freelance paradigm

In the time of economical crisis we often hear different opinions on how to save stock market, what should be the price of oil, inflation this, deflation that, imports, exports, jobs, etc. A lot of economical mumbo jumbo which is there to cover the fact that we simply don't get it and that the world is far too complex for us to grasp (read Nassim Nicholas Taleb on that subject). But I believe some people are putting their honest hard work into solving this problem and in doing so i really miss discussion on one thing: Art! Not just that, budgets for fine arts and cultural activity are dramatically reduced trough out the world. I came to believe that is a critical mistake that will prolong this crisis for much longer than necessary.

Even more so: I would like to make an argument, that in order to solve the problem, we must invest in Arts like never before!

The problem is symptomatic on so many levels. A month ago Maribor held an opening ceremony as the cultural capital of Europe for 2012. It was extremely disappointing to me (although not surprising) that none of the speakers, not even the president of the state, recognized culture (which is to say fine arts, theater, dance, music, literature... in short, Art) as nothing more that mere entertainment which is to be visited/watched/listened after a hard days work.

How foolish and underestimating! Arts have never been just plain entertainment, at least not for those who devote their whole lives to it. Arts are an endless exploration of our inner worlds and capacities. It is a research in which we are trying to discover who we really are on a completely emotional and spiritual level. The more reason-based quest is left to science, but when done right, these two domains are really not so different at all. They are rather complimentary and mutually supportive. Trough Arts might be the only means of communication trough which we can really connect and reach each other the way rational conversation just can't do. It seems almost paradoxical that arts let us develop the highest possible form of individuality, and yet trough arts we most effective dissolve our differences. People of different ages, races and beliefs come together under the stage of a musician or they all gather in awe in front of the painting or a movie and share an experience that is unique.

The very fact that Arts are dealing with emotional stuff makes them so much harder. Art is just a simple craft if it doesn't deal with strong emotions. And strong emotions are a risky business which can be only coped by the strongest of us. It is no surprise then that artists are on the forefront of almost every social, cultural and even political change. It was always the artists who lead others into the dark and unexplored territory with a bright torch of fresh knowledge.

Secondly, Arts nurture a way of thinking that implements and cherish innovation. At the core of every artistic pursuit is defining or redefining new frontiers and seeing the existing things in new light. Arts have a lot to offer in a way of thinking. If we want to save economy, we need new ways of thinking, and even on a very pragmatic level, we need new inventions, new solutions...

Thirdly, Arts are a spinal cord of our very culture and I dare to say, our very existence. Think about it; at times of great wars, migrations or other highly agitated political actions, no art was produced. Nothing remained. It is almost as those times didn't exist. Politics comes and goes, at best it only serves the needs of today, technology evolves, but Art is what remains and what forms the heritage of our species. A good painting is just as good a good a painting now as it was at the time of creation. Even the most introvert and intimate Shakespeare's poetry is still a vivid document of the times he lived in. Arts offer us communication and connection trough generations and centuries. I can feel Michelangelo or Rachmaninoff as if he was speaking to me personally. If we cut Arts now, what will remain of us in 100, 200, 1000 or more years? What will they think of us? How will they understand our struggle?

It is of the outmost importance that we support research in Arts and Sciences. People who do it don't require much; just to cover for the basic needs of their work. Think about it; how much could have Tesla given us, if his work was properly founded. Or Van Gogh! Or Beethoven! (even from economical stand point, their heritage is worth billions of euros in tickets, cds, books... the price of a grant that they would require at the time of their lives is insignificant in comparison to what they produced) But instead we are being completely hypocritical by spending millions and millions of euros on van Gogh, who is already dead and has no benefit from all this... So why not rather give that money to a young artists who might turn it into majestic work of Art which will inspire people. At the end I think that it is just all about arrogance which stems from our denial of death. And that is at the core of the whole problem. Those who are aware of their own mortality and brief temporality need no explanation on what really matters.

It was only recently that I begun to research what I somehow knew since childhood; there are two kinds of creativity: individualistic and vernacular.

Individualistic would be what we normally celebrate in architecture, music, films, photography, art, etc. It is what we reward the most; financially and trough other social mechanisms. It developed during classical antiquity in ancient Greece and got an other big push (which lasts until our very time) in Renaissance. It is the creativity of a single author or a group of people, but in any case we know who they are and we give them credit for whatever they had done. That is to say, we know them by name. We celebrate and sometimes even worship them. We recognize them as authors of their work. Works by the most celebrated authors tend to have very individualistic approach that separates them from all the others.

The vernacular creativity is different in that respect; usually we don’t have any idea about the author, but even if we do, his or hers work is not much different from all the others. There might be slight variations in style or execution, but not much really. What is more important; wether they are educated or not they don’t consider them selves as authors but in best case as craftsmen. Most often they consider them selves as carriers of tradition. All the folk singing, dancing, storytelling, housing, manual crafts, and a lot of folk art fits into this category. These are forms of art that often serve folk rituals and are passed on from generation to generation. Together they form a special kind of memetics (genetics of ideas) that make a nations mental DNA. I think that is all that there is to nationality anyways and it is the only real thing you can be patriotic about (being part of that process and heritage). Everything else that is about nationality is completely arbitrary and it is usually just a product of government’s propaganda.

And here is a striking idea; vernacular art is most often underestimated. “Real” artists look down upon it and don’t bother much studying it. Of course, many will say it is “interesting”, but only in a way the child’s drawing can be interesting to them too. They will not study vernacular paining the same way they would study Michelangelo’s or Rembrandt’s. In most cases, they wouldn’t study it at all.

Which is quite a pity, isn’t it? There is a lot of wisdom in vernacular arts and crafts. They didn’t just pop up, like most individualistic art. Vernacular art is a product of a long process of trial and error, very much like evolution is. Whatever remained trough the decades, centuries and generations, stayed there for a reason. There is not much bullshit about it. I was very lucky to be a satellite member of a team of students at Faculty of architecture in Ljubljana, which studied vernacular architecture from all over the world and you wouldn’t believe all the amazing things this research brought about.

So I decided to pay more attention to this second world of creativity and learn from it. If you think about it, the best artists always extracted great wisdom from vernacular vocabulary. Dvořák might be just one example. Plečnik, in architecture is an other. His approach to buildings is surely very individualistic and innovative, but at the same time he drinks from the centuries old fountain of Slovenian vernacular building and wood craft, which ties him to this geographic and national territory. His memes were passed on to his students, and their students and so on... Hopefully something remains. In a similar way Vlado Kreslin (a folk-rock musician) includes memetic DNA of folk music into his own original creations. His music influenced Siddharta and many other bands who build on his legacy. You could say that Siddharta’s music is very much Slovenian and Slovenian only (the quality might be absolute and international, but the style is not). It could not have been done in Germany or Venezuela exactly for the reasons I describe above. When Siddharta inspires new younger bands, this process will hopefully continue as long as we return to the roots every now and then.

