Creative Education Vs Traditional Education

SOMOL is a conceptual offshoot of ‘’Creative Education - DDV: SEE – Discover, Develop, Valorize Self-Employing Employers’’, published in 2018 by OutSkirts Press, US, by Dr. Ilongo Fritz Ngale. The book link is www.outskirtspress.com/CreativeEducationDDV.

Creative Education is an original educational model, paradigm, and theory which seeks to address the education and employment crises in the world in general and in Africa in particular. These crises are characterized dropout rates of learners, by astronomical spiraling unemployment, traditional underemployment and the new phenomenon of unemployability.

For Creative Education, the aforementioned issues are warning signals that there is an imperative need to rethink education by reconsidering its deontological purpose, function, principles, goals and methods.

‘Creative Education - DDV: SEE - Discover, Develop, Valorize Self-Employing Employers’, is thus a comprehensive, unique, revolutionary, and practical paradigm which aims to transform each person’s ontogenetic potentials to their highest levels, for individual and collective empowerment.

Creative Education is the movement from traditional ‘superficial fixing of issues of failure, dropout, unemployment, underemployment and unemployability of learners’, to discovering, developing and valorizing learners’ potentials so that the latter can be self-employed employers.

General Aims and Objectives of Creative Education

The general aims and objectives of Creative Education – DDV: SEE – Discover, Develop, Valorize Self-Employing Employers are to answer the following two questions:

a. Why are youths experiencing astronomical dropout rates, colossal unemployment,  persistent underemployment and rising unemployability?

b. How could governments implement Creative Education and thereby substantially transform educational systems?

A) ANSWERING THE ‘WHY’ QUESTION

FAILURES OF TRADITIONAL EDUCATION

 

According to Craft (1984), there are two different Latin roots of the English word ‘education.’ They are respectively ‘educere’ that has the connotation of ‘leading out’, and ‘educare’, which means to ‘train or to mold’. Most educational systems focus on the latter and ignore the former. The consequences are setting the mind in motion without any authentic inputs from learners’, thereby leading to GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).

Education as ‘Educere’ – Getting out the Substance

  • For Socrates, ‘Education means bringing out of the ideas of universal validity which are latent in the mind of everyman.’
  • According to Forebel, ‘Education is a process through which the child makes its internal external.’
  • According to Edison, “When education works on the noble mind it draws out to view every latent virtue and perfection”.
  • According to M. K. Gandhi, “I mean an all-around drawing out of the best in child and man, from body, mind and spirit”.

Education as ‘Educare’ – Developing the Instrument or Mind/Intellect

  1. For Socrates, ‘Education means bringing out of the ideas of universal validity which are latent in the mind of everyman.’
  2. According to Forebel, ‘Education is a process through which the child makes its internal external.’
  3. According to Edison, “When education works on the noble mind it draws out to view every latent virtue and perfection”.

For Callaway (1979), there is a distinction between the ‘purpose of education’ and the ‘functions of education’, that is, ‘purpose of education’ is its fundamental goal (educere), whereas the ‘function of education’ includes ‘the mediating instruments and secondary outcomes of the educational process’ (educare). Functions of education are therefore byproducts or consequences of schooling. The following are some of the ‘functions’ which have become ‘goals’ for educational systems:

  1. Capacity/ability to evaluate information and to predict future outcomes (decision-making)
  2. Capacity/ability to seek out alternative solutions and evaluate them (problem solving and critical thinking)
  3. Development of mental and physical skills: motor, thinking, communication, social, and aesthetic.
  4. Knowledge of moral practices and ethical standards acceptable by society/culture.
  5. Capacity/ability to earn a living: career education.
  6. Sense of well-being: mental and physical health.
  7. Self-esteem, self-image, self-concept, self-efficacy.

