Note: The thoughts in this entry are my own.
Before I graduated from university, I was teaching an incredibly smart Primary 5 (and later, Primary 6) kid. He was fascinated with Science, and often asked me lots of questions, some of which I could not answer, like, “Why is it impossible to calculate the distance between stars?” Gee, I don’t know buddy, but let me go found out. I made an effort to print out as much information as I could for him to absorb, as it was pretty much killing two birds with one stone. Although he had spurts of creativity, he couldn’t sustain them, and they soon fizzled out into a blur.
I’d asked him for a sample question his school had asked him to write, and he basically showed me a story about returning a lost wallet. This topic has been given to students since time immemorial. I remember doing it as a child. Everyone remembers doing it. But what I remember actually having as a child was the freedom to write whatever I wanted. We had two composition exercise books, and one for school mandated compositions and the other for whatever else you could write. No one said that I had to write didactic stories about returning wallets and stopping thieves. I could write about aliens, time travel, and everything in-between.
I got to experiment. I got to have fun. Kids don’t have fun with writing anymore.
Instead, they have to write sequential stories about children returning lost wallets, catching thieves, cheating in examinations, or some moralistic composition. Accidents and drownings are also pretty common — there is no variety, and the cliches come. Someone’s face would be as red as a tomato. Another’s would heave a sigh of relief because a hard day of school was over. There is no fantasy, science fiction, or mystery. Children are supposed to write about events that may happen in real life, and I die a little inside if I have to say that what they have to write has to be “realistic”. I settle for plausible, but that’s besides the point.
The point is that there’s little room for creativity in the syllabus, and as a result, we’re killing students’ creativity. What’s the point of making them write compositions that tick all the boxes in terms of language skills, but suppressing their imagination? It even begings with the language, because schools say that they can’t start sentences with “And”, “But”, or “So”. or use short forms. I understand why — children need to stop writing sentence fragments and learn how short forms can be made from the long way of writing them, but telling them that they can’t unleash their imagination goes against the nature of learning and exploring. I fail to see why they shouldn’t write about stories that are about space and aliens, or solving crimes. Teaching them genre fiction also helps them in the same way as writing “realistic” fiction. They have to make an internal universe work, and find solutions to the problems in fiction in the same way.
Moreover, teaching them how to write fantasy or science fiction lets them get acquainted with tropes that are often toxic. Don’t like the damsel in distress? Me neither. Let’s write a story about a girl who goes to slay a dragon and makes friends with him because they aren’t so bad after all. As for marrying a prince? That can wait till later. In this way, letting be creative empowers them because they can write their own stories and the solutions to their problems. If they can write themselves into these stories, even better. We need diverse stories from people of different races and backgrounds. Having them take charge of their own stories through writing is the first step.
Forget about asking them to write stories with morals — let them write what they want. Cultivate their creativity and teach them how to find solutions to problems in fiction. Show them that their thoughts, ideas, and people like them are important. That is what we can do to empower children. Don’t tell them that writing should be didactic in nature, or that stories should be one way. Let them explore and grow.