Creativity and Self-discipline
One thing I've wondered lately is whether it's possible to educate in a way that fosters both self-discipline and creativity.
I specified the two attributes because they are - in my opinion - two essential ingredients to success in today's workforce.
My definition of creativity may be vague. By creativity, I refer to the ability to work beyond a set of instructions, the ability to learn and create new solutions, or the ability to do what machines cannot. The essence is obvious: if your skill set can be imitated by a machine, you either won't have a job in the near future or you'll be earning minimum wage soon.
Self-discipline, on the other hand, is much more straight forward: having self-discipline just means being able to concentrate on a piece of task for a sustained amount of time. It sounds easy enough, except most people can hardly do it. A roommate of mine bitterly noted (after only the second day at work), "If my colleagues would stop tweeting every 15 minutes, they'd have their sh*t done a lot sooner!" Perhaps that's not so bad compared to the upcoming generation which is purportedly sending texts every "couple of minutes" every hour of the week (see Texting May be Taking a Toll).
from The Age
Neither education in the west (e.g Canada) nor education in the east (e.g China) seems to produce people with both attributes. Western culture encourages imagination and innovation but not self-discipline. Eastern culture, on the other hand, is obsessed with self-discipline and hard work but not creativity. These are broad, general, subjective statements, but there are some evidence behind them: in a survey on 21 countries, China's children rank first in computing power, but dead last in imagination.
The good news is that at least one side is trying to learn from the other: there seems to be growing envy from the West of Chinese immigrants' professional success (e.g Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior). The bad news is that copying the Chinese isn't the answer. You don't want to be Chinese; you want to be better than Chinese.
Then there are those who insists self-discipline and creativity form a duality: you either have one or the other. I'm referring to creative people who are reluctant to embrace any form of system or repetition; they feel that one must be "free" and "spontaneous" to be creative. They think being "disciplined" will destroy their flow or damage their brilliant minds. Perhaps they are correct to a certain extent, but no amount of creativity is going to outweigh the detriments of being carried away by every distraction around us.
In the ideal world, educators will figure out whether we can educate students to innovate and focus. 21st century students should be generating creative solutions by leveraging an incredible amount of information. At the moment, however, no concrete education reform is underway and whatever changes being made are actually moving farther away from this goal.
