ABOUT CREATIVITY

It’s said that Leonardo da Vinci was looking at a marble block so concentrated that somebody asked him what he was thinking of. Leonardo said that his next statue was already inside that block, so the only thing he had to do was removing the pieces of marble which were not necessary for the sculpture.

 

Creativity, like in Leonardo’s block is inside us, but most people are not able to discover their own capacities, so the school could be the best place to discover and develop them. However, from my point of view, what Ken Robinson explains is only possible in developed countries. In many Asian or African countries, where most of the people can neither read nor write, discovering creativity in the children could be, unfortunately, a secondary target.

 

Ojeda

THE WAVE (DIE WELLE)

It’s a pity that local theatres are not showing “Die Welle” anymore!
I wanted to watch it, just because it’s origin. As I study German, I thought it could be a good occasion to get in touch with Goethe’s language, although I knew the film would be dubbed into Spanish. If I just could pick up a few written words of German in a character’s T-Shirt or in any signposting, it would be great. I always thought learning a language was something I could do in a funny way by watching films.
So, there I went and I can assure you I didn’t throw money away with this movie. Money doesn’t grow on trees and I really get upset when I waste my money with a bad film. This one, though, is out of this world.
“Die Welle” means “The Wave” in German and the film is about a high school teacher who embarks on an educational experiment – here I am talking about experiments on education again… – to demonstrate what “autocracy” means. Aiming to show their pupils that a totalitarian regime could easily flare up again, even in a society which is sure to be “vaccinated” against it, he starts his own dictatorship in classroom.
Against all predictions, the kids get on well with the new order and submit to the superior power of the group, they call “Die Welle”, for which they design a logo and set up a web page, apart from choosing a uniform to wear on behalf of it.
No individual differences, no disagreement. Those who venture to dissent are excluded and ignored. Acts of violence begin to be well accepted, if they are committed in the name of their cause. They just obey fanatically the wave and, in some cases, can even give their lives for it.
The end is out of the blue. The experiment grows out of control and reaches its final in an unexpected and shocking way.
After watching the film I knew it was inspired by real events that took place at a high school in Palo Alto, California, in 1967.
There is a book about the film, by Todd Strasser, titled “The Wave: The classroom experiment that went too far” available on Amazon.com

Helga Maria Saboia Bezerra

On schools and creativity

I don’t think schools kill creativity, nor they can provide children with it. School’s mission is not to develop creativeness in children. Schools are both a source of information and an institution in which children are brought up on social values. Nowadays we see how computers and Internet can almost replace them in the first task, at least to self-taught people. Portuguese writer José Saramago couldn’t finish his studies because his parents, being very poor, couldn’t pay for it. Being an autodidact he read all the books of his neighbourhood public library and was able to show his creativeness in his marvellous work rewarded in 1998 with the Nobel Prize.
Since creativity is the faculty to produce or use original and unusual ideas, the capacity of creating something new, no institution, no school, is able to kill it or make it flourish. I think creativity depends much more on inner forces than on external ones and that it is an indomitable strength that no school can prune. A creative person will, sooner or later, show his or her creativeness. Sometimes his or her contemporary people aren’t able to value them. Van Gogh was recognized after death, like many artists.
There are schools and schools, and there are teachers and teachers as well. What I mean is that although a child can have the luck of having a teacher who can play an important role in his education, schools, in general, don’t have the power to prevent the creativity of a child neither to give him or her a creative personality.
By Helga Maria Saboia Bezerra

Passive Voice

We don’t usually like dealing with grammar in our leassons because we find it  boring and, even, a waste of time. However, it is important to have a good comand of grammatical structures when we want to talk and write in English and “sound” natural and fluent. You can have a look at the revision we did the other day on Passive Voice. Remember how useful this structure can be, but do not overuse it.

View this document on Scribd

Sir Ken Robinson: schools and creativity

Maria told me about it, and in fact it is worth having a look at it.

Hope you like it.

Education

If you couldn’t come to our lesson, or if you want to try again, click here and do the online version.

Carmen, as usual, thank you.

How patient your teacher is!

I am still waiting for your homework: an article both for our blog and the school magazine and your leaflet.

ON EDUCATION

ON EDUCATION

Cutting Edge Advanced’s fifth module – “Learning for Life” – is about education and makes us think of what life skills should we know at school.
Every time I am faced with this issue, I recall Bertrand Russell’s experiment on childhood education he described in his outstanding “Autobiography”.
The British philosopher, mathematician and pacifist, Literature Nobel Prize (1950), decided to found and run, with his wife Dora, in 1927, an experimental school.
They didn’t want their son and daughter to be forced to follow a traditional learning by rote in a strictly academic curriculum, but didn’t find any school which satisfied their educational principles. Thinking they could have their own way in their children’s education, and that the boy and the girl would need to have other children’s company, they decided to launch into that new school, which began its activities – based on self-government and learning-by-doing – in Beacon Hill, Sussex, England, with twelve pupils.
Russell’s reference to the school in his memories makes think that the experiment was not that success, due to many mistakes they both committed regarding to financial issues, the difficulty to find teachers who acted according to the principles of the school and the fact that many children enrolled were problematic.
The school was opened for sixteen years – it closed down in 1943 – although Bertrand Russell was only during the first five years associated to it. That experience gave him material to publish “On Education” (1926) and “Education and Social Order” (1932), in which he called for an education “liberated from unthinking obedience to parental and religious authority.”
Nowadays Beacon Hill School is considered to have been, together with Summerhill School, one of the most important pioneering schools in the field of Libertarian Education. Recently researches highlight the importance of it “as an educational and social experiment, situating its history in the context of the development of progressive education and of modernist ideas about marriage and childrearing in the first half of the twentieth century”, having being a success even during its last few years.
For those who have curiosity about this issue: I’ve found a riveting paper titled “Dora and Bertrand Russell and Beacon Hill School”, by Professor Deborah S. Gorham, from the Department of History, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, which is available in:
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109&context=russelljournal

Helga