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Twisting Knobs
(Creativity) Is all about broadening experience, and this comes from an open mind. Travel and experiencing other cultures can open up our minds to entirely new ways of thinking, culture, art and music, and conceptions of the world, with ideas that may be very different from our own and which may stimulate our own thinking in entirely new directions. Likewise exposing oneself to varied and diverse disciplines – this was the point of a ‘classical education’ –exposure to arts, literature, history, maths and science. It is not about specialization and singular focus. Students learned to ‘see’ things, to analyze, and to express themselves, to draw connections between the disciplines and see how answers in one area could provide solutions to another. This was Steve Jobs’ point, that creative people ‘… were able to connect experiences they’ve had to synthesize new things. And the reasons they were able to do that that they have had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.’ This was also the point that Ken Robinson brought home when bemoaning the American educational system; too narrow a focus, and a focus on testing. (He believes that ALL of us are born creative, but that over time, it gets 'educated' out of us, so that but the time we are adults, what was once the flame of creativity has become a dying ember....However, he also believes that it can be cultivated and nurtured and practiced.) As far as my rewritten song lyrics apply, the original is a song I grew up with, but it was applying it to current (recent) events that made it attractive to me. To be able take an event that has had such import and currency in the US over the past decade, and to apply it to a song that spoke to a generation of the 80s with very few concerns, was extremely appealing and also relevant to represent how our lives have changed. | ||