Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Chaining The Creative Soul
Chaining The Creative Soul
© 2007
Our children are taken from our homes, large or small, good or bad.
They are placed in a centrally located building where they are joined by
many more. The corridors of the building are lined with noisy, metal
closets intended for supplies and clothing.
And the school is but the first of many institutions that perceive
subjection as their duty.
But whatever the method, fear is usually the motivation for acts
designed to limit individuality of expression. And this well-engineered
fear exacts a terrible price. In the words of Thomas Szasz, a doctor,
“institutional psychiatry, whether in the mental hospital or the school, is
perhaps the finest technique developed so far for driving the soul out of
man”.
The retesting was done openly and the results were more than a little
surprising. Joe now tested out at 110 ---and, at that time, the
conventional view as that I.Q. scores would never change more than five
points in either direction. It was even more interesting to observe that
after the publication of the new score, Joe’s grade average advanced
from “D” to “C”. Whether this advance was a consequence of a possible
increase in Joe’s self-confidence or a realization among his teachers that
their assessments of his abilities did not conform to objective science
remains a mystery even now.
I do not intend to imply that Joe was in all ways a highly creative child
only that he dramatically demonstrated that with a little confidence he
could over through the mantle of ineptitude placed upon him by a
highly prejudiced and ignorant society. The growth in self-confidence in
him was a joy to observe, and, who knows, perhaps this episode released
sufficient frustrations in Joe that he did not, indeed, move on to become
a statistic in the records of crime.
In their totality, these changes are obviously far off, but steps in the
right direction can be made now. And of organizations currently on the
scene the New Mexico Alliance for Arts Education may function the best
as a shielding apparatus to protect all students—but especially the
creative ones—from the over-anxious social engineer.