Our education system is destroying creativity - closing speeches

Proposers’ closing speech
In closing this debate I would like to clarify our belief, since it seems to have been misinterpreted. The education system that we claim to be destroying creativity is the current “forced-feeding” learning system that currently is the norm in most modern countries. We are told what is supposed to be learned with very little thought and experimentation outside of the little box that has been created around it. (Continued below the fold…)

By AM

Opposers’ closing speech
Ladies and gentlemen, the Proposition side has gone on and on about how our education system is killing or has killed our creativity. But the more they argued their case, the further they went to fetch their arguments, the deeper the contradiction in their position. Indeed, how can our respectable Proposers defend such an idea, when they are actually being creative because of an educational exercise? (Continued below the fold…)

By HA

Proposers’ closing Speech
In closing this debate I would like to clarify our belief, since it seems to have been misinterpreted. The education system that we claim to be destroying creativity is the current “forced-feeding” learning system that currently is the norm in most modern countries. We are told what is supposed to be learned with very little thought and experimentation outside of the little box that has been created around it.

Students are seen and treated like sponges of knowledge instead of potential creators. The student should be allowed freedom to explore knowledge through his curiosity, the school’s job should be to stimulate this curiosity and create an environment where abilities and skills are allowed to develop not by obligation but by the pleasure of obtaining achievements.

The greatest problem with this Industrial Education that we are subject to is that so many people are extremely invested in this system, making it hard to convince them of the existence of a problem and the need for change. This can be easily observed in this debate. The first step to the amelioration of our education system is to recognize how weak it is regarding the stimulation of creativity and innovation, and this is a weakness that cannot be suppressed solely by implementing a bunch of leadership and creativity workshops and making them mandatory for graduation.

One argument raised by the opposition was that “our education system, far from destroying creativity, is its very prerequisite”, in this statement, a solid base of knowledge is taken as and equivalent to our education system. This is simply not the case, what defines our education system is the manner which this knowledge is delivered. In many other conceivable systems knowledge would be transferred to the youth, what changed is how it will be expanded upon. Thus, clearly, the system is not a prerequisite for creativity or any other byproduct of education. We are creating students who absorb information but can’t produce new things.

It is by being critical of the current model that we will be able to further the progress of human civilization. With the foundation of progress being creativity, it is extremely important to continue to stimulate it, and we believe that is not being done on our current system, which forbids students to think by themselves and thus be creative.

We urge you to vote for us and permit the conception of a more progressive system of education.

AM

Opposers’ closing speech
Ladies and gentlemen, the Proposition side has gone on and on about how our education system is killing or has killed our creativity. But the more they argued their case, the further they went to fetch their arguments, the deeper the contradiction in their position. Indeed, how can our respectable Proposers defend such an idea, when they are actually being creative because of an educational exercise?

Ladies and gentlemen, I do declare it: without this homework assignment, these students would never have gone home to think about such a subject, and how to argue in its favor. That is the whole point of education: challenging your mind and your imagination to set back your limits. Never is your imagination and creativity more stimulated than when you study. Without school, how would you have discovered literature, how would you have learned to write a poem for Mothers’ Day? Without music school, how would you have learned to play the piano or sing? Without a coach, how would you have learned to play tennis?

Creativity, like any quality, is but a seed sown inside you that has to be tended to and educated. That is the Parable of the Talent in the Bible. Picasso, to become the creating genius he became, had to study Art for long years. To “think out of the box”, you first have to know how to get out of the box, i.e. its limits. There is always a technical base to any creation, be it dance, painting, writing, singing, of scientific discovery. Isaac Newton famously acknowledged this necessary education before any creation: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The whole point of your education is to get you up there, no matter how painful the climb is.

The Proposition seems to have quite a naïve idea of creation. For them, it is linked to some inner self buried under the education-imposed inhibitions. We defend the opposite, along with Socrates and Plato. In the Banquet, Plato and his character Socrates explain “maieutics”, the art of delivering ideas just as you deliver a baby. For Plato, the role of the professor/philosopher is to get people to think for themselves by a carefully crafted art of dialogue. If you think back on it without bitterness, that was all your teachers tried to do in your school years. They tried to teach you to be an independent thinker. For that you needed to learn how to read, write and count, you needed to learn history, geography, and foreign languages. 

Far from destroying your creativity, dear Proposition, your education has given a myriad of ways for it to express itself. Education might sometimes kill spontaneity, because you have to set limits in order to live peacefully in a group, but it certainly does not kill creativity. 

The Proposition declares that one of the reasons why our education system allegedly kills creativity is that it teaches you that “mistakes are bad”. I completely agree with them, this is outrageous! Our schools should teach our students that mistakes are great, that if you are wrong in your calculation of the resistance of the bridge you are designing, that is no problem! The most important thing is that you learn from your mistakes. Never mind the thousands of people that die because of your mistake! 

They should tell that to the engineers, architects, doctors, drivers, and so on that have killed people because of one silly little mistake. If you are not taught rigor in school, you will have to learn it the hard way. Like the engineers of the Tacoma Bridge. Like the architects of the factories in Bangladesh that are collapsing. The “hard way” means thousands of deaths. Without rigor, creativity is not only pointless, it is deadly. One does not go without the other, in science as much as in the arts. Remember this image of French writer Gustave Flaubert spending hours locked up in his cottage in Normandy, yelling out his sentence until he found the right rhythm and wrote it down. It took him five years to write his masterpiece Madame Bovary.

The Proposition has mixed up creativity and spontaneity, rigor in thought and closed-mindedness. Our education system certainly does not kill creativity, as our team has tried to show you. Education fosters creativity on the contrary. I beg you to oppose this crazy motion.

HA