Important developmental challenges that come when actively engaging in creative social emotional learning are sorely missing in education today.
Challenge is a creative process demanding emotional and social engagement. When challenged we are pushed to know ourselves, what we think, feel and care about. We find passion and motivation. Without authentic social and emotional challenge, we become waders, watchers, sideline participants, never plunging into deeper waters.
Yesterday, a college graduate, age 22, said, “They asked me (at a job interview) what I liked to do in my spare time and I had no idea. I have no idea what I like to do. I’ve been doing homework all my life.”
Education has become dopily dependent on drill and skill left brain fact memorization/regurgitation that does little to socially and emotionally engage, inspire or challenge forming minds and identities – but does an excellent job taking up valuable, irreplaceable time. Students are led to believe they are doing something, going somewhere but when they get there – the high school diploma, the college diploma – they don’t know themselves or what they want.
It’s not just schools that are responsible for perpetuating this social and personal emptiness, it is experience itself, in and out of school, life is watered down.
Do we believe our children are suffering a crisis in creativity? Our children are not the problem. The dull state of children’s imaginations is the consequence of the dull state of education. School is linear, flat, packaged. Kids are bored and unchallenged. Their disconnection is telling us something is wrong. Creativity is banging at the door to be let in but we keep the door locked shut.
Maybe comfort is the problem. Maybe rote learning. Maybe our lives have become so standardized that true challenge, imaginative challenge, relational challenge, sweat and tears challenge is impossible to be had.
I think we hunger for real experiences, not just the larger than life depictions portrayed on film, TV and video games we are glued to. These can’t substitute for real life, but they do allow us to study and absorb challenge vicariously from a safe distance. Why was the TV show “LOST” such a phenomena? Was it because, from the safety of our private islands (homes), we transferred our hunger for real challenge onto characters lost on a fictionalized island?
Maybe this is why reality shows are popular. We are relegated to watching life rather than living life, timid from lack of practice and opportunity. We covet and yearn but in the end, don’t know how to truly engage. Life is not set up for real engagement. Escapism is addictive.
Boredom, disconnection, insecurity, generalized apathy and deep unsatisfied want challenge us but these are different kinds of challenges. These are not challenges that define or shape us in concrete ways. Instead they weigh us down by their burden of hollowness because we cannot concretize them into authentic action.
I care about all this because I have four children, three are out of high school now, one out of college. For 23 years I have thought a lot about issues of creativity and challenge, identity and freedom.
I didn’t want to send my children to school. I knew and remembered what it felt like to be closed in physically, emotionally and intellectually. And this was long before across-the-board standardized testing stole the soul out of education, when school was far more open and relational and less rigid and lonely – as it is today.
I kept my children home and homeschooled my oldest son through 5th grade. I don’t idealize this experience/experiment but on the whole it was a profound learning time. There was a liberating openness to the moment and a wonderful creative messiness in figuring it (learning) out. What I learned was children are insatiably creative and hungry to learn. They love being challenged.
I learned the more I tried to control and order their learning, the more resistance there was. They needed structure but too much control led to increased resistance, which meant a marked decrease in motivation. The more I relaxed and trusted their learning, the more energized and curious they became.
A woman working at the Apple Store said she loved her job because, she says, she is using her middle brain – the brain that uses equal parts of her right brain (creative, intuitive, problem solving) and her left brain (logical, linguistic, mathematical). She feels intuitively, creatively and intellectually challenged. As a result she is always curious – which defines the open, learning, creative mind.
Schools must challenge the middle brain.
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Social Emotional Living 