I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what education might become and what schools are for. — Elliot Eisner, What Can Education Learn from the Arts about the Practice of Education?
It's been really exciting and refreshing to have some daddies come up and do the parent shift. I'm grateful that we have the community we do. A friend of mine shared this article with me and it really does ring true. There is a wonderful energy that men bring when working with children.
Many will argue about semantics and definitions. I will not enter that fray. Whatever it is, creativity revolves around unique, independent, and original thinking. It sometimes leads to an activity, such as playing the violin or implementing a new program to end homelessness. But without creative thought, the activity simply cannot be creative. In the end, only you can say whether you have been creative — only you can know whether your thoughts are unique, independent, original. So when was the last time you were creative? The answer for many Americans’ children is “never.” — Michael Bitz, Creativity in Crisis: The “Brain Drain” in American Schools
