subject: Day Dreaming Is Not That Bad After All? [print this page] As kids we always had a few people around us telling what to do and what not to do. Still no one taught us how and what to think. Remember how we were free to imaginemade up those imaginary friends and spent all our time putting bits and pieces of toys together. But when we moved to school, things changed. We all had a teacher telling us to stop daydreamingstop imagining in class. Is something wrong in the way our education system works? Far from being allowed to think up multiple creative solutions, we were often told that there was only one right answer to a question, and if we reproduced it correctly on an exam paper, we would get an A.
Ironically, imagination, creativity, and innovation are increasingly prized in the workplace today, leaving a greater onus on our education system to put these three traits at the center of learning. Any teacher worth her salt can tell you that incorporating project-based learning in the classroom and letting kids collaboratively solve problems are key to fostering those traits. Today, academic institutions are under pressure to teach creativity and conceptual thinking to students to prepare them for the 21st-century workplace.
But experts feel that the tendency to treat creativity as something you can "add on" to the classroom wont prove to be effective. They are of the opinion that recommending a weekly creativity hour as a solution will not help the case at all. The need of the hour is a radical change in the education systemprovide a personalized educational experience by promoting a broad curriculum, one that gives students more opportunities to be successful.
Being creative is a way of doing a task more effectively through lateral thinking and innovative ideas; in total it demands that we go off the beaten track in search of solutions. Such thinking should be infused in every aspect of our educational system. Though examination is the key to test a students skills, the urge to acquire higher test scores forces children to simply memorize the textbooks and doesnt allow room for reasoning or fine-tuning ones creative skills. Fixing our examination system and changing what it is designed to test would go a long way toward bringing imagination back to classrooms.
If teachers understand the need of the hour and work from the ground up, they would no longer feel the need to tell students to stop daydreaming.