In other words, the aforementioned ‘functions’ are not educational goals, if the definition of education has an educing connotation as found in ‘educere’, as much as they are ‘tools’ which are supposed to facilitate the development of educed potentials of an individual. Thus, when ‘functions’ become ‘goals’ in educational systems, there is bound to be misplaced priorities, inverted mission and vision, and misallocation of resources, for negative outcomes.

Traditional educational systems, that is, all those preceding Creative Education, for example, essentialism, perennialism, progressivism, reconstructionism, experimentalism, existentialism, and pedagogy, focus heavily on WHAT and HOW we should teach the curriculum aspect in education, not WHO is to be taught and HOW, which is the essence of Creative Education.

The aforementioned educational philosophies concentrate on ‘functions’ or derivatives of the educational process, making the latter ‘core purposes’. In other words, traditional philosophies of education generally transform ‘function’ into ‘purpose’ or make the ‘tools’ to become the ‘essence’.

Creative Education vs. Pedagogy

Creative Education Pedagogy
The need to know
  1. Creators are fully aware of their discovered ontogenetic potentials, and that they need to be developed and valorized.
  2. The first task of the guidance counselor and psychologist is to ensure that each Creator first discovers their ontogenetic potentials, and along which area(s) development will take place
  1. The learners do not need to know the utility and value of the material that they are learning before embarking on learning.
  2. The first task of the teacher is to ensure that learners are taught what has been prescribed for them to know.
The learner’s self-concept
  1. The Guide depends on the discovered talents of the Creator to structure talent development activities.
  2. The Guide and the Creator jointly collaborate in structuring the talent development curriculum.
  3. The Guide and the Creator jointly evaluate progress in talent development.
  1. The learner is dependent upon the instructor for all learning.
  2. The teacher/instructor assumes full responsibility for what is taught and how it is learned.
  3. The teacher/instructor evaluates learning.
Role of learner’s experience
  1. The Creator’s discovered ontogenetic potentials is the substantive source of the talent development process.
  2. The discovered potentials of the Creator are most influential.
  1. Learner comes to the activity with little experience that could be tapped as a resource for learning.
  2. The experience of the instructor is most influential.
Readiness to learn
  1. Creators know their discovered talents and they know the progressive phases in the development and valorization of the latter.
  1. Students are told what they have to learn in order to advance to the next level of mastery.
Orientation to learn
  1. Knowing, being and doing are respectively the discovery, development and valorization of each Creator’s ontogenetic potentials.
  2. The content units of development and valorization of a Creator’s potentials are sequenced according to the quality and logic of his/her discovered talents
  1. Learning is a process of acquiring prescribed subject matter.
  2. Content units are sequenced according to the logic of the subject matter
Motivation for learning
  1. Primarily motivated by internal pressures to operate according to the Creator’s personal ontogenetic potentials, striving to operate at highest levels of excellence, with the ideal that there is no room for failure, but possibilities for infinite self-expression
  1. Primarily motivated by external pressures, competition for grades, and the consequences of failure

The availability of counsellors and psychologists, their allocation to carry out their traditional responsibilities, and time allocated for the latter are generally deficient in most African educational institutions

Education of the past leads to the following ontological and psychosocial outcomes: mindlessness, thoughtlessness, astronomical dropout rates, high unemployment, underemployment and unemployability levels, disconnection of learners from the challenges of the New World of Work.

Mindlessness

The educational setting that creates and sustains learner mindlessness can be described as follows:

  1. A time-based, teacher-centered approach, in which the teacher is the center of attention and provider of information.
  2. The teacher is sole judge and students have little or no freedom of initiative.
  3. 3. The curriculum is usually fragmented and meaningless to the learners.
  4. Print through textbooks is the primary vehicle of learning and assessment.
  5. Learning is passive, solitary, and limited to formal settings.
  6. Learning focuses on memorization of discrete facts, and is limited to the lower order thinking of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Remembering, Understanding and rarely Applying).
  7. Since expectations are low, grades are simply averaged.
  8. Hazy idea of goals.
  9. Learners’ sense of being “a cog in a wheel” and not an authentic, autonomous self-willing subject.

