Teaching and Learning Creativity
One of the biggest problems in modern education is that parents don’t know or don’t believe that their children have talent. When asked in registration questionnaires whether they believe their children have talent, ninety-nine percent of parents with 3 to 4-year-old children leave this question blank.
Figure 1.
WenXin Peng (8 years old)
Because parents are unsure of the answer to this question, and because they do not know that the child has a talent, they miss a lot of the instinct exhibited in childhood, since beginning to draw in early childhood is the best and desired scenario. Adults think that everything should be formally taught, and children should formally study and learn. In the process of excessively pushing teaching and learning, the innate, intuitive, and imaginative creation of human beings is not only not developed, but can be suppressed.
In an entire art course, we only try to do one thing: Let the children believe that they have a gift, but we spend even more effort to persuade parents to believe that their children are gifted. Standing on the basis of "originality", "teaching" is a dangerous thing, because there is no such thing to teach, there is no such thing to learn; like Edison before the light bulb, or the Wright brothers before the airplane.
Children do not need to learn, they are born able to draw; from one year old, the hand can grip the pen to begin to doodle. Drawing is natural instinct, creation is born. Sometimes adults do not understand and think we should start "teach" them painting in early childhood, otherwise the child will not know how to draw.
We think that everything must be taught in order to know, it happens that the art of "original creation". If this priceless treasure is taught more, it is no longer; this is the earliest and greatest paradox of life. Just as everyone can walk, children need to walk by themselves; parents can not teach the center of gravity, or the amount of force needed by the left or right foot to walk well. They can only let children try to grasp the movement themselves, let them trip and fall so they can find their own balance point. Everyone eventually learns to walk, only through self experience, can they continue step by step on their own road.
Figure 2.
HaoHua Xu (10 years old)
"Knowledge" can be taught, but "understanding" cannot; it should happen naturally.
At a certain age, each person will have the ability to draw portraits. The focus is not on painting, but is on letting the child use every painting experience of their own creation. Letting them training their own creativity, just as it takes time to experience falls, sooner or later they can learn to walk. Since sooner or later everyone can draw like and later all very like, adults should put set aside the result-seeking mindset. Instead, let the children experiment and "practice" to become familiar with their creativity. Not to mention, the paint "accurate" is definitely not the purpose of art education.
Problems in our parents or in charge of the general teaching of preschool teachers, are resuits of victimization in education of the past, not too ignorant of fine arts, but also ignorant of art education. They have an excessive expectation of skills and "accuracy", and forget that art education is the road to "create" the most powerful and direct shortcut.
Figure 3. ZheMing Zhang (eight years old)
Figure 1.
WenXin Peng (8 years old)
Figure 2.
Figure 2.HaoHua Xu (10 years old)
Figure 3. ZheMing Zhang (eight years old)