The Arts in Schools - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

43 Freedom Two further points must be stressed. First, teachers mustand avoid giving the impression that only their views count. Ifauthority we want to promote independent, critical and creativethinking, we shall be working against ourselves if we try toachieve these things by methods of teaching which stifleinitiative and promote the acceptance of some authoritarianfiat of a body of elders or establishment. If the stress is uponconformity of response and acceptance of established ideas,we can hardly expect the emergence of critical and creativework as a direct result. The balance is difficult to strike.The teacher must promote the application and disciplinewhich underpin all creative work but allow for the newdepartures in thinking and doing by which it is characterised.There is a difference then between what we may call teacherinputs which may need to be closely structured and theteacher's responses to what the children produce as a result,which ought to be flexible and open-ended. This brings usto our second point. To encourage creative work we mustput a premium on the pupils' own original ideas wheneverpossible; setting them to use these either to produce newwork or new interpretations, or to propose novel approachesto the solution of problems for which their existing knowledgeor skills provide only partial or inadequate solutions.We are talking here not only about the arts but alsoabout, work throughout the curriculum. If we wish to developyoung people's creative capabilities, we would do well toheed the results of research 8 which argues that only in classroomswhere there is an emphasis on self-directed and selfinitiatedwork — keeping in mind the principles we havediscussed — will there be any departure from the pressuresof conformity, convention and repetition that characteriseso much work in our schools at present.These pressures are particularly acute where the rigidrequirements of certain types of public examinations andthe teaching methods associated with them act as stultifyingconstraints upon pupils' sense of initiative.Downey and Kelly summarise some apposite conclusionsby Torrance which might provide helpful guidelines here.34'Torrance's suggestions are that teachers should be respectfulof children's unusual questions and ideas, showingthem that these ideas have value. They should provideopportunities for self-initiated learning and for periodsof non-evaluated practice, indicating that whatever childrendo may be of some value and is not constantly going tobe assessed by some absolute criterion of correctness setup by teachers. This emphasises not only the need tovalue children in then: own terms, by acknowledging the