Looper's Delight Archive Top (Search)
Date Index
Thread Index
Author Index
Looper's Delight Home
Mailing List Info

[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index]

Re: OT Creativity and Education: a thought provoking talk by Sir Ken Robinson at the TED CONFERENCE



i will have to watch that tonight when i'm home.

here's a story about creativity we talked about in grad school, when i was getting my MFA in painting:

our chairperson (who wasn't well liked by most) said that when you are in kindergarten, you're encouraged to go whacky w/ the finger paints, etc (which i always hated)...but somewhere down the line in elementary school he said that if a kid painted a picture and the sky was red, someone would probably say that is wrong, b/c the sky is not red, it is blue.
and how that would affect the kid for the future.
at some point, someone will throw in conventions that can stifle the individual.
the real question we debated much is: how much freedom (in the arts) do you really have?

it's also sort of like explaining picasso's mature work to the layman. if you showed picasso's academic paintings to most, they look quite naturalistic (and he was an amazing painter at the age of 13), but then when you look at his exploration of abstraction that consumed the last 70 some years of his life, most will say: i don't get it or it's ugly or i can do that, etc. i usually explained that for someone like him, he could do naturalistic stuff so early & he was good, but he then explored the possibility of unknowns and creativity for the rest of his life (essentially he was experimenting w/ form).

as for music, i'm not as informed, but my only response is the countless interviews i've read about musicians doing some technique or using some gear in a strange way, and someone tells them that is wrong or improper. but they do it anyway, or the cliche, they break the rules....
in my experience from teaching the visual arts: teaching creativity is hard. generally you have to teach some foundation, that provides the basis for exploring (in the future for students hopefully). generally young learners can't explore too much if they aren't grounded in some sense of the history of what they are exploring...
my feeble 2 cents...
s---
www.myspace.com/scotthansen
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=235503632389016121
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5791548553161416906&hl=en