Thoughtlessness

Thoughtlessness implies for Creative Education, the development of mechanical, lower level thought, imagination and consciousness, characterized by maintenance rehearsal, passivity, and ‘mindless repetition’ of disjointed facts which are unrelated to personal needs and potentials. Thoughtlessness in ‘education of the past’ is also characterized by ‘unschooling’, ‘unteaching’, ‘unlearning’, and ‘meaninglessness’ of the educational process.

Un-schooling

Where, when, how, and by whom a person is consciously or unconsciously misguided to forget who he/she is, and never to do what he/she should do on the bases of their authentic potentials.

Un-teaching

Consciously/unconsciously misguiding a person not to know who he/she is, never to become-be and act on the basis of one’s primordial and essential talents.

Un-learning

Consciously or unconsciously forgetting WHO one is, never being-becoming that one, and never Acting as that one.

Meaninglessness

Memorization of meaningless fragments of ‘mis-information’, that is, concepts which are unrelated to, and instead lead to the forgetting of a learner’s unique ontogenetic potentials. In other words, meaninglessness is forgetfulness of one’s natural potentials through accumulation of ‘mis-information’, that is, facts which are irrelevant to the discovery, development, and valorization of a person’s essential potentials.

Finally, ‘education of the past’ is accompanied by the following phenomena: astronomical dropout rates; high unemployment, underemployment and unemployability levels; and disconnectedness of learners from the challenges of the New World of Work.

Astronomical dropout rates

According to the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa Policy Brief of March 2008, the Department of Education reported that of the 120 000 students who enrolled in higher education in 2000, 36 000 (30%) dropped out in their first year of study. A further 24 000 (20%) dropped out during their second and third years. Of the remaining 60 000, 22% graduated within the specified three years duration for a generic Bachelor’s degree .

High unemployment, underemployment, and unemployability levels

An excerpt from the inaugural address by Professor Nqosa Leuta Mahao, ninth Vice Chancellor of the National University of Lesotho, delivered on the 21st of March 2015: ‘…And yet jobless economies characterize the present day world we live in and constitute a reality universities cannot run away from. As frontiers of knowledge creation and innovation universities have to confront through their curriculum the reality of the three challenges of our times: Unemployment, Underemployment and Unemployability’.

Disconnectedness of learners from the challenges of the New World of Work

Mismatch in labour market demand and supply

Most employers perceive graduates to have mostly theoretical knowledge without the necessary hands-on practical aspects which are even more vital and critical. Another challenge is that most graduates are trained using obsolete and imported theories which are inapplicable in the local workplace.

Inadequate labour market information

One reason for the mismatch between demand and supply lies in the lack of appropriate and updated labour market information, which leads to a discrepancy between labour market demand and supply.

Discrepancies between graduate expectations versus market reality

A major element which impacts on the unemployability of youth and graduates is the unrealistic expectations and demands of young employees, especially given their lack of experience and skills. In addition, most youth and graduates are unaware of the exigencies of the New World of Work and the New Psychological Contract.

Lack of work experience

In general, the divide between school and the world of work is imposed upon students by the educational systems, in conformity to policies and pedagogical approaches in each country. Similarly, social and cultural norms play a role in how and whether young people are exposed to work environments.

Lack of critical life skills training

Another common complaint about graduates that make them not appealing to the employers is that of their lack of skills and experiences. Curricular contents in educational institutions stress core competencies in reading, writing and arithmetic – and core subjects. Life skills such as social skills, interpersonal relationships, motivation, critical thinking, communication, creativity, language skills and so on are usually not taught within the formal setting of the school system, yet these are really valued during interviews and in workplace dynamics.

Lack of Entrepreneurship foundations in the educational system

It is very likely that most African educational systems perpetuate job seekers rather than job creators, that is, there is minimal encouragement of entrepreneurial development among youth and graduates.