Often, while I teach the children sewing or knitting, I notice how afraid some of them are to try something they haven’t done before, and how they keep saying that they can’t do this or that. Usually my answer: “Of course you can’t knit, you haven’t learnt it yet, that’s why I’m teaching you,” is enough to calm the nerves, and a little later, they are beaming with pride because now they can!
As a crafts teacher I believe that the confidence, and problem-solving skills gained by learning to create something beautiful, is essential for healthy development. I recently watched a brilliant TED* talk by Sir Ken Robinson which linked with that thought. He spoke about how schools are killing creativity, not only by putting the arts, especially movement and dance, at the absolute bottom of priorities, but also by focusing on mistakes and by making being wrong the worst thing imaginable.
Children are naturally creative and not scared to try something new, but are ‘educated out of it.’ Sir Ken Robinson said: “Being wrong is not necessarily the same as being creative, but if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” Naturally, nobody can predict what the world will look like in 5 years’ time, but it is already known that in 30 years more people will probably have a degree than ever before in the history of humankind…this is causing an academic inflation where degrees are worth increasingly less...and still creativity, arts, and crafts are being undervalued…
Gillian’s mother took her daughter to a dance school, where a world opened up for her, because she wasn’t the only one anymore who had to move to think…. Gillian had a brilliant dance career, and choreographed the Broadway hit musicals ‘Cats’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’. Sir Ken Robinson concluded: “Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.”
*Technology, Entertainment and Design — ideas worth sharing — you can download them from the internet.
