This Salon.com article may not seem, on the surface, to have anything to do with creative writing, but in my opinion it does. I often think and wonder about how our current high tech/social networking culture affects our ability to be creative. One of my recurring worries is that the generations raised from a young age on smart phones and iPads are sorely missing out on the part of life known as "solitude." I think that solitude is a crucial component of creativity (and of independent thinking, deep thinking, soul-searching and spiritual growth).
So...I enjoyed this article, particularly the ending...which I have included in the excerpt below:
Demand for remedial instruction in colleges is on the rise. About 75 percent of New York City freshmen attending community college last year needed remedial math, reading or writing courses. The organization that administers the ACT found that only one in four of 2010 high school graduates who took the ACT exam were college-ready in four key subjects areas: English, math, reading and science. Statistics like these are startling, as they not only reveal serious flaws in our educational system, but also raise questions as to how these students will fare in the future if they are lacking the knowledge and critical skills needed to succeed in college and beyond. . .
. . . ending graphs of article:
You write about what you see as our obsession with the idea of success and our desire to do away with failure. What do we lose in the process of striving for success?
There is nothing wrong with striving for success at something meaningful. But if the emphasis is on the success and not on the thing being accomplished, the latter almost inevitably gets reduced. You can be successful if you make the task easy enough or lower the standards enough. You can feel good about it temporarily and get temporary approval or applause. But it is much more valuable, in the end, to accomplish something concrete, even if it doesn’t manifest itself as success for a long time.
For instance, a student is having difficulty with fractions. Well, that student should work on fractions until that student feels comfortable and fluent with them. But the talk emphasizes that “the student succeeds.” We hear about successful schools, successful students, successful people and so forth. Usually this means having some attainment of high stature, high score or high salary. The true accomplishments come often in the absence of these immediate, visible results; and if you sit and work with a subject, or you sit and struggle with a language, you may go for months without feeling you’re succeeding necessarily, but what you’re getting is something that won’t go away. Over time, after that constant practice and struggle, you find that you have attained something: You come to know that language. So the attention must go to the thing itself that you’re trying to do.
article written by Alice Karekezi
- Link to full article:
via www.salon.com
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