After publishing "Managing Creativity", I was left with some energy and motivation to continue exploring the field of creativity and its surroundings.
Since September 2018 I began thinking about the importance of creativity in education, and how we as educators might be contributing to kill it.
This might sound like a radical comment, but I strongly feel that due to lots of institutional pressures, management educators like myself find it difficult to instill curiosity and imagination in our courses.
Many of my current management students (mostly undergraduate) have also pressures. They want to graduate as soon as possible and get jobs to validate their long standing education. Like me, these guys have been in educational systems for most of their lives. At their early twenties, they find that finally they are to be rewarded by spending long hours in classrooms, taking tests and surviving in often hostile environments to their personalities.
In this climate where time is precious and debts grow, there could be little room for creativity. in education Novel ideas might be valued but even if they are, implementing them into monetized products or services could take longer than expected. The competition for marks at universities is replaced by competitions about funding and success. A competition that seems not to have an end in social media.
I am not sure if even claiming that "the problem of management education is the lack of practice" will solve our creativity drought. Putting students in work placements or making available more entrepreneurship opportunities is to me a way of transferring educational responsibility to other places.
For some students this sort of opportunities helps them to be more attentive to the world around them and to gain problem-solving skills to tackle complex challenges. But they might not be a preferred option for others.
Fostering curiosity, imagination and somehow a re-encounter to that inner self that makes us happy (perhaps that child that we still have within us) might not be part of an employer's agenda. As educators, we could encourage our students to be honest and reflect on what they really enjoy doing (not only what they think management education is to give them or what their parents think they should be doing).
We could open up other types of experiential opportunities to students. Management could be about art, spirituality, community, family.
Our students need to know that failing is OK, not because celebrities say so, but because we are human. We all have the right to change our minds and our hearts.
We might need encourage to go and find that which is mysterious, magic, that which we do not fully comprehend, that which like a new tree, animal, park or friend, we enjoyed venturing to find when we were children.
