Drawing a few lessons about life and education

Way back in school in the old country, my friends Vijay and Srikumar were very good with pencil drawing.  Animals, nature, and even people, you name it and they easily could.  I, on the other hand, couldn't even draw a line!

How on earth do some people--even without any formal training--draw and sing and dance and write poems and more?

I have forever wondered about this, and have even blogged in plenty about creativity.  I get pissed off when education systematically marginalizes all these, and then write something like this, which I did a year ago:

Creativity is something that has always intrigued me; I have always felt that formal education the way we offer it simply kills any creativity. Only the fortunate ones survive with their creative skills in tact.
All these add to my frustration with the mantras of STEM and coding. If I could, I would tell educators to "fuck off."  But, alas, in the academic and professional worlds, we cannot ;)

Which is why when I read about one of the MacArthur "genius" Award winners, I was easily bowled over.

Lynda Barry, whose class at Wisconsin helps college students tap innate creativity, is one of the honorees.    Barry was tapped for the award for "Inspiring creative engagement through original graphic works and a teaching practice centered on the role of image making in communication."

I followed the link and listened to a 30-minute interview with her from six years ago.  Yep, there is no doubt about her genius.

Barry says there:

I find so interesting is there's that longing to make things stays with us our whole lives, and there is a lot of sadness about it, and a lot of, a lot of terror about drawing. I mean, that's the - that's the part, when I'm working with the people at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, I'm around geneticists and mathematicians and physicists, all these people who are also - and they do their big formulas on the board, you know, delta epsilon minus two and whatever they're doing. But if they have to draw like even a stick figure, they freak out. So that's interesting to me.

Count me as one those sad people!

Maybe some day we will think beyond how to prepare young children as coders and programmers and worker bees, and encourage them to explore their inner creativity.  Further, it is not as if creativity and imagination are "wastes" in the scientific and analytical thinking; remember this quote from a week ago?

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

On my part, later this evening I will go watch and support some creative people.  That's something "creative" that I could do.