The difference between my generation and the one I teach is responsibility. As a student, I knew my responsibilities, and when I shirked my responsibilities I did so with the full awareness of what I was refusing to do. Nowadays the responsibility is no longer on the student–at least in their mind. Today’s student comes from a academic background of handholding and constant reward where students are rarely held responsible for behaviors and as a result, need to be provided very specific guidelines and can only operate in a razor thin window of independence.
My students often tell me they want broad, sweeping, engaging assignments that fire their creativity. Then when given that sense of creative freedom they ask for specific examples of what creativity looks like. In other words, when asking me not to constrain them, they look for constraints. I think this is a result of training. Watching my boys go through school it is clear that creativity is not a large part of the curriculum when it should be the core of the curriculum.
The way I teach is to provide the basic skills and create an opportunity for students to apply those skills to a specific (and sometimes general) context. For example, I will tell them to make an 11×17 poster advertising a website about Censorship. I’ll explain that this is about hooking the reader. I wont tell them what the poster should look like, and that is the problem they have. They want to know where everything should go and exactly what to say on the poster. If I say that, they’ll do exactly what I said, stripping away any sense of creativity. So, I include some basics, but that is never enough. They need hand holding.
I can’t do hand holding anymore. It does a disservice to the student and to the world, because I am then creating workerbees as opposed to powerful free thinkers. America used to be an industrial nation where everyone knew their role on the assembly line. That isn’t an option for our nation anymore. We need to create workers who can think and be creative.