I also believe this genetic process of passing on ideas (or sometimes mixing them), is very important even within the rigid system of individualistic creativity. The reason why Italy might be such a leading force in fashion and design is that they have an unbroken chain of designers who were students of a teacher, who was a student of a (repeat this 20 times or so) student of Michelangelo or Leonardo... In countries where these chains were broken, most often by political revolutions, nations suffer not just from identity crisis, but from lack of productivity. It is just too damn hard to start anew every couple of generations. A lot of time, energy, money and resources are lost on beginners mistakes.

That is how I came to believe that traditions and vernacular arts are extremely important and one should study and learn from it. It is not so much that people intuitively know what is right (that can be achieved by more rational methods), but trough the time some things just work better than the others. When these qualities collectively build on top of eachother trough the decades we might end up with quite refined results (much like with genetic algorhythms in math). So this is what I am after - that accumulation of the unschooled and primitive impulse. It is ignored for too many times.

3 sezony v pekle - Another La Bohemme, this time in Czech version of informbiro times. Not badly filmed at all... some really nice shots.
Food, Inc. - Only one thing missing; a chemical analysis of food samples and its nutrition values. That would be the definitive proof.
X-Men: First Class - Entertaining.
Paul Is it just me or is this about Roger (from American Dad) with a little less attitude? But the movie is really fun and relaxing though.
Mars Needs Moms - Kinda cute
Tangled - Lovely A classic Disney.
The Thirteenth Floor - kind of...
Barry Lyndon - Masterpiece.
Kari-gurashi no Arietti - One of the best from Studio Ghibili so far. My expectations were a bit different from the trailer, but that doesn't matter. It is a beautiful film.
Gedo senki - Beautiful.
Mimi wo sumaseba - Actually quite nice, but the opening part is way too long in my view.
Neko no ongaeshi - I would expect a little more sophistication and mystique from Ghibli.
Rango - Extremely well crafted fun.
Hotaru no haka - in tears...
Code 46 - Boring
Super 8 - How about some lens flares, J.J. Abrams, right? ... and cliches...
Les triplettes de Belleville - Weird, stylish and incredibly animated.
Umi ga kikoeru - Not the best of Ghibli, but still nice.
Another Earth - I waited a long time for this and it was totally worth it. The girl did some amazing acting, too bad the main male actor wasn't at her level of performance (which is the only notable flaw of this movie).
The skin I live in- Sick, but in a brilliant sort of way.
Nunta muta - Interesting story... and nice European cinematography.
Melancholia - This is so amazing
Le scaphandre et le papillon - The story is inspirational, the acting is great... but you know what I find the most amazing? Camera work, light, optics, postproduction... there are some really incredible shots here, and the most incredible part is how they contribute to the story.
The Tree of Life - Perfect. Almost a spiritual experience.

There are many reasons. Many of them are covered in a 4 part series on the General Lack of Creativity. But let's get nasty today and blame someone else: like school and institutions alike. (by the term "school" I mean primary and secondary school, that is to say everything that is more or less compulsory and comes before University, which is another matter indeed)
I know, I know... I'm spreading negativity instead of love... It is not positive or constructive to throw blame around, but some things need to be said!

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

School is first and foremost an institution. It should not be confused with education. For education has been around since the beginning of times while schools are in place only since a short while - more exactly: since the industrial revolution. And they haven't change much since. We'll see that shortly. It is precisely its nature of institution that generates many of its flaws. Every institution has a goal of doing something; the goal of a hospital is healing people, the goal of police is secure safety of the citizens, the goal of schools is supposed to be educating children. But every institution, even the local brass band, has a goal that comes before anything else and that is its own perpetuation and longevity. It is an unwritten rule of every institution to stay active and prosper. That it is why it is not in the interest of the police to eliminate crime and it is not in the interest of school to find a good model of education. Many jobs rely on things being wrong. It would be really stupid of any "scientist" to publish conclusive results on the age of the famous Shroud of Turin. Not as long as the cash for "research" keeps flowing.

So, around the times of industrial revolution some factory owners realized that the production of goods could be far more efficient if their workers knew how to read and do some basic calculus. Their practical view was supported by the views of classical antiquity (especially ancient Greek), which values logical deduction and rhetoric abilities above anything else. Studying Greek art, sciences and philosophies was very fashionable at that time. Before long a curriculum was established and schools were made compulsory to satisfy the needs of so many factories.

Don't get me wrong, not everything is bad. Enlightenment brought about many fantastic things; development of true science being only one of them. We would not have medical science, hospitals, pharmacy, physics, chemistry or anything like that without the mental breakthroughs of the enlightenment. The idea of compulsory schooling expanded the pool of talents. There would be no Tesla, Edison, Einstein or Fleming if the poor children wouldn't be obliged to go to school. The problem is, that we still stick to the same concepts that were established at the time when schooling was conceived. The world has moved on since then. So should education.

The idea of academic abilities is only one of them. It simply states that math, language and some encyclopedic knowledge are worth more than all other pursuits of the mind. What about arts? Dances? Music? Could you look Beethoven in the eyes and explain him that his creativity is worth less simply because is in the field of music and not philosophy?

That is de jure, de facto is far worse.

Recent neurological research proves what has been intuitively known for ages; your brain and your body will develop to meet the needs and challenges of (early) childhood. There are many well documented cases, when a child has become blind on one or both eyes, simply because it's eyes were closed or covered during the critical period within which the neurons ("sensors") in the eyes were supposed to develop. Child's developing body assumed those neurons will not be needed so the child remained blind for the rest of its life, despite having otherwise perfectly normal visual apparatus.

On the other hand we can look at the early life of Usain Bolt. I have heard anecdotes which are yet to be confirmed (if you could find me good sources of either confirmation or denial, please send me links or emails), BUT they are illustrative enough even if they are not exactly true. So, I have heard at one neurological lecture, that Usain has been playing football (soccer, for US readers) on a meadow field close to his house and that meadow has been located on the top of a cliff. Underneath the cliff there was sea. The meadow had been leaning towards the edge of the cliff at a smaller angle which caused Usain's ball to run away quite frequently... If the ball reached the edge of the cliff before Usain, it was lost in the ocean. So young Usain had to develop some good sprinting abilities at a very young age. His developing body assumed this will be its task of survival so every muscle developed in a way to favor fast sprinting runs. That is obvious, you might say. What is usually forgotten is that also his brain, which actually controls those fabulous muscles and bones also had to develop specialized ways to do the job. Not only his muscles, his brain is made for 100m running just as well!

