At the first part the topic above feels a little odd, because till now all we have heard is the importance of discipline in all the streams of the world. And discipline in the school, which is regarded highly important is actually the real problem why world is going insane.
The mere reason why I am disregarding discipline is just because that discipline is killing creativity. And the world is a cripple without creativity. This paper is mostly on why schools should no longer concentrate on discipline.
A famous Philosophist has once said “ A man is born with the most amount of knowledge and dies with the least.” Let us go in a little depth of what does this proverb mean. When a man comes into this world , he was pure , innocent , he was not yet in the contact of the society that us waiting for him to live his life their way , and totally devoid himself of intellectualness. What we forget is that discipline is just a way of students to come to school at time, or make them complete their home work, or even stand in a straight line. But in this process what happens is that the society tends to thrust their ideas on to him .and the brain starts getting conditioned.
According to the American journal of sociology, every century the rate of invention is declining. For sure the world is reaching to new heights and newer and newer technologies are being built up, but the statistics says that rate at which things are getting invented is declining. This is complete opposite to the expected as the government is spending so much in research grants and educational budget. I mean with State-of-art infrastructure coming up the graph of the invention rate should have been exponentially high or at least would be increasing. But the fact that it is declining actually supports the fact that something is wrong in the whole educational system. And on diagnosis I feel that the only flaw is that schools have stopped encouraging creativity in students.
So what is so wrong in discipline practiced in the schools?
First of all what is discipline? Discipline isn’t just about being well dressed, or coming to classes on time. Actually the real harm that discipline does is actually in your mind. What happens when young children are told to follow something in the name of discipline or religion? Had the child just followed it without giving much thought to it, it would have been alright. But the very fact that the brain starts adapting to the surrounding makes the real problem here. The brain starts forming its thought process based on that simple stupid idea that was someone else’s. And so the child’s brains goes on getting conditioned day after day, month after month, and one fine day he loses his own thought process, there nothing more he can think other then following something that is being told.
While I was writing the paper I went through a video where the speaker was counter arguing by with an example that when you give a farmer an unlimited land to farm he would farm on some space and be satisfied , thinking that this the end of the life. Otherwise give him a small space and he would come up with ways in which he can maximize his profit. So the zest of it was, as Nietzsche has said that “You need a chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star”, that for any man to succeed there has to be constraints in his way. I am not in a favor that a child should be given whatever he wants for, but at the same time the constraints should not be so hard that he starts following the world. Pablo Picasso once said that every child is a born artist, all it counts is how much time he keeps that artist in him while growing up. And that’s exactly what I want to prove. What now-a-days happens is that schools are focusing on Newton’s laws of gravity but I have hardly seen any school where they make the students realize where it came from. Newton and the his story of how he discovered gravity is well known. Now had he been disciplined at the time the apple fell on him , he would probably lift it up and throw it up in a trash can .But what he came up with was a result of creativity. He was creative enough to think that something in this world did actually make the apple fall down.
My argument is simple , why people who either didn’t go to a school or were considered crazy by the society ,made it big. And the list is not small. There is a big list of famous scientists , industrialists , artists who didn’t go to normal schools and have made it big in life. On narrowing down, what I feel is that these people actually weren’t in that vicious circle, and for those who were it was that necessary constraint which actually gave them a boost to actually do something great in life.
When one gets disciplined the rebel in him dies, and he is nothing but a moving dead body among other millions like him. Someone also said that there has to be two opposite forces to give a birth to your inner rebel. That is true, there has to be a certain force that actually can make a rebel. But in this way having discipline is very absolutely right as it is enhancing your opportunity to do something big in your life. But my point is different. I am not arguing on the the presence of discipline, what I am arguing on is the preaching of discipline in schools. According to Harvard Mental news letter, depression in students is rising at a whopping 23% per annum! The world is going to be the way it is, the society Is going to function in its way, what I am arguing is for a school which doesn’t. So a student finally has a vent out from discipline being preached every where around him.
The base line of the whole argument comes on to that the world has gone enough after being disciplined , now it is a time to stop for a while and think , what actually in the world is happening. Now Is a time that people actually start believing in innovation rather than petty theorems of the world on its progress. Discipline is important, but in schools I believe that creativity should count. New and innovative methods of teaching making creativity as a baseline should now be made. The schools are a stepping stone for students and now they should be the one that should believe on how a balance should be created.
More number of schools should be made that doesn’t follow IB board or the GCSE board but gives important to the creative quotient. Make the students realize the immense potential of creative ideas and thinking that is actually there in them. There are companies now that give more importance to creativity then to discipline. Companies like google are really turning the world around. And for institutions like this schools that really value creativity should come in place.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
-Albert Einstein.
I would like to see schools in this world which reverse the famous proverb and prove it to the world what creativity can do.
Alfred B.Stafford. "Is the Rate of invention declining." American sociology journal Volume 57.Issue 1952: Electronic
Robbinson, Ken. Out Of Our Minds. United Kingdom: Capstone Publishing, 2001. Print.
Axelrod, Alan. Edison on Innovation. United States of America: Jossey Bass, 2008n. Print.
Harvard mental health letter, Harvard university press: February,2002
Osho. Creativity unleashing the forces within. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Print.
