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Leave them kids alone

Radhika Chadha

Quashing a child’s originality in favour of the straight and narrow has disturbing implications for organisational innovation, and society at large.

Celebrate creativity and innovation. Begin early – at schools and at homes.

A family anecdote relates with pride the story of how a child suffered the ignominy of failing in his nursery test at school. When asked “what swims?”, the child answered “crocodile”; to the question “what burns?”, the answer was “toast”. And when asked “how many legs does the horse have”, he replied “three” and told his perplexed parent that it was a “lame horse”. Sadly, the evaluator didn’t see these zany and creative answers as merit-worthy and the child was denied admission. The happy ending, of course, is that he went on to join the IIT, the IIM-A, became a successful entrepreneur and author.

It reminded me of the little boy in Helen Buckley’s powerful poem-cum-short story of that name who finds his originality slowly squished by a limited world-view that values obedience and conformity at the cost of the creative spirit.

“We are going to make flowers.”

“Good!” thought the little boy,

He liked to make beautiful ones

With his pink and orange and blue crayons.

But the teacher said “Wait!”

“And I will show you how.”

And it was red, with a green stem.

…..

And pretty soon

The little boy learned to wait,

And to watch

And to make things just like the teacher.

And pretty soon

He didn’t make things of his own anymore.”

So it was with a sense of déjÀ vu that we watched Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par describing the travails of a child whose talents are out of sync with societal expectations. TZP is making waves – and justifiably so: by putting a spotlight on the dark side of childhood and schooling, he’s hopefully making parents and teachers squirm a tad uncomfortably in their seats. Though the movie focuses on the problems faced by dyslexic children, the story also touches on other issues in the Indian education system that has become increasingly fixated on the mantra of compare-criticise-compel: An education system that venerates the quantitative and the functional at the expense of the qualitative and the creative. On the one hand, a father, who when told that his son is an exceptional artist, worries about what sort of a career this could lead to; on the other, a school principal who dismisses the child’s talents because of an inability to deliver on subjects considered essential to the mainstream.

Here’s a vicious spiral, creating a strong preference for a technical, job-oriented, utilitarian degree in science or commerce and an avoidance of an arts (and I don’t mean just fine arts) education which is seen as being either too general, or vastly inferior in earning power. An army of such thinkers cannot but impact society – and organisational innovation - adversely. No wonder then that there is a worrying sameness in our managerial gene pool, leading to a boring and vulnerable sameness of strategic approach. Ironically, organisations have then to invest considerable resources in unlocking this suppressed creativity, unleashing the poet from the engineer, if you will, to fashion new and innovative solutions for business unusual.

I asked Anand Mahindra about whether things could change if there is a movement towards liberal arts education in India. Anand, who studied film-making and heads a successful engineering-based conglomerate, believes that we need an overhaul of the schooling system: ‘What we need to do is reform the high schools so that they create the seeds to a more rounded personality early on, then let the undergraduates have liberal arts options, which allows students explore what they want to be, and finally the graduate schools can be more functional, which is the American system. The whole education system has to be segmented, you can’t hope for a silver bullet of a single course or college to create a well-rounded person.’

I talked to a veteran school counsellor and she pointed out that changing the system is not easy. Even if, in an effort to lower the pressure, a school eases up on exams to inculcate greater creativity in problem-solving, this is possible only till Standard Five. Not because the school is unwilling, but because parents worry about whether their children are being adequately trained. She describes a school which planned to knock out exams completely, and to use a Cambridge-based evaluation system in Standard Ten – parents responded by wondering if their kids would be able to write the IIT-JEE examination after that.

Anand, however, is optimistic. ‘What’s going to change,” he says, “is that as the economy matures, and becomes diverse in terms of the opportunity it offers to people, people will see there is not just one route to prosperity. Earlier, before the MBA, it was IAS, then medicine; IIT only came into prominence after Silicon Valley. Today, you hear of canvases selling for a million dollars – over time, parents will stop worrying about a child taking art as a career.”

The route that we, as parents and educators, opt for will shape the way in which our society will develop. In Helen Buckley’s poem, the little boy escapes when he is young enough to recover. Much like the young protagonist in TZP the child luckily meets a more adventurous teacher who asks …

“If everyone made the same picture,

And used the same colours,

How would I know who made what,

And which was which?”

“I don’t know,” said the little boy.

And he began to make pink and orange and blue flowers.”

Interestingly, though the original poem has the above uplifting ending, another, more cynical, version has a chilling ending where he unquestioningly paints red flowers with a green stem as he was trained to do, reminding us that playing around with the malleable clay of children’s creativity is fraught with risk – leave it too late and the damage will be irreversible.

Is our education system a function of our population dynamics or resource scarcity? Does the large number of children in poorly funded schools in India make it difficult to provide for individual learning? Perhaps. Yet, if we are to forge a society that celebrates creativity and innovation, we need to give the right side of the brain as much respect and value as the left – and that has to begin early, at our schools, at our homes.

Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation and co-author of Innovative India: Insights for the Thinking Manager. Karate-gy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow Ltd.

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