Whatever is trained and repeated in early childhood will stay there for ever. Every political system that used early childhood indoctrination knew that. It is absolutely necessary to start at early age to become a master at almost anything you can name; ballet, chess, math or music are just the most famous examples. The complexity of those activities can be mastered only if it is approached by a young and highly plastic brain. After the age of 7 most of the important brain connections are already fixed... Much can still be done, but surely it is not the same is if it were started a few years earlier. It is of an utmost importance to give child's brain as much practice as it can handle. If that child also shows emotional affection (passion) for that activity, that alone can lead to a magnificent career. The bottom line is that brain needs to practice that activity trough all of the critical periods; early childhood (3-7), young childhood (7-12) and teen age (12-18). After that it is more or less time to harvest the results of hard work. Learning gets harder and harder with each passing year. This is the hard reality as told by contemporary neuroscience.

Are we doing anything to take advantage of those facts? Not really. Most of our children are spared "hard" mental work until the age of 7. I put the word "hard" in quotation marks, because that "hard" work should be presented and experienced in the form of relaxed playful activities that is suited for child's age. I am not speaking of child's labor. Well, many good opportunities are missed... But many more are to be lost in years that follow.

Because if you think about it, is it really math, languages and memory that children practice at school the most? (I say memory, because most of other subjects, like history, geography and even chemistry require nothing more than good memorial skills to be passed) Is it really that they practice those skills? What skills (I can't emphasize that word, skills, hard enough) do they practice? Only one: passing exams! It could be either oral or written exams, by the time you reach 16, you are a master of solving math puzzles, filling blanks at language tests, naming 5 things of this or that, manipulating teacher's feelings when being put in front of the blackboard, etc... Or simply cheating at any of that. These are the skills that you practice over and over again. Beside obedience, indifference and passivity but that is another matter (read this book) indeed. The point I'm trying to make is, that your brain specializes in an entirely narrow and useless field. On the side of that you acquire tons of "knowledge", that is to say, useless data that can be used only in solving crossword puzzles or TV quizzes (and you forget most of it when you get out of the school anyway). Instead of learning skills of creativity and productive thinking you really learn some very limited skills by doing whatever is needed to achieve that one and only goal of passing exams. Unless you had been active on your own or with help of your parents, your brain remains underdeveloped in every other field or activity for ever. By the time you reach University (most of them are much better at educating than compulsory schools because they give more freedom to teachers), your brain has already lost most of its valuable plasticity. Just as muscles in your hand will deteriorate with time if you don't use them, so will parts of your mind. The more time passes the more hard it is to reanimate them. After a certain point it becomes impossible and there is no return. Our schools fail to exercise the vast majority our mind, so most of our mental capacities are stunted in development, never to be reborn. It does not mean we should do everything at once, it means doing one thing passionately enough so that it includes everything else. Playing violin really passionately already includes doing math, arts, dance, history, biology or anything else you can think of, but this time, in a service of beautiful music, which makes learning all those supportive fields so much more exciting. Each child should find its own passion and learn everything else to support it. Which introduces us to the next problem.

Schools have a growing need to be standardized. Everything has to be sorted within standards. Children are sorted in classrooms by their age - I know you take that for granted, simply because you are born into this world without ever being any different - but step back and think about it. Is it really their production date that is the most important factor of classification? Some children are more advanced in math, some in dance... Wouldn't then follow that advanced math children should practice math with older students with matching abilities? 7 year old Jose Raul Capablanca played chess against adults because no other child was as good a match for him. And even the sheer number of children in one such class is usually too big for quality learning (usually around 30, sometimes even more).
Secondly; why should textbooks be the same for everybody? In music schools where there is no such standardization a good teacher can choose from a huge number of books for his students to adjust the needs of each particular one. There is only one reason for this hard standardization and that is to meet the needs of a large industry which produces those books: professors (authors), publishers, printing facilities, bookstores and many other institutions rely deeply on "new and revised" editions that are compulsory sold every year by state law. Even if you borrow, somebody had to buy it first. Most parents go nearly broke every September but there is no need for that. At the end, it is about money on both sides. Does basic algebra really change so much with every passing year? And more importantly: does one size really fit all?

If you really think everything trough - what is at the heart of an education? What is that minimum that is needed for this activity? Is it a "new and revised" edition of a textbook? Not really, a good teacher could do even better without. Is it a classroom? No - we could do well without that either... I think that at the heart of it all is a teacher and a student or better to say - a relationship they develop. And that has been cluttered by tons of administration burden, standards, forms, tests, merits, levels, standardized textbooks, or whatever you can name that keeps this schooling industry running and jobs safely kept... It is not just money, sometimes these standards are put in place with very noble causes but also without a view of a bigger picture (see Barry Schwartz on this issue). As a result, teachers are preoccupied with administration so they rarely have time to focus on teaching, and children are preoccupied with tests and scores so they can't focus on learning. Whatever is truly individual and worthy in one person is smashed down and washed away by these standards which fit a rare few and exclude everyone else. That is the reality of today's schooling. That is why the majority of the people feel dumb and excluded in schools or after they finish it. That is why they feel untalented. That is why all those creative and smart children (whose parents can't stop talking about) grow up to be depressive and boring adults. It is important to understand that this is not a result of any vicious conspiracy; it just came to be this way by many small steps which all made the majority sink just a little deeper into their comfort zone. They made grounds to open more institutions (commissions, boards, research labs, panels...), make more jobs, make everybody a little happier and at the same time everything a little worse, so more jobs can be made to correct it. Concepts like "Tragedy of the Commons" can play a big role here. I don't believe they are doing it consciously. They are not that smart. Perhaps nobody is.

OK, let's review that process once again: at the age of 7 children in most developed countries are put into classrooms and told to sit down and be quiet. Otherwise teacher might get a headache and no one wants that, does it? But again, if you really think deeply - isn't that the most unnatural thing you could do? Look at baby kittens or puppies. Are they sitting still? No, they are jumping around and playing... very much like human offspring of the same relative age. Schooling uses different techniques to petrify children; threats, punishments, emotional blackmail... If anything of that fails, they assume the child has ADHD and they put it on Ritalin. Childhood education should fit the needs of children not the needs of teachers. Sitting still and listening is an activity of the old.

