical matters as is evident from his poetry. Leaving aside his mysticism and practical wisdom, Kabir’s verses reflect his genius as a poet. Rosalind Franklin was pivotal in unravelling the mysteries of the structure of the DNA molecule. She could do so since she was exceptionally gifted with the use of her hands that worked in such fine synergy with her brain. Sir C. V. Raman was also exceptionally gifted in the use of his hands and he hand crafted the instruments, that led to the Nobel Prize winning discovery of the Raman Effect. He was also an exceptionally gifted communicator. Mendel was gifted at gardening where you can do nothing without using your hands. He was also very perceptive in analysing large data sets. These two abilities made him very well suited to discover the laws of genetics. Feynman was just as good with his hands as any other individual in the list. He could take apart and fix any radio set in which task he was also putting his knowledge of electronics to good use in synergy with the use of his hands.

The other qualities that each one of these names has had include:

·extraordinary levels of curiosity about things and events around them

·great consciousness as also awareness of those things that were of interest

·the ability to bring to bear their boldness at experimentation at tackling problems

·a very disciplined and committed approach towards executing their tasks.

·high levels of interaction with the world around

All of these listed qualities are essential to be a creative individual and most college students that have gone through the prescriptions of the curriculum have acquired many of these features and qualities. These assist the student in pursuit of the discovery of his inner drumbeat and in turn when the student begins to realise his drumbeat these qualities get reinforced further.

Innovation is the backbone of NEP but it needs to be addressed from multiple prongs.


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