Where's the Creativity

There has been movement for decades to seriously restrict our students' ability to interact creatively. It began when districts began cutting art and music from our schools. No more band or choir. No more learning how to play the recorder or how to keep time on a drum. No more making mom a crude piece of ceramic pottery that she will treasure forever because it came from her child's hand and imagination. How sad. Even taking a social and historical perspective, how do we teach children all the words to America the Beautiful or teach them songs that are relevant to the diverse cultural building of our nation? How do we teach the importance of songs that tell the history of millions of people who otherwise never make it into our textbooks? Who is responsible for teaching the value of interesting visual composition? Is there a school out there who can teach why we, as a species, have created murals from Lascaux to last night's graffiti? Maybe politicians have been restricting the arts because artists are somehow dangerous, but they have also put serious cuts into home economics classes, auto and wood shop, and physical education. Why shouldn't we know how to cook, change our oil, or play kick ball? The answer is often that there is not enough money and besides, we need to help our children pass the high stakes tests. Now, we are one step further away from creating well-rounded students as some districts are choosing to chop literature from our English classes.



Of course, we do need to improve our ability to read, interpret, and respond to non-fiction writing, but not at the expense of millions of pages of important literature. Getting rid of literature from the curriculum is not the solution for helping students become better writers, but having students read and intelligently respond to themes found in all types of writing will. And that isn't all, students also need to create their own pieces of fiction and non-fiction texts. Those of us involved in education know that according to Bloom's Taxonomy, being able to find information in a text is lower level thinking. On the other hand, being able to connect ideas found in both literary and expository tests, understand the relationship between both texts, and eventually create an entirely new text based on what was previously read, is a form of higher thinking. Simply sticking to non-fictions texts such as newspaper articles and informational essays is no better than restricting students to the study of poetry, novels, drama, or short stories. However, one important responsibility of all teachers is to be scholarly enough to expose students to creative texts and the informational texts that help support these works. It is equally important for students to understand how creative texts are also a response to very real issues in our world. One effectively cannot read Ellison's Invisible Man or Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God without understanding pre-Civil Rights America in the 20th century; and we can learn about the context of those novels through non-fiction texts. Although we can also read the non-fiction texts without the novels, students lose a valuable component when they are not afforded the perspective of the characters in those novels. Imagine the ideas that students will never be exposed to if they are never exposed to the voices of literature.

Many of the texts to be excluded are also the voices of those who are left out of our general curriculum. History classes do not teach us slave narratives, indigenous creation stories, corridos, or the stories of the poor and disenfranchised, but we have their narratives to add new dimensions to our understanding of American history. The same is true of world history. Numerous cultures have flood stories, Cinderella stories, and morality tales that humanize people across the globe that are nothing more than abstract ideas to children sitting in desks. This humanizing factor also creates empathy and sense of common understanding, and on higher levels students can trace how these stories spread from one place to the other over time through commerce and conquest; or they can consider how similar themes are central to many, if not all, sustainable civilizations. It is ridiculous to remove these from our schools.

If anything, we should be exploring a more integrated way of presenting fiction and non-fiction texts together. Although it would be difficult at first, imagine what students could learn from reading Isabel Allende while also learning about Salvador Allende, the US induced coup on Sept. 11, 1973, how the coup changed Isabel Allende's life forever, and how those changes influence her writing. Students might even come to see the irony of the 1973 coup and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The same could be done for Walt Whitman. We could look at his romantic view of an emerging nation, the myth of American rugged individuality, and study homosexuality in 19th century America. We could study Sherman Alexie and the lives of those we call "Indians" and look at the reality of life on the reservation and what happens when one leaves the reservation. We might even be inspired to look at the lives of local tribes such as the Kumayaay, so they are actually seen as a real part of our community. How strange that would be. And still, this does not even take into consideration the large community of Chicano and Puerto Rican writers.

When we begin to look at Chicano and Puerto Rican writers we also have the chance to look at Manifest Destiny, the relationship between identity and national origin, how the government officially categorized brown people from south of its borders, and offers a myriad of views into economics, conquest, and immigration. Starting with Americo Paredes, we are offered a very different view of the American West than that told in popular American culture. As students continue through the Chicano canon, they will undoubtedly encounter Santiago Baca, Acosta, and Luis Rodriguez. All three discuss open racism in our court systems, prison, gangs, and drugs. These authors beg for students to continue research into areas such as U.S. military operations throughout the Caribbean, and all points south of the U.S.-Mexico border to see how our own government has helped induce mass immigration from these places into the United States. Committed in the name of democracy, our government's intervention in Central America contributed to the formation of the Mara Salvatrucha 13 and the expansion of the 18th St. Gang, which built upon the Chicano cholos of the southern California barrios, and have become a near unstoppable force in organized crime. In addition, students could study the Iran-Contra hearings to learn how our government, through the CIA and military, dealt in many of the guns and drugs that flooded our streets. These are not some of Acosta's wild rantings of the 1960's and 70's, they are real parts of our history, and they add context for some of the Chicano cannon's greatest writers.

Even though Chicanos have an interesting history to look at, we cannot forget the Puerto Ricans, especially the NewYoRican writers. Piri Tomas and others are direct descendants from those who were told that they are Americans, but they are the "other" type of Americans. You get to be a citizen, but don't ask for too much. You can come to New York, but you don't speak enough English for a good yob. Students could read Pinero's Short Eyes and discuss the overwhelming problem of prison and poor youth on the East Coast. They could look at pedophilia in their own communities, consider how that effects how young males grow up, and look at how child molesters are dealt with in prison. In a larger sense, Pinero is talking about how so many people put their trust in someone or something, and are then betrayed. But life goes on, and Pinero writes about that, too. These can definitely be dangerous ideas, but not so dangerous as to get rid of literature.

Much of the literature that schools want to rid themselves of probably don't even include any of these writers. In the long-run, that ensures that millions of our students will never even be exposed to them in the first place unless they are lucky enough to make it to college. We need to find a balance that shows our students how to seriously dig into literature in ways that promote a greater sense of learning. By continuing along this path of ignorance, we only do ourselves harm by creating wider gaps between the informed and the uninformed. As this gap widens, so do other divisions, all one needs to do is watch the news to see how far we are growing apart from each other. Education is a way to narrow those gaps, but if we won't even teach the literature that tells our story, then how will anyone ever learn anything except what we are fed. It is logical enough to believe that our rebellious Founding Fathers never intended for an American public education system to become an instrument of tyranny; so it only makes sense to continue giving our students different ways of exploring the world around them, and like so many memorable things in this world, that probably begins with a good story.