A flashback to the mass cheating incident at an elementary school in Surabaya left our hearts wrenched and minds disturbed. Academic knowledge often becomes children’s benchmark for success and thus every possible way is taken and considered halal.
But how about morality and motivation that serve as a basis for children’s own, and our nation’s, advancement? How can we solve traffic jams and other complex issues in life if the way our nation thinks and conducts its education are in opposition?
Sometimes we value and praise our children according to their academic achievement stated in annual reports or exam results. What we often miss is the process in-between, whether the result came from an optimal enjoyable learning experience or by pure memorizing, copying, or worse, by cheating.
This is important because, without the joy of learning, a child will lose its curiosity.
Every parent and employer wants the best for their children and company. The aim is for the children and company to match their performance with their potential, to experience a meaningful and well-rounded success.
However, to reach well-rounded success and stay motivated is not easy, because you are required to be not only strong academically, but also to be innovative, adaptable to changes, and able to transform your new ideas into vivid implementation plans.
Naturally, each of us is curious and creative as a child. Throughout our childhood development, these natural traits are supported by our education and family environment through a range of knowledge and guidance.
Simple activities like play, choosing our clothes for the day, observation, sound expression, or trying something new, provide golden opportunities for children to actively create an experience based on what they see visually, rather than just memorizing or copying.
Through these active experiences children become enlightened and make relevant connections between their personal worlds and the real world, engaging them with interesting, day-to-day interpretations. Unconsciously, these moments of enlightenment continue at work or later in life, when we learn about new products or develop knowledge, enlivening us with a wow effect and a sense of achievement when we experience it.
What parents or employers often miss is that if a child’s or an employee’s involvement is motivated by the fulfillment of curiosity and creative traits, not by a “reward-and-punishment” system, then the child or employee will engage him/herself to a life-long learning system and total working commitment that makes them adaptable to changes, immune to extreme stress levels and, ultimately, wanting to the best for themselves and their employers.
These issues have been researched extensively and proven in many life and product evolutions. In reality, providing a child or employee with appropriate and increasing challenges, and letting a certain degree of autonomy work on those challenges, reinforces well-rounded education and skills for such children or employees.
Unfortunately, business and parents fail to fashion a change in this motivation paradigm, even after years of psychology scientists’ research into such theory. Many still run their businesses with the “reward and punishment” system and wonder why they fail to motivate their children or employees.
And while the need to fulfill curiosity from an academic viewpoint receives a lot of attention and effort throughout childhood, the need to fulfill a child’s creative traits, and to find creative outlets for him or her, is still very limited.
Along with growing complexities in the real world, academic achievement is not necessarily a benchmark for success. We have all undergone this when we plan to enter a reputable school or the working sector. Yes indeed, the gate is guarded by admission heroes and super HR departments, whose first filter is a candidate’s prior academic results. However, during panel interviews and school or working periodic assessments, students or employees are not solely valued by their academic history.
In fact, according to a survey conducted by IBM in 2010, which looked at 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries, creativity is the top leadership quality required in any business. Creativity is the main source for problem solving and advancement, whether minimal or groundbreaking.
Unfortunately, art and creativity have long been underestimated in Asia, let alone in Indonesia. Most of us agree that art touches a person heart and soul; however, our definition for art is often limited to something beautiful and valuable to admire and look at, but never really as a medium to facilitate creativity, especially for the non-artsy child.
We may buy very expensive artworks to hang on our walls of fame, but many times do not appreciate our children’s scribbles and freedom of expression, by judging them to not have any talent for art or creativity.
As for creativity, many of us unconsciously kill the creative spirit by looking for shortcuts and easy fixes that we think will be good enough to survive our current problems, but not really work on (creative) solutions that can fix the problem in the long-term, or even permanently.
We quickly implement a plan for a problem by copying others. For example, on city infrastructure development, quickly building the monorail pillars to cure Jakarta’s transportation problems based on fixes done in other countries; or by generalizing a solution for different problems while creating another bigger problem, like building flyovers above two-lane roads to provide access between the city and remote areas, while in the process only creating more traffic jams and bottlenecks — not just between those areas but also within the city.
Interestingly, the gap between the perceived importance and rating of creativity is the widest between those of childhood and those of the working world. Only a few schools and children’s enrichment programs are already embedding an approach to inspire and ignite children’s creativity in their curriculums.
On the other hand, many multinational companies encourage, and provide training for, their employees to inspire creativity, such as creative selling, thinking outside the box, achievement motivation, etc. It seems that the urgency of having a competitive advantage and sustainable growth in business drive companies to provide such trainings.
In summary, to brace our nation for advancement, first we need to change our paradigms regarding the motivation for learning, from a results orientation to a learning process orientation. Second, we need to feed children’s and employees’ curiosity and creativity rather than assess and reward them with a carrot-and-stick system in order to reinforce well-roundedness and total commitment.
Last but not least, we need to appreciate and inspire more substantial creativity and value the acts and consequences before making decisions or choosing solutions.
The writer, a Sampoerna Foundation scholar 2004, is co-owner of Abrakadoodle Indonesia, a children’s art education program from the US. The opinions expressed are her own.