Obviously, at the age of 10-12, when hormones kick in, most children become sick of school. They have had enough of standards, they intuitively feel there could be more to life, and that this system does not fit their intellectual needs. They start to hate the idea of education and mental effort in general, simply because it was presented to them in the wrong form - in the form of schooling. They rebel! (in every other way, education and mental effort remain being fun - even factory workers like to solve crossword puzzles, don't they)

From here on (this is highly speculative, but bare with me), schooling has two different strategies to keep them in order. First predominantly works on girls and calmer boys, second works mostly on boys and wilder girls.

At the beginning of early adolescence (as we said, when hormones kick in), 5 million years of evolution starts to reveal itself. Most girls calm down and act more responsibly. That is the necessity of becoming a mother! (in the eyes of adults girls seem to mature faster than boys, but in reality they just mature in different way) However, most boys become even harder to control, they take greater risks, they damage things around them and often even themselves in games they play. That is the necessity of becoming a hunter! What they need is a rabbit to be killed and brought home with its head chopped off. Our bodies are not developed for writing homework and answering emails. Our bodies are made to survive in nature and it is impossible to understand psychology without internalizing this hard fact. It is only a small fraction of percent of the entire evolution that we have been living in what we think of is a civilized society. The vast 99,9999...% of the time which shaped us is during the time we were in wilderness.

So girls are usually bargained to suppress their individuality with good grades and compliments. After all, it is a system that values very highly sitting still and behaving well, especially combined with responsible attitude towards homeworks and school assignments. This are all the qualities of a young (soon to be) mother. They prosper trough schooling, many without getting any real education and many of them finish on positions that require high level of responsibility and obedience (they can become even a judge or a medical doctor..., but more often a secretary or a nurse).

Young hunters are a harder case for school. They will just not sit still, listen, obey or behave. They will not learn or sometimes they will hide their knowledge just to show rebellious attitude. School has a number of readily available mechanisms for such young brats; school detentions, punishments, principal's office hearings, bad grades, letters to parents, emotional blackmail, and so on... In most cases they succeed to crush rebellious spirit by the age of 18. Unknowingly they also destroy his/hers own individuality. What it is left (in both cases) is an average person (whatever that is).

But rebellious spirit is at the heart of creation. Some sorts of rebellion should be nurtured and cultivated into a positive form which will question dogmas or conventions and at the end produce something new and better (I have a feeling someone just doesn't want that... even in healthy families it takes parents with a very big heart to teach children to question authority, that is themselves [parents] in the first place). Oscar Wilde reminds us:

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

but also:

Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

(my emphasis... taken from the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism)

There is another mechanism how degrade young geniuses: give them extra homework. "You are smart, you should do these extra hard exercises too!" But you know, these kids are not stupid - why work double if all you get at the end is the same "5" (or "A" in US) as you would otherwise? Isn't it better to hide among the average and pass smoothly without lifting but a finger? When nobody mocks you for sticking your neck out? Sure it is... Being average it is! But that kid has still lots of spare energy (remember; puppies like to jump around, not sit still), and if it is not transfered with his hobbies or sports into something productive, it could be very well turned against him/her-self in a form of a violence, drug abuse... it could even lead to suicide. (I didn't come up with this - a far more experienced elderly teacher told me to write this down)

In all cases the system that is based on standardization has managed to produce a product of its own kind: a standard human fit for a standard job. Or, as George Carlin puts it: an obedient worker. Unfortunately many of them finish as boring, anemic and frustrated teachers (or textbook writers, headmasters, social workers, etc) who fail to inspire children for arts or sciences (or whatever else). Even more so; they manage to present these fabulous pursuits as disgusting. The cycle is closed and the schooling business continues. If anyone remains creative or positively individualistic it is in spite of schooling, not because of it.

So what is the solution out of this mess? Firstly; we should demolish this system and think of a new one where the constructive relation between the teacher and a pupil will be at the heart of it. We only add things from which their relationship will benefit. It could very well be textbooks and standards too, but only when needed and as needed. But above all, it should be a system in which skills are transfered, not encyclopedic knowledge. If I aspire to be a photographer, a fireman, or even a judge, or a medical doctor - the first thing I need are skills of the profession. It could be skills with equipment (camera, computer...) or skills of any other kind (social skills, mental skills, you name it). And don't worry, I will gather encyclopedic knowledge, but this time, not so much by memorizing as by doing. Books are good way to learn, but only in supplement to practical training. And of course, a good and experienced mentor who is guiding that process is also critical. It looks like we have a triangle; at one corner is practical learning, on second theory (books) and finally mentor on third. I have a good sense that the Renaissance knew that. The greatest masters of that time; Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Vasari, Galileo and many others gained that knowledge with practical work under the careful and caring eyes of the master. If they entered the workshop at 10 or 12, they were masters themselves by the age of 18 or 20 (todays graduates are beginners at 22). And guess what; they were all rebellious in spirit too. But the Medici, who payed for everything, were smart enough to see beyond attitude - they saw and nurtured the talent! And that is how they calmed them down!

References and further reading/watching/listening:
Ivan Illich - Deschooling society
John Gatto: Dumbing us down
Jeff Hawkins: On Intelligence (find him also at TED Talks)
This talk by Ken Robinson
RSA animated talk by Ken Robinson (find him also at TED Talks)
Also all of the books by Ken Robinson... please read them all!
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene (or anything else by him... it is all brilliant)
Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational - find him at TED too
Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism)
a lot of stuff at Wikipedia, Google, and so on... I heard a lot of that in person during lectures or interviews... to many to name them all.

This is a short slideshow I did for the opening of my Siddharta exhibition in Ljubljana. I will report on the event (or you can see it on my facebook profile), but for now, here is the video... I recommend full screen. ^.^

In an attempt to promote my 52 project in which weekly I shoot (conceptual?) portraits I decided to make a tumlbr page for this project. I wanted to keep the project away from my.opera and use this blog for my utterances only (hence new design which is optimized for writing and reading).

so here it is:
marjan52.tumblr.com

If you feel like it, you can support the project by clicking "donate".

Even though I often write and talk about creativity, I never said much about talent. There is a reason why: it is damn hard to define it. General definition would be that one is talented when one presents skills that are far above average for one's age. The problem is that those skills may very well be a result of huge amount of work, lucky circumstances (being born in the right family, having stimulating circle of friends, and so on) and many other complex things, including genes. Probably it is influenced by a combination of everything mentioned and even more by the things we couldn't possibly think of. So how to talk about something so elusive? Here is my solution.

