[Bromikka]

i am not a parent or teacher, but will relate what occured to me as a child.

schools today are heavy on maths and sciences first, followed by language and history, while art and music take a back seat. children are conditioned out of using the right brain and most education is left-brained. creativity takes a back set.

how many adults were told as children they couldn't make a living with art, music or poetry?

that happened to me. i loved music classes and never skipped them, because the energies were wonderful. it would always lift me up and allowed me more ability to understand the sciences and maths. sciences were my second favorite classes.

anyway i am a result of the left-brained teachings and have great difficulty with my creative side. there are moments of clarity, but they are few.

i remember fourth grade. the teacher played guitar, and a few days a week she would take it out and we would sing.

in second grade, we had a music class and the teacher would play piano and we would all sing. on more quiet days with the same teacher in "homeroom" would pass out pages to color. i didn't know it then, but it was sacred geometry. i'm not sure if she was aware of this, but most of us loved coloring these and we would figure out "new" ways of folding paper to make things like a paper blowfish. after you fold the paper, you blow into one corner and it puffs up. i wish i could remember how to do that. lol

so anyway, i think the best gift of all to share, is to encourage children never to allow themselves to be educated out of right-brained, creative endeavors. while science and math is important, creativty and an open mind can greatly enhance these studies. i think i read somewhere that einstein would dream of things, write them down upon awakening, and not even realise what he had written until later.

teach them it's ok to make mistakes. the story of ivory soap is a good one. the worker went to lunch and left his machine running. when he returned to his work area and realised his mistake, he feared reprimand and allowed the soap to go out. later on people kept asking about the soap that would float and wanted more.

there's a video about the same subject on ted.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

sir ken robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. with ample anecdotes and witty asides, robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize -- much less cultivate -- the talents of many brilliant people. "we are educating people out of their creativity," robinson says. the universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. a typical review: "if you have not yet seen sir ken robinson's ted talk, please stop whatever you're doing and watch it now."