Creation Vs. Consumption

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Education should ideally push students and educators beyond fear to experience the beauty and freedom of original creation. Creation means that students craft organic and uncensored responses to ideas. Creating means critiquing, re-working, and re-creating someone else's ideas into something entirely new, doing original research or putting theory into practice. Encouraging creation, of course, comes with built-in risks for both students and educators.

Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert sums up some of the primary risks for students:

“Let me list for you some of the many ways in which you might be afraid to live a more creative life: You’re afraid you have no talent. You’re afraid you’ll be rejected or criticized or ridiculed or misunderstood or—worst of all—ignored. You’re afraid there’s no market for your creativity, and therefore no point in pursuing it. You’re afraid somebody else already did it better. You’re afraid everybody else already did it better."

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear


In my experience, it's easy to pass fear of creativity on to students or to encourage their fear of creative failure either intentionally or unintentionally. Teachers can minimize the importance of creativity, demean student's God-given talents, criticize, ridicule or intentionally misunderstand creative work or even call creativity pointless. The easiest way to do this is by promoting the opposite of creativity: mindless, unquestioning consumption.

Elizabeth Gilbert does a great job listing some of the things that prevent creative expression in the classroom. Here are a few fears that educators may experience, preventing them from making their classrooms more creative and innovative:

• Fear of change 
• Fear of new ideas
• Fear of insubordination or disrespect 
• Fear of disagreement
• Fear of  unanswerable questions
• Fear of sacrilege or anti-Christian beliefs
• Fear of heresy

If we reduce education to passive consumption or regurgitation of information we fail our students, we fail as teachers and we'll ultimately fail to accomplish our ultimate goal: transformation. By passing curiosity and interesting questions on to our students, educators often produce students who delve deep into the unexplored realm of ideas, bringing up nuggets of pure gold. Don't allow fear to prevent the implementation of creativity in the classroom.