Hi, Jeremy,
This is to the side of the main thread, so I've broken it off with a new subject header. Your wrote that "teaching them [young people] language and how to write is clearly deeply unhelpful if a bigger picture of creativity is taken, as there is nothing quite as profoundly creative, or so most people claim, as children before they are literate ...."
While children may be more creative before they are literate, becoming literate may not be the cause of diminished creativity. Rather, the problem may lie in how -- and where -- children learn to read and write.
Children learn literacy in schools. These organizations are structured to socialize and normalize behavior. Effectively, this gets back to Chuck's original question, educating for creativity, as contrasted with reducing children to socially normative thinking by placing them in schools that train them -- I use the word train advisedly -- to think and behave like others in their cohort, all of whom have been trained to think and behave as the children (and adults) do in the cohorts before them.
Once the system begins working, of course, it is not merely the official structure that takes on the work of normalization, but the parallel social systems in which children themselves take on the roles of unwitting behaviorists.
That's short-hand, of course, for a long and difficult series of arguments.
One could probably just quote Sophocles.
For those of you who are lucky enough to be in Melbourne today, I'm happy to note that Jeremy Hunsinger is here at Swinburne to present a workshop for Design Victoria and Swinburne Design on "Hack Labs: Collaborative Design in the Global Economy."
http://www.designvic.com/Events/DesignVictoria/2009_07_29_Jeremy_Hunsinger.aspx
Hope we'll be seeing some PhD-design participants at the event.
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
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