Schools: Students worst nightmare

Schools:  Students worst nightmare

By Hanan Al Khanbashi

College of Arts and social sciences, Translation

It is believed that students should have their own voice in the education system. Don't you think that schools are killing students' creativity? Well, I am assured of that. It's just as simple as that, but it is painful to swallow and extremely hard to overcome.

Throughout the years, there have been attempts to develop education systems, not only in this part of the world but everywhere. Unfortunately, these attempts which are blindly implemented measures are no better than the previous ones. They are continuously ignoring the fact that education is an exchange between students and teachers.

It is true that I'm not an expert in education, but I was a student and so my voice counts. The tendency towards the students as being a recipient only, a yes-man, is still alive. Teaching pedagogies are killing creativity leaving students with no possible chance to 'Hows' and 'Whys.' I remember being a school kid. At that time, school was a kind of dictator looming over our heads. We had to pay orders, sleep at 8pm and wake up at 4am. I remember arriving school half asleep as school nightmares haunted me all night. This was also right for my friends back at school. We would sit there waiting for the ridiculously long morning assembly that would do nothing but cause us a headache. Nowadays, it is still valid. Students are given precise regulations to follow, including behaving and thinking guidelines. 

We have reached a point where education becomes as ideas that we are obliged to take but not novel ideas that we come up with. Students have lost their capacity of creation because they are imprisoned in a limited area of thinking. Consider a child sitting for a drawing test, and he\she colors a tree with yellow whereas it is supposed to be green. This is not going to be rated as a kind of creativity but rather as a big mistake indicating students' deficiency. What is wrong if the child look at the tree as yellow, he might be seeing something that we don't see.

Truth is to be told, students study, memorize and forget. Schools are spoon-feeding students preventing any possible kind of creativity. A teacher would be panic if he\she saw students coloring a triangle for instance outsides the lines. Why not to let your students explore the world around them; most importantly, let them speak their minds. Don't kill the child's curiosity by asking them to stop asking questions. It won't waste time from the mandatory syllabus. On the contrary, it might help adults to think critically about their questions too. The carrots and sticks ways should no longer be used. Don't teach them to think of the box but to think outside of the box.