There are different positions to see the human being. One of them is the study of human behavior based on biology, its thinking and all the theoretical and empirical foundation that exists in this regard. But this is not enough, since under this gaze there is a limitation to recognize other dimensions of the human being such as his corporality, creativity, affection, spirituality, his essence . The human being is more than a set of biological functions governed by the nervous system in response to the environment.
This limited vision vis-à-vis other dimensions of the human being is reflected in traditional education, in our society, in our families, in our culture. For hundreds of years you have convinced us that the important thing in a human being is intelligence. We have always thought of intelligence as the ability to perform mathematical operations, learn texts by heart, and other skills related to the left hemisphere, but we have neglected other elements of the human being, making him a being mutilated by our own beliefs .
From the methods used by parents to educate their children, we see how they seek to classify them as: an obedient, intelligent child, one who follows the rules to the letter without questioning anything. That child who seeks to obtain a ten at school and considers that it is therefore better than others. Unlike the problem child, the one to whom the different behavior correction strategies should be applied to fit what society expects from every good human being, depriving him of his spontaneity and creativity. And it is that creativity is something that has been constantly underestimated in human beings. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers are often considered superior to artists, novel writers or designers.
For our society the left hemisphere has become a god of mud that we constantly worship and we have left the right hemisphere aside, making it a simple helper of the left hemisphere. We have lost our ability to marvel at the simple things in life, to explore our world with an innocent look, of one who does not carry prejudices and previous knowledge. We have rejected our ability to create.
Education and creativity
Education must be accompanied by creativity because in it is the possibility of evolving. Without creativity we stagnate, we lose the ability to adapt. Only flexible minds are able to achieve great changes. Accepting that we are multidimensional beings is something necessary to continue with a process of human evolution. Express ourselves as total human beings accepting that we have a body that expresses, creates and transforms with each experience . That rationality is only one thousandth of all our human potential.
The development of the human being is not only intellectual. Understanding that we have the possibility of creating beyond what is possible, that we express beyond what we speak and that we believe in something more than what we see, is part of knowing that we are integral beings. Creativity is not exclusively an intellectual process. Our bodies create, teach us about ourselves, learn, improve our ability to communicate. The body reflects our emotions and feelings giving others the ability to understand our inner world, the one we cannot express through words. Through body expression we show our life story, the learning and the memories that inhabit us, those memories of which we are often not aware.
We have become accustomed to inhabiting our brains, but our body shows with transparency all how much we are. When we seek to suppress our emotions, our bodies are altered, cease to be creative, becoming inflexible human beings who seek to hide their true selves for fear of the expression of our interior and over time that fear is transferred around us, forming the idea of that the right thing is to keep ourselves hidden, with a mask that shows that rational human, capable of thinking about intellectual matters but unable to recognize himself in his intimate being.
Stop hiding the human being
We hide our imagination and with it comes frustration. We become bitter beings who only seek to fill themselves with the outside so as not to have to see the inner emptiness. This is how we have created a world where it is forbidden to imagine different ways of educating, because traditional education allows us to have control over the children and youth that are being formed, filling them with the same fear, dissatisfaction and repression that we have done each one of us.
In education we see how a number is assigned to students to determine their level of knowledge, and although modern terms such as competency assessment have been implemented, in the end it all comes down to the same, to a grade that indicates how good or bad memory has a student. Students have no interest in education, they simply want to meet the needs that adults and society impose. We see how in the current age many children and adolescents refuse to study, because they lost interest in discovering the world. This is the result of a gridded education where the only thing that matters is to demonstrate how much information a person retains in their head, without allowing students the possibility to reflect on what they are taught, to create from what exists, express in novel ways.
Research has focused on knowing the functioning of the human being from an analytical empirical perspective, proposing exact models that end up typecasting human beings within a label. In psychology these labels have been used to diagnose the human being and from this diagnosis, establish a set of steps to treat the person. This means that truly important aspects of the person with whom they are working are being left out and leaving us with an uneasiness regarding the handling they are giving to our problem.
We must change the way in which the human being is seen from the scientific perspective, accepting that human beings are not machines and that we cannot mathematize the psychological functions of the latter and much less skew their emotionality, creativity and spirituality. We must broaden the vision about what the human being is and the way he relates in the environment . It is valid to affirm that the human being reacts to environmental stimuli and that it has information processing through different sensory pathways. The drawback lies in fully attributing to this type of factors the complete existence thereof.
Author: JP Ben-Avid
