Yesterday, during a class I teach to Junior High School students (Grades 7-9), we discussed their favorite school subjects. Not one of the students mentioned English or Chinese as their favorite subjects. When I asked why, they said that these subjects are boring, because all they do is study grammar. That is why they attend my English class, because we are reading a novel (a simplified version of Oliver Twist).

Apparently, the only things they read at school are factual prose articles written by famous personalities exhorting youth to be good citizens and to study hard. They do study some poetry - 1000-year-old poetry, written in a Chinese that no one understands. They do not read any English prose or poetry. If they take story books of their own to school, these are confiscated if found by the teachers.

Why is creativity banished from the classroom and treated as an illicit activity? Are the purposes of education advanced by stock piling facts? What use are facts without the ability to creatively apply them? And what better training ground for creative application than studying and applying creativity?

It is certainly in no short measure due to this creativeless educational environment that Taiwan is infamous for copyright piracy, for products ranging from movies to kitchen appliances. As one adult student once told me in a class discussion on this issue, why spend all the time and money on creating things when others can do it for you. Why, indeed? Seems like a waste of effort, doesn't it. Except that uncreative people and societies are followers and dependant on those who are creative. The cost of this is far greater than the initial creative outlay, as Taiwan is amply proving at the moment, completely dependant as it is on the creative American and Japanese markets and thus in steady decline and lagging behind as it awaits new innovations from these two creative giants.

Can a modern society afford to produce students whose main response to the question, "What do you think?" is "I don't know."

31 March 2002

Dion Marc Delport

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