Creativity and Curiosity: My Thoughts - Special Post #12A

Do schools inhibit the creativity and/or curiosity of students? It's a hard thing for me to answer without being on both sides. Schools are going to teach what they think are important to a student's future, maths, sciences, histories, and languages. We all know these are things essential for everyday life. A student will only find curiosity in something if they are interested in it. Luckily, growing up history always grabbed my attention and curiosity, but for many kids none of the basic subjects get their attention. For example, a student may find interest in baseball, something that gets my attention as well. Just yesterday, a perfect game was pitched and that got my curiosity of how many perfect games have been pitched in the history of baseball, also how many were pitched by the American League and how many by the National League. I began looking these things up and feeding my curiosity, but you do not see schools teaching a subject of baseball in their curriculum. You maybe wondering where I'm trying to go with all this, well I'll tell you. A student is only going to have curiosity in something they are interested in. So my answer to the question , do schools inhibit the creativity and/or curiosity of students?, is yes and no. There is nothing a school can do to it's curriculum to make a student be interested in it. It would be up to the student to have an interest in what is being taught. Teachers can only introduce subjects to students. They can try to make them as interesting as possible, but if a student just is not into the subject it will be hard to have curiosity in it. I'm not saying there is nothing a teacher can do, I am just saying you can not force curiosity and/or creativity from a student. You can encourage your students as much as possible to participate in their own digging and information finding, which they should want to do if they are truly interested and curious about a subject.