The author of this video says it takes on average about 10.000 hours of practice to achieve a notable skill. I don't remember exactly where, but somewhere I read that to reach the level of grandmaster in chess you need about 20.000 hours of training (the exact number is hard to prove and it doesn't matter anyway... let's just take it metaphorically). But there's a catch! Not just any 20.000! This is an over-simplification. It is as if we are saying that to win a chess match you need to make about 50-70 moves. True - but not just any moves! They have to be the right ones, from the very beginning. Especially at the beginning!

I agree that achieving mastery takes a HUGE amount of work - but where talented separate from the average is in the way they are playing. They are doing the right things from the very start. Every artist has to move trough different stages, one has to make a lot of mistakes to learn the right way of doing things, but gifted ones move trough that phases very quickly and can even skip a few. They have a deeper insight into the game they play. When I play chess I can rarely have that kind of insight into my game. I am smart enough to see my mistakes from the past, but not smart enough to see clearly the present or even the future stages of the game. I believe it is very much the same in art, music, science, life or other complex games. Talented people just see deeper and move faster. They make a much better use of those 10.000 hours, just like a talented chess player makes a better use of his 50 moves, no matter the external circumstances. Of course they might be inclined to take larger risks or present much less fear (and have a few lucky picks with lucky outcomes), but that is beyond this argument.

Slowly but steadily I am reading John Berger's book Ways of Seeing. It is a remarkable piece of thinking which has to be consumed as slowly as possible. The third chapter in which Berger finds a strong parallel between realistic (oil) painting and materialism is especially intriguing:


What are these paintings?
Before they are anything else, they are themselves objects which can be bought and owned. Unique objects. A patron can not be surrounded by music or poems in the same way he can be surrounded by his pictures.
It is as though a collector lives in a house built of paintings. What is their advantage over walls of stone or wood? THEY SHOW HIM SIGHTS: SIGHTS OF WHAT HE MAY POSSESS. - John Berger

Before the renaissance painters were no more than anonymous (yet skilled) craftsmen, very much like carpenters or plumbers today. But when Giotto first painted his Lamentation of Christ, he introduced not just a new way of painting, but also a new way of seeing things. Painting was no longer symbolic, now it offered a window into another reality, a replica of physical world. What follows is an never-ending pursuit of perfection; how to make painting as realistic as possible, that is to say, how to make an illusion of reality as perfect as possible. Because: what is painting if not just drops of color on flat canvas or a wall. Whatever 'realistic' we might see in a painting is just a trick of the brain.

From here it is just another logical step; if we could paint things in a realistic manner, we could show things. THINGS THAT MONEY CAN BUY. In other words; we can show off. Patrons were commissioning paintings of their castles, belongings, wifes, horses, exotic animals, even more exotic food (it is how still life was born), and so on... Painters were trapped in a position which was well payed, but a bit boring... Suddenly they were a slave of realism with little or no space for more sublime symbolic thought. Only rare exceptions (Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo...) were able to transcend this claws and create something that went into history. Myriads of others didn't. During the late baroque period techniques of realistic painting reached perfection.

Luckily for painters photography was invented just in time! Suddenly painters were free! They could finally venture back into symbolism where they belonged (imagine a poet trapped in a job of a news reporter). Now it was the photographer's job to recreate physical reality onto 2-dimensional plane.

I believe photographers are trapped in the same way painters were during the famous "realistic" periods (14th to 18th century). Better yet, photographers are today in the same position as painters during the late baroque. The techniques of reproduction are perfected to the level at which we are being bored by it. Wedding, portrait, still life, commercial and other types of photography are mere reproduction of physical reality (and how funny, most of them are dedicated to the 'things that money can buy'). Even photojournalism rarely goes beyond that. This is why photojournalists have their mouths full of 'stories' and 'humanitarianism' - they need a deeper reason to justify their menial craft.

The way in which I am pulled more and more by each passing day is symbolism. I am tired of being a slave to physical reality, I want to produce some of my own. I am not happy just by reporting anymore, I want to write my own (fictional?) stories or even poems instead. This is the main motive behind my new project: 52.

Last year it was all about capturing daily impressions with my mobile camera. This year I am doing something more profound, something more planned and contemplated. I am doing a project of one photo per week. I am trying to venture into the world of symbols, as deep as I could go. I want to explore the world of dreams, fears, emotions... To me the whole thing is very close to filming movies; I have to write a story, organize the filming (find locations, actors...) and at the end shoot the whole thing. It is very challenging and I hope to make it trough. So far I am doing it on Hasselblad camera (I really want that quality). You can follow me on flickr.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

So here it is, the last part. After discussing fear we turn to the final obstacle that is on the way of reaching our full creative potential. You are not going to like it. It is:

Satisfaction with the Obvious
Or in short: laziness! People are plain lazy! I believe laziness in creativity comes in three stages and we'll deal with each separately:

- Satisfaction with the Obvious (this sounds so good I took it as a general title, sry)
- Lack of Homework
- Lack of Persistency

Satisfaction with the Obvious¹
Huh, how to begin with this? Well, in a nutshell: everything that has a value in life doesn't come easy, does it? I mean, it takes some time and work! It takes some time and work to understand Coltrane or Beethoven, but after that, you are more than well rewarded. Many people go for Lady Gaga (or equivalent, don't pick up on me) whose tunes are so obvious that one can easily remember them after the first listening. There is nothing sublime in it, something that would wait for you on your second, third or 100th listening. Nothing. Most people are satisfied with that kind of obvious!

And once you'll start being aware of this phenomena you'll see it everywhere. People, as consumers and creators of the culture, quickly quit. They don't dig in for the solutions that are not so obvious. But it is precisely those that are often the most valuable. You just have to go the extra mile!

I see this in my classes. When I try to inspire some creative work, most students quit searching for solutions the minute they get their first or second idea. And it is often that I am no better myself. It is only at my most motivated point that I dig deeper to find the most valuable ones. For one thing, the first ideas, the obvious ones, are usually the ones that are already done somewhere so they are not novel at all (hence, they are not really creative, are they?) and beside that they are most likely be the ones that I am most comfortable executing. Usually they pose the least amount of risk (precisely because they are already executed somewhere with known outcome). The deep ideas are usually counterintuitive and highly risky. But those are the revolutionary ones! Practically every invention, from a lightbulb to an iPhone was at its creation very counterintuitive. So is the best music, like Beethoven's Grosse fuge which went against everything people recognized as music at its time. Yet it is more musical than almost anything else created in the history, but you realize that only after a couple dozen times you listen it. At first it is very demanding, but then it is very rewarding piece.

The reasons for this are of course complex (like everything we discuss here). On one side it is perhaps a natural disposition of the brain to spare energy once an acceptable solution is found. Secondly; our brain uses memories of past events to envision future so it is quite natural that most people can't envision any other future than a mashup of what has already happened. This is a huge handicap for creativity and another evolutionary advantage that backfires (envisioning the future on the basis of past events helps survive, no doubt). See Jeff Hawkins for more on that.

