U.S. Ed. lacks creativity

[maxx]

http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6314

No Child Left Behind, only rote learning, is destroying creativity.

[jams]

Pass those tests!

[Jimaz]

Interesting that all the guests seem introverted.

But that might be expected whenever we think about thinking.

[fryar]

No Child Left Behind, only rote learning, is destroying creativity.

Yes. Not sure that it's fair to blame it all on No Child Left Behind, though. And you might want to add critical thinking to creativity.

[Jimaz]

A curious emergence in corporatocracies is their intense effort to proceduralize creativity. Corporations benefit extremely from efficiency. No doubt there. Proceduralizing rote tasks is extremely efficient. No doubt there. But attempts to proceduralize creativity have failed -- witness the historical decline of artificial intelligence attempts.

If a task can be proceduralized, a machine can do it cheaper than a human being. But they can't proceduralize creativity because whichever human would have created the procedure would have first had to create the created in their mind. That's a necessary precondition.

That's why sites like YouTube have to rely on human users to rate their videos. Machines alone can't accurately predict what creative humans will enjoy -- what's unanticipatedly novel.

[mwilbert]

Humans can't accurately predict what humans will enjoy either. That's why there are flops.

Creativity is very important, and to the extent that a particular approach to education suppresses it, that is a bad thing. On the other hand, creativity without supporting skills and knowledge leaves you with the adult equivalent of craft projects by three-year-olds.

[gibran]

as an educator [[long ago) the NCLB is failing to teach students to love to learn or think critically...in fact a professor was brought to DC from a stats. department ib the south during the Bush years to data mine and prove it was helping...unfortunately he failed but we still kept the charade up... so much for really making a difference...NCLB was deemed a failure becuase the Gov didn't fund it appropriately [[imagine that)....but they were bound and determined to keep it going...

[maxx]

Evidently, NCLB didn't eliminate all creativity.

"...
The system of incentives and penalties sets up a strong motivation for schools, districts, and states to manipulate test results. For example, schools have been shown to employ 'creative reclassification' of drop-outs [[to reduce unfavorable statistics).[24]
Critics argue that these and other strategies create an inflated perception of NCLB's successes, particularly in states with high minority populations.[25].."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Chil....22_the_system

"...On two state tests [[New York State and Michigan) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress [[NAEP) almost two-thirds of eighth graders missed math word problems that required an application of the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the distance between two points.[30] Wiggins and McTighe blamed the low success rate on teachers who correctly anticipated the content of the tests, but incorrectly assumed each test would present rote knowledge/skill items rather than well-constructed, higher-order items. The practice of giving all students the same test, under the same conditions, has been accused of inherent cultural bias because different cultures may value different skills. It also may conflict with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [[IDEA), which states that schools must accommodate disabled students.[31] For example, it is normally acceptable for visually impaired students to be read test material aloud. However, on a NCLB-mandated test, a group of blind students had their scores invalidated [[reported as zeros) because the testing protocol did not specifically allow for test readers to speak.[32].."