Is our education system producing creative thinkers?

In a recent conversation with a friend, the idea came up of how school curricula can either kill or nurture creativity. Creativity as we know, if harnessed effectively, is one of the drivers of economic development of a country.Inadvertently (or not), educational systems have the capacity to squash this important trait in students, and produce individuals whose critical thinking skills were never really nurtured. For the life of me, I still cannot see the purpose of having studied Venn diagrams during my first year of high school in Uganda. I have as much use for the diagrams today, as I do for a motorized ice-cream cone – none whatsoever.The manner in which we were traumatized with impossible piles upon piles of homework as ten year old kids in Kenya, meant that we woke up in semi-cold sweats at 4a.m to finish the mind-numbing and intense ten or so subjects that were part of Kenya’s 8-4-4 system.Thankfully, this system has since been revised to include more relevant subjects, and make them more engaging to students rather than have them cram and regurgitate content without genuinely learning anything.An educational system – to get to the point – should be one that produces creative thinkers, adopting from a young age, a solutions-based mindset. It should be able to tap into students’ talents, and generate young people who have a sense of their capacities and how they can exploit them from an early stage. For some reason, my high school teachers chose to overlook my proficiency in English and Literature, and instead focus on my dismal grades when it came to Mathematics. This was a perfect case of the saying that, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” It is said that in order to be good at something, to be truly brilliant at something, one has to have spent ten thousand hours mastering it. This is known as the Ten Thousand Hour Rule.If most education systems took into account the concept of nurturing various capacities of students, imagine the number of world class experts that would be churned out of schools having mastered something by their twenties. It may be easier said than done, but the first step is to review the relevance of subjects taught in a school’s curricula. The important question should be whether or not educators manage to sustain the creativity, curiosity and critical thinking of their students and in the long-run – enhance the quality of a country’s human resources.In Rwanda, my sincere hope is that this type of attitude can be incorporated into our national curricula. The imbalance between the humanities and sciences in our educational system is one we seem to have borrowed from the rest of the world. Why does it have to remain that way? A student aspiring to be an engineer shouldn’t be treated with more esteem than one who wants to become a playwright. It may seem radical and far-fetched, but then again, it is such thinking that usually ushers in change for the better.