The other reason was already mentioned before; the incredible passivity of the 20th century. Trough out the history of man kind people had to entertain themselves. In order to have some fun they had to tell stories, sing, act, dance or draw for them selves. Of course some were better than the others, but I believe all of them did at least something. This was amateur culture at its best. In the 20th century technological inventions allowed mass distribution of sounds and pictures. Unfortunately those inventions were not developed enough to allow interactive participation of the audience. The audience became evermore passive, while on other side professional entertainers got the largest stage in the world: the whole planet! Why would I listen my father while Sinatra sings so much better! Why don't we all just sit down on our couch and laugh at Letterman's jokes? 20th century is a century of cultural passivity which has no precedence in human history. So in hunger for bigger and bigger audience (=ratings), any reasonable TV station has to adopt measures that fit the largest crowds, which means doing productions that are easy to grasp. People are educated into the obvious and quickly gain notion that everything in this world should be this way. So when they go to a modern gallery or when they see some art photography, they are lead to believe, that this kind of culture is obvious too. They couldn't be more mistaken. The best creative works are anything but obvious. They are fruits of the deepest creative thoughts and in order to understand them one should take time and dive into those depths.

Of course, sometimes even renowned art is shallow and sometimes what appears to be deep on the surface is actually empty on the inside. It happens. Even people who are trained in arts or sciences are often mislead by the appearance. One such example could IMHO be the famous Drake's equation which on surface looks like hardcore science (it is math, right), but when one inspects it closely, one can find out that it is actually bullshit. Almost all of the factors in the equation are arbitrary and unknown. So the 'equation' can easily yield a huge number of different results (from 0 to gazillion) which are almost equally probable. Is that equation solving anything? Of course not. It just mimics science by appearance in a form of an equation. At best is just an other way of saying: we don't have a clue! But we are off the track now. I am sure there are similar examples of phoniness in art too: things that just look like real art on the outside but hold nothing valuable inside. It happens. My point is that you can't really tell if you don't dig into it. You can't just glance at a painting in the gallery and say "This is nothing." You can't!

In this context an other thing should be mentioned: critical thought! People often fall in love with their ideas and their work, but only those who can maintain a safe distance can produce really good stuff. "You have to be routhless!" William Allard told me in an interview. Not everything you produce is good, in fact, most of it isn't. Scrutiny is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of creativity, but it is critical for any kind of creative work. The most obvious example would be photography; photographers return from assignments with thousands of photographs, but only 10 can make it into print. Which 10? A movie director might have a dozen different dialogue versions for each scene, but how to pick ones that really play well? I spoke on taste already, and I also noted how to recognize really a mature performance, so I will not repeat that here. It suffices to say that critical judgement and developed taste is an important aspect of every creative process. One should be in a constant zig-zag between non-judgemental playfulness and harsh self-criticism. When one is in the zone (i.e. having an almost spiritual creative experience of totally focused mind) those two modes either merge or totally disappear - it is hard to tell since this is such a delirium that it has rules of its own. Needles to say, being in the zone is the best creative state of mind and we should do everything we can to make it happen. More about that in a minute.

Lack of homework
I don't know whether this should be before or after the previous argument about being satisfied with the obvious, but in a way it doesn't even matter. I believe every creative act needs some sort of theoretical (or practical) background. The only way to invent something (without a huge amount of luck) is to study all of the available knowledge that existed before you on that subject. You can't push the whole field of physics forward without studying all of the physics that is already known. You can't invent a new way of storing liquids without studying all of the ways we store liquids today. You can't! It is absolutely necessary to study every detail of every thing you can find in order to find flaws and imperfections which are opportunities for improvement or in the best possible case; the reinvention. In a case when there is simply no solution available, you must study the problem so much more. Only then you may count on being lucky. The discovery of Penicillin is often regarded as an accidental discovery, but in my eyes is anything but that. It didn't happen to just anyone. It happened to Alexander Fleming, a man who invested so much into science! Discovery of comets, stars or fossils are most often described as the same kind of "lucky accidents", but just think if that could happen to you rather than to a person who studies the sky or the bedrock 24/7. I believe not. They know exactly what they are looking for! Similar kinds of accidents can happen in art too (see this blog post about it). Again it is not what happens, it is about you recognizing a true value in it. You can recognize that only if you are ready, only if you did your homework! Many people don't!

Lack of Persistency
Creativity is often confused with rich imagination. Sometimes you find these weirdly looking self-proclaimed artists who wouldn't stop telling you how creative they are. They go on about their 'ideas' and how nobody understands them. Those people may have rich imagination, but creativity involves an act of creating something tangible; an invention, a painting, a dance, a piece of music, an article, a new economic theory... something! And that takes work!
The amount of time you actually feel inspired and illuminated is very short in comparison to the amount of time you spend crafting this thing into its final form. Just to give you a trivial example; I had an idea for this series of articles written down in 5 minutes during a breakfast one morning (I must have had too much tea, I was quite hyper that time) and I think I had more or less everything written down in my head at the time. But it took me more than three weeks to actually execute it, no matter how good or bad the actual result really is. Most of the time went for trivial typing, spell-checking, double checking the facts and stuff like that. Nothing typically creative at all - just dull and boring work. But that is nothing compared to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. You think that ceiling painted itself? I am not sure we can even begin to imagine the impossible conditions under which the great genius spent 4 (four!) years of his life simply executing his idea. Even though the whole idea is brilliant, the majority of the work lies in trivial craft of painting. The first part of creativity (getting an idea) might be about letting it go and be as unconditioned as possible, but creativity is also about holding on to it. It is about not quiting when the work becomes dull and borring. It is about not quitting when the time of crisis and self-doubt erodes your will. Self doubt will almost always come if you are working with novel and untested ideas. We discussed that in the previous part of this series (I really like the way how everything is coming together).

The reason why people don't do their homework and why they lack the will to carry on is in my opinion in lack of passion. When people are blindly passionate about some problem or activity, they don't care about "what if they're wrong" or "what will people think." That fear is gone like the laziness is gone too. They simply push forward like a bulldozer. They don't care much if it is possible or not, they don't care if people are telling them how stupid they are, they don't care if they haven't eaten for hours or haven't slept for days... they just don't care!

