Narrative: Conflict and Resolution

The main problem I want to focus on is the idea that education (specifically high school curriculum standards) does not foster enough creativity in students. 

The world today is complex, and we want to educate our students to face the challenges of tomorrow. Education needs to produce critical thinkers, designers, synthesizers, people who will make a difference, people who can generate new ideas. Most high school graduates nowadays go on to some kind of secondary education - over 85% of high school graduates. This kind of percentage of graduates requires a generation of critical thinkers, and the high school curriculum is not producing it. 

High school curricula are simply too pedantic for today's society - students are running on the racetrack of their high school careers from test to work to test, without the chance for any creativity. They are learning to think inside the bounds of the box that is the high school curriculum. But the world is beautiful outside the box.

The way to encourage creative thinking, foster innovation, and push students to obtain the skills about global leadership that they need as world citizens is to give them space to explore and come up with creative solutions to problems themselves. Instead of asking for "recall" of material, ask for them to build a visualization of the material. Instead of telling them about the process of design, have them design something. Instead of explaining how to build something, let them build and explore. The high school curriculum standards must be changed from a simple recall or "understanding" metric to a "intuitive feel" or "ability to teach others" or "mastery" standard. 

Organizations and programs like the FIRST Robotics program aim to foster creativity and critical thinking in students by providing them a guided set of tasks to accomplish, letting them come up with creative solutions to the problems at hand. High school curriculum standards should be changed to reflect these values, to allow students to explore the world around them and come up with innovative solutions to problems. 

The way to create the engineers and thinkers of tomorrow is to foster creativity by giving students a hands-on learning experience inside and outside of the classroom. By adding more hands-on activity standards and assessments to the high school curriculum. The students need to think outside the box, or they will just be stuck doing the same things over and over again as a result of their high school education.