I have just finished reading a beautifully written, highly informative and accessible biography about Leonardo da Vinci. In it there is constant reference to him being a man of science and the arts – someone who saw them as inextricably linked. 

For Leonardo one informed the other. He was not formally schooled, but he was curious about everything and in his own studies and explorations of all that absorbed his imagination, he combined aspects of science, engineering, mathematics, art, anatomy and more. 

He was also fortunate to live at a time of great invention and in a city – Florence – where architects, engineers, silk makers, wood carvers, sculptors and painters were an integrated talent pool who engaged with and learned from each other and applied what they learned in new ways.

The importance of young people today being provided with authentic opportunities through their formal education to follow their imagination, respond creatively to problems and be given occasion to develop their innovative and adaptive ability is no less than it was in Leonardo’s day. 

We need to create an environment in which young people can try to achieve in a diversity of areas and not be pigeon-holed early as being good at one thing and so not encouraged to spend time on other activities that may intrigue them.

Educating active participants

We, as educators, talk a lot about the importance of developing creative, flexible, lateral thinkers who will be active participants in, not just passive consumers of, the future. 

Formal education should be about guiding learners to learn how to think, how to reason, how to critically evaluate information, how to successfully collaborate with others and how to transfer skills and knowledge across a range of settings to arrive at different solutions to problems. 

But… much of the time we have learners sit passively in seats, we talk at them and have them work through artificially separated out content, at the same rate, for a set period of time, eventually all sitting the same tests to determine if they can progress to the next level where they do it all over again. 

Take a simple example of a class being asked to work in small groups on a project, excited and fully engaged in problem-solving, when the instructor announces that time is up and they must pack everything away and move on to the next subject or class. The learning momentum is destroyed. 

That curious young person with a wild imagination, inquisitive about a host of unrelated things so fascinating to him or her, is eventually turned into a compliant, uniform student, who gradually loses their natural want for enquiry. 

There is very little if any authentic opportunity for exploring unrelated but interesting events and issues, for engaging in creative problem-solving, nor encouragement for taking initiative and fostering of new ideas. That requires a shift in approach to teaching-learning. It means breaking down compartmentalised discipline or subject boundaries and engaging in interdisciplinary teaching and learning. 

It also means providing learning environments in which risk-taking is encouraged and creative self-expression is genuinely commended. It means involving students in making, expressing, experiencing and-or interpreting in active rather than passive learning and meaning-making. 

In essence, it requires 1) a major rethink of what constitutes ‘the curriculum’ and 2) more flexibility in how learning is organised.

Diversity and innovation

Those environments that continue to promote learner attainment of a narrowly defined body of knowledge, that persist in prescribing one set of learning outcomes for all and continue to measure all learners accordingly, don’t provide any opportunity for thinking that includes making judgements in the absence of rules, having to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity and constructing imaginative, fresh, even absurd responses to problems. 

Diversity, creativity and innovation are critical to any society’s future. Education should not be about constraining creative potential. Homogeneity is not what we want or need. We need to better reward the risk-takers and the imaginative thinkers.

The challenge is for our education institutions to create appropriate structures and processes that generate learning conditions to facilitate and harness young people’s acquisition of such attributes.

Dr Nita Temmerman is a former university pro vice-chancellor (academic) and executive dean of the faculty of education at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is currently chair of two higher education academic boards in Australia, visiting professor to Ho Chi Minh City Open University and Solomon Islands National University, as well as invited specialist with the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications, invited external reviewer with the Oman Academic Accreditation Authority, registered expert at the Australian Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, and a published author.