How to bring people to that passionate inspired state of mind? How to fall in the zone? It helps a lot to be in your element. You must do what you love to do! Being in an element is fun! You are playful which, again, doesn't mean you are careless, it simply means you take enjoyable risks! And secondly; you must have an inspired figure to look up to. It could be an idol from television (not everything about television is bad, ok) or even better, a person from your own place - a really good teacher, mentor, athlete, somebody who also loves his work and shares this positive energy with others. An inspirational person can become only someone who is inspired him-herself.

Does the school play a vital role here? Mostly no, but sometimes yes. Speaking abstractly - in most schools only three kinds of mental capacities are fully exercised; math (logic), languages and memory. Even these are far to abstract and are not practised on the applied level. Studying languages in (most) school is like learning to swim by performing swimming moves on dry ground. What about jumping into the water, dammit!? Schools offer far too narrow curriculum for kids to test their talents. The hierarchical structure reveals that applied arts or dance are undervalued. This is a legacy of the 19th century in which schools were popularized to educate the working class. A good factory worker should know some basic algebra and have some writing/reading skills. Hence math and languages are still at the top of importance list of every school. Math is something that is forced upon as common knowledge, something that we all have capacity to learn, while at the same time, art or music is denied on the basis of the required talent. Just how stupid is that? You need a talent for music, but you don't need it for math?! This curriculum is totally out of balance, it has nothing to do with our real mental capacities and worst of all, it denies people their talents... Many very bright people who don't happen to be interested or gifted with those few skills that school rewards, can live their whole life thinking they are stupid and untalented. I believe this is simply unacceptable for the 21st century. True, in 19h century you couldn't have make a living being a dancer, but that is no longer the case now, at least not in developed countries (forget Slovenia... see part 3 for that). Of course, we all need some math, we all need some language skills, but we also need some music, some art, some dance, some photography or movies... The thing is in proper balance which should also be individually based, and proper execution which should be based on practical application. And this is just the beginning... Again, this is not an article about education.

Luckily we at least have a few inspired teachers, mentors and public heroes who can overcome these obstacles and fire up new generations of students. When Appollo program was running MIT didn't have any problems with not having enough students. At the same time we unfortunatelly have bored and frustrated teachers who do so much damage that it would be better if they hadn't thought at all. Perhaps I am exaggerating, but maybe you are better off having no math at all than hating math for the rest of your life just because the person who was teaching you, hated math (and his life) more than anything in the world. Don't you think?

But let us rather finish with good news. We DO have inspired teachers, mentors and public figures, we DO have people who are aware of how broken our education system is and we DO have people who work hard to make it better. And with the advent of the internet and Web 2.0 there is an overabundance of creativity everywhere. People stood up from their 20th century couches, picked up cameras, pens, guitars, brushes (etc) and the results are here. The new generation cares less about mass media (politics, entertainment...) and cares more about their own creativity. There would be no Flickr, DeviantArt or Vimeo without them. Of course, not all of what is uploaded is creative in the most meaningful sense, but some of it is! Give me one good reason why not be optimistic about it!


Epilogue
First of all - if you came to this point - thank you for reading. To be completely honest, I didn't write it for you. I wrote it (as almost everything on this blog lately) for myself. I write these things as preparation for articles, lectures or debates. You can see it as a kind of public notebook if you will. But anyways, thank you.

This series can be viewed in two ways. The way it is written is a list of things that can go wrong when we try to reach our creative potential. But it can also be understood in an other way in which it can help you understand just how many small things have to go right in order to get productive geniuses on the level of Tesla, Picasso, Bill Gates... Of course, not everything can be controlled. There are so many arbitrary and random factors that shape our life and work together that it is impossible, despite all that was written, to predict where one will end up in life. Life is full of randomness which we don't understand. We know a little bit about certain trends that happen, but that is all. Just as we know what happens to a certain amount of gas when we raise temperature for 10K, we have a small clue about social and economic trends, but just as we can't predict the movement of a single molecule in that gas so we can't predict a life of a person or stock market. So please, try to read and understand this with a grain of salt. Try to understand life and creativity on the basis that you don't understand it fully or even at all. I believe this is a mature place to start.

Basic references:
Hawkins, J., (2004), On Intelligence, New York, Holt Paperbacks
Robinson, K. et all, (1982), The Arts in Schools, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Robinson, K., (2001), Out of Our Minds - Learning to be creative, London, Capstone
Robinson, K., (2009), The Element - How finding your passion changes everything, New York, Viking Penguin
Lessig, L., (2004), Free culture - How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, New York, Penguin (Free PDF)
Lessig, L. (2007): TED Talk
Robinson, K. (2006): TED talk 1
Robinson, K. (2010): TED talk 2
Drori, J., (2007): TED talk

Footnotes
¹ Many smart people often say that the most difficult things to grasp are usually the most obvious ones. Things that are the most difficult to see are usually the ones that are before your eyes. There is some truth to that. But that is a different kind of 'obvious,' it is a 'higher level of obvious'... I hope it is clear I am not talking about that, but I have to put this note here in order to avoid any misinterpretations.

Part 1 Part 3 Part 4

In the first part of this series I discussed the noise that is created by the media outlets which clutters and occupies our minds so that we simply cannot think creatively. But there are other problems too. The next in line is:

The Lack of Imagination
Imagination is the core engine of creativity and many people simply lack that. Imagination simply means seeing with your mind's eye what has not been materialized yet. At least not that you know of it. There are IMHO two basic reasons why people don't develop/carry this ability in adult age:

1- they lack proper genes for their brain to be powerful enough (I don't believe this could be true for such a large amount of people),
2- they had it too easy in life.

Since the first reason is completely arbitrary and hard to prove (then again, I am not a geneticist), I shall not discuss it.

But what about the second? Again, I might be speaking from my gut, but I came to believe that imagination develops when there is a certain delay between a wish and its fulfillment. If that time is too long then frustrations and its suppression can occur, but that is an other subject.

Remember your childhood; you want a new toy so badly it almost hurts. But your parents don't buy it right away, so you'll have to wait till Christmas or your birthday. During that time you start imagining how sweet would it be to get that thing and everything you could do with it. You can see yourself playing with it, sharing it with friends, and so on... This is how your imagination was born! If you have parents that fulfilled your wishes instantly, it is very likely you will not develop imaginative powers of the brain. Again, this is from the gut, but in my experience as a mentor, spoiled kids tend to have more difficulty understanding fairytales, poems or even visual art. They also produce less (and lesser quality) of their own works. It is not that they are stupid or unknowledgable, they simply lack imagination. And patience! How could anything be created without patience!? (another product of non-fulfilled wish)

Then you go to school and school fails even harder than some parents at developing children's imagination. Almost every education system in the world is what Lawrence Lessig would call a Read-Only (RO) system. That is a centralized system at which one person broadcasts his knowledge or skills, while a myriad of other are in a role of completely passive receivers, who have to repeat whatever was told or demonstrated. This system has no respect for individual intellect or personal creativity. Most classes are organized in a way that knowledge is brought to you readily on a tray. You don't have to work for it. It is just there for you to consume it. It often feels like the system thinks I am so stupid, that I can't find that knowledge myself. Only the most inspired teachers have the power to overcome this built-in flaw and make their classes a Read-Write (RW) class, at which students equally participate in creation of the lesson, and where their individual contributions (ideas) are crucial for the class. But those are rare exceptions.

