Bird’s Eye: As schools move from fosterers of creativity to factories for knowledge acquisition, there is increasing evidence that that process is wrong, and that exploratory play and the arts boosts the ability to learn far more than rote memorization. We offer some statistical proof from Wired, and some anecdotal proof from Mickey Hart and Kurt Vonnegut

* The Virtues Of Play Wired

This lawsuit would be funnier if it were an article from the Onion:

A mad-as-heck Manhattan mom says her daughter’s Ivy League dreams have been all but dashed — and she’s only 4 years old. Nicole Imprescia is suing the $19,000-a-year York Avenue Preschool, saying her daughter, Lucia, was forced to spend too much time with lesser-minded 2- and 3-year-olds when she should have been focusing on test preparation to get into an elite elementary school.

The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, notes that “getting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school” and says the Upper East Side school promised Imprescia it would “prepare her daughter for the ERB, an exam required for admission into nearly all the elite private elementary schools.” But “it became obvious [those] promises were a complete fraud,” the suit says. “Indeed, the school proved not to be a school at all but just one big playroom.“

The irony is that, according to the data, Ms. Imprescia should be looking for schools just like the one she’s suing: Preschools seem to work best when they are ”one big playroom.” That’s because unstructured play turns out to be one of the most important aspects of Pre-K education. A 2007 study published in Science, for instance, compared the cognitive development of 4- and 5-year-olds enrolled in a preschool that emphasized unstructured play – they were using Vygotsky’s “Tools of the Mind” approach – with those in a more typical preschool. After two years, the students in the play-based school scored better on cognitive flexibility, self-control, and working memory, all of which have been consistently linked to academic and real-world achievement.

* There’s a Fire on the Mountain Mickey Hart:

Neuroscientists also have shown that the brain is hardwired for music, innovation and creativity, all other human activities follow. No human culture known to historians or anthropologists has ever existed without music and dance. The arts are a necessity for insight: the arts make us human.The energy that you acquire from art and music turns inspiration into invention. This allows an inventor to dream up something never envisioned before and creates new industries and good-paying jobs.

I don’t propose to simply add art or music classes to the schedule. I mean making the arts a key variable in the STEM equation. Art sparks creativity and instills a sense of wonder and discovery without which learning often winds up being nothing more than rote memorization. Instead of teaching our kids to memorize well, we should be teaching them to think for themselves and to apply their imaginations. We need to fill their heads with more than just facts if they are going to compete in the global economy that is a knowledge economy. Creative thinking is what is needed to, in President Obama’s words, “out-innovate” and “out-educate” the rest of the world. It’s creativity that links education and innovation by taking what is learned in the classroom and using it to make something new.

Art in the classroom not only spurs creativity, it also inspires learning. More organizations concerned with the state of science education in this country are beginning to embrace this idea. The National Academy of Sciences, for example, is reaching out to the artistic community through its Science & Entertainment Exchange, which matches scientists with filmmakers to more accurately portray science — and scientists — on screen. It also encourages collaborations between teachers and creative figures in the entertainment industry, including video-game designers, to develop tools to stimulate learning.

*Kurt Vonnegut goes to buy an envelope. Profundity ensues. – garry’s posterous

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope….