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The education secretary ’s new national curriculum is a dead hand on the creative pulse of teachers and students alike .
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“ An essential first step in being creative is to question your own way of looking at things … perhaps Gove could start there . ”
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During a recent appearance on BBC ’s Question Time , Michael Gove , the Secretary of State for Education , extolled the importance of encouraging creativity in schools .
He ’s right .
Creativity is essential to the success and fulfilment of young people , to the vitality of our communities and to the long - term health of the economy .
The trouble is that his current plans for the national curriculum seem likely to stifle the creativity of students and teachers alike .
So what is creativity , and how does it work ?
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I define creativity as the process of having ideas that have value .
Creative work in any field often passes through typical phases .
Sometimes what you end up with is not what you had in mind when you started .
It ’s a dynamic process that often involves making new connections , crossing disciplines and using metaphors and analogies .
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Creativity is about fresh thinking .
It also involves making critical judgments about whether what you ’re working on is any good , whether it ’s a theorem , a design or a poem .
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There are various myths about creativity .
One is that only special people are creative ; another is that creativity is just about the arts ; a third is that it ’s all to do with uninhibited “ self - expression ” .
None of these is true .
On the contrary , everyone has creative capacities .
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I imagine Gove would agree with all of this .
But his conclusions about how to promote creativity are very wide of the mark .
On Question Time he had a lot to say about what ’s involved in being creative .
He insists , for instance , that children have to learn the necessary skills before they can start to be creative .
In English , he says , “ creativity depends on mastering certain skills and acquiring a body of knowledge before being able to give expression to what ’s in you … You can not be creative unless you understand how sentences are constructed , what words mean and how to use grammar . ”
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Even if you ’re musically gifted , he says , “ you need first of all to learn your scales .
You need to secure a foundation on which your creativity can flourish . ”
This all sounds like common sense .
But like a lot of common sense it ’s wrong or , at best , a half - truth .
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Over the past four years , I ’ve spoken with many people about their particular talents and passions and how they discovered them .
In my new book , Finding Your Element , I draw together some of the lessons they can teach us .
Hans Zimmer is an Oscar - winning composer , who has created the scores for some of Hollywood ’s most successful films .
As a child he loved to play the piano but had no patience for scales and rote learning .
Whenever he tried to play or compose , his teacher would stop him and say : “ Go and practice your scales ! ”
He admits to being disruptive at school and was actually thrown out of eight of them .
Finally , he arrived at number nine .
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The headmaster took him to one side on the first day and said : “ Look , I ’ve read all these reports .
How are we going to avoid this sort of trouble here ?
What is it you really want to do ? ”
Hans said that all he really wanted to do was play music .
With the head ’s support , he spent most of the time doing exactly that .
Slowly he became engaged in other work too .
He remembers a particularly brilliant teacher who took the class for German studies .
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“ He ’d be sitting on his piano stool and he ’d be talking about something and then he ’d whip around and play the music of its period .
Suddenly all this stuff started to come alive .
Learning was n’t about learning things by heart and then regurgitating them like a bad cheese sandwich .
He was fantastic . ”
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It was the flexibility of that school and the inspiration of a few teachers that helped set Hans on the way to his extraordinary career .
You might object that Hans is an exceptional case , but in several ways he is not .
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First , creativity , like learning in general , is a highly personal process .
We all have different talents and aptitudes and different ways of getting to understand things .
Raising achievement in schools means leaving room for these differences and not prescribing a standard steeplechase for everyone to complete at the same time and in the same way .
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Second , creativity is not a linear process , in which you have to learn all the necessary skills before you get started .
It is true that creative work in any field involves a growing mastery of skills and concepts .
It is not true that they have to be mastered before the creative work can begin .
Focusing on skills in isolation can kill interest in any discipline .
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The real driver of creativity is an appetite for discovery and a passion for the work itself .
When students are motivated to learn , they naturally acquire the skills they need to get the work done .
Their mastery of them grows as their creative ambitions expand .
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Third , facilitating this process takes connoisseurship , judgment — and , yes , creativity , on the part of teachers .
One concern about the revised national curriculum is that it will be too linear and prescriptive .
For creativity to flourish , schools have to feel free to innovate without the constant fear of being penalised for not keeping with the programme .
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Oddly , Gove seems to think he can improve schools by demeaning teachers .
He ca n’t .
The evidence of high - performing systems around the world is that genuine school improvement depends on positive engagement with the profession .
When for the first time in their history two major teaching unions pass votes of no confidence in the Secretary of State , he might pause a moment .