Imagine now, if you will, a different kind of class. It is a class at which knowledge is acquired by hands-on experimenting and (field) research. A class where you have to work to get your answers. The knowledge doesn't come right away, you have to wait and search for it, and while you're at it, you imagination is already working out the possible solutions for your problem. It might take a little more time, but the understanding you get is far deeper and the knowledge more real. It is not just words you memorize from a book, it is The Knowledge. This kind of teaching respects learner's intellect. It is as if it's been sublimely said: "I know you are a smart person. I believe you can find answers yourself and you don't need me to bring them to you." It is a lot easier to be motivated after such compliment. And imagine a class at which testing is done in a way that is not humiliating. Questions are completely different. One can get a question like;

"From where does a tree get all the stuff it needs to grow?"

If you want to answer that, you have to know really a lot about trees, but not just that; you must also connect together different domains of knowledge, like biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology, math... Everything has to fall into place for you to answer that the tree is made mostly of carbon and that carbon doesn't come from the ground (like the majority would answer), but from the air with a process called photosynthesis. You didn't see that one coming, did you! Photosynthesis is how a tree makes wood! If it really came from the ground there would be a large hole under every tree. A tree wants to grow up to reach even more sunlight and dominate the space (evolutionary explainable). Oxygen is just a side product. But you didn't learn that in school, because you were too occupied with memorizing the exact word order of the proper definition of photosynthesis, which goes as followed:

"Photosynthesis (from the Greek φώτο- [photo-], "light," and σύνθεσις [synthesis], "putting together", "composition") is a process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight.Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and many species of bacteria, but not in archaea ..." (source)

It is a scientifically correct definition, but it completely blurs the point. It is a wood making process! Of course, memorizing and repeating that dull definition will rob you of the joy that is thinking. I assume you had a great time pondering the question "From where does a tree get all the stuff it needs to grow?" but not such a great time when you had to memorize in school. People simply love to think, they love to use their imagination, but the schools will just not give you enough opportunities to use your brain in a way that it was built for and we are lucky to have that many creative people who retain this capacity into their adult life. For the most people, by the time they finish school, they are just a machine to store and reproduce a few facts and some basic skills (language and some math). If people are creative, they are creative despite of-, not because of the schools.

The schools are tiring and stressful, but that shouldn't be confused with intellectually hard. The schools are far to easy. Thinking is fun, but there is almost no thinking and imagining done in schools.¹ This kind of teaching is actually an insult for one's intelligence. No wonder kids rebel! Again: there is no delay between a wish and its fulfillment that is needed to spur imagination. Hence, for the most of the people, schools are boring and no fun at all! The unnatural way of learning and testing is a cause of a lot of anxiety. There is something very wrong with that. The majority of people doesn't see it that way (they assume this is the nature of things, that it cannot be done any other way...), but I simply find it problematic. Give me one good reason why should the school be stressful! Why in the world should 10-year-olds have cramps in their stomach every morning? Why do we torture our kids like that? Schools could be so much fun, full of adventure and exploration, just like Naional Geographic, but in real life! We just have to shift our logic from RO to RW and develop respect for their young but huge intellects.

In both cases (parenting and teaching) the reasons for not giving a child enough time to develop imagination could be completely benevolent and even noble. Parents want their children to have things they couldn't have had. And many people go into teaching because they want to share knowledge and spare misconceptions they had themselves. They want to give kids the right answers straight away so that they wouldn't waste time on intellectual dead ends. That is a noble cause indeed, but by doing it too much they rob young people of the joy that is exploration (and imagination).

After school, your passive intellectual life, where information is only consumed (not even repeated anymore) continues in front of the TV set and other classic media.² We covered that already. 20th century is perhaps the only century in human history, where the predominant culture was of the RO kind. A big, centralized industry of music, movies, television, radio and publishing was feeding hungry consumers. Why wouldn't they consume; professionals in Hollywood are much better than the local theater. But there is a good news; with the dawn of the internet our creative potential is back at work. Just look at the Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, blogs and everything that is created. We are back to Read-Write. We all participate in making the cultural landscape. And that fuels my imagination!


Basic references:
Hawkins, J., (2004), On Intelligence, New York, Holt Paperbacks
Robinson, K. et all, (1982), The Arts in Schools, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Robinson, K., (2001), Out of Our Minds - Learning to be creative, London, Capstone
Robinson, K., (2009), The Element - How finding your passion changes everything, New York, Viking Penguin
Lessig, L., (2004), Free culture - How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, New York, Penguin (Free PDF)
Lessig, L. (2007): TED Talk
Robinson, K. (2006): TED talk 1
Robinson, K. (2010): TED talk 2
Drori, J., (2007): TED talk

And if you want to so see how a good RW kind of class looks like, see this.

Footnotes:
¹ - We should also note, that the school curriculum is far to narrow to cover all of the interests and talents that children might have. Not just that; it is completely unbalanced. Languages and math are dominant subjects everywhere you go while arts and certain sciences suffer from the lack of attention. As Ken Robinson puts it, a lot of people go trough their lives thinking they don't have any talent at all. They don't enjoy what they do in life, they just do their jobs and wait for the weekend. We are not all born just for math, languages and encyclopedic learning. We are much more than that! I spilled a lot of ink on that subject, I am aware of the problem, but it is an education-specific subject, so I decided not to write about it in this context.

²- One more thing. When you talk about schools and media in this tone, you can quickly pass the line and end up on the side of conspiracy 'theories'. It is a very thin line indeed! The point at which conspiracy simply fails is that it assumes that this system is put up and maintained by intelligent design of the elite. Now this is a kind of a compliment, don't you think? I simply don't believe they are that smart. Nobody is. There is simply too much data and too many arbitrary factors for anyone to manipulate with. Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science will show you that even with the simplest of rules a great randomness can occur. Even supercomputers can't predict weather for more than 3 days ahead, not to mention the whole society. I would also strongly suggest reading some game theory on this subject. It will show how even if every involved member of the society is trying for the best, the whole system can go totally down. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene will force you to make the same conclusion.