Some Old Ideas are New Again

By R. Steven Reynolds

Recently there has been some concern about the “Oklahoma Creativity Project”, so I decided to check it out.

The “Project” has a web site www.stateofcreativity.com. The Project was started with seed money from the Kirpatrick Foundation, a well-known philanthropic organization in Central Oklahoma since 1955. The Foundation has donated generously to the arts i.e. the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, the Omniplex, the Oklahoma City Civic Ballet, The OKC Zoological Park, Oklahoma City University and the National Cowboy and Western Museum. This foundation has merged the best and brightest minds from banking, industry, and education.

You can read about the organization yourself; I won’t bore you with details. Basically the Project wants to promote Oklahoma via creative thinking. I would sum it up as encouraging people to think “outside the box”.

Most of the concern about the Project seems to revolve around the nomination and appointment of V. Burns Hargis, Esq.. A short bio of Mr. Hargis can be located on KFOR radio’s website. Mr. Burns wants to incorporate the guidelines of the Project into the OSU educational system. This seems to be a worthwhile effort and one he believes in and is dedicated to, but I also see some short sighted thinking.

Any change in education cannot start at the top level and trickle down. It must start in pre-school and work it’s way up. Our education system today is failing our youth and this program could go a long way to revitalizing our education system and returning it to the best in the world.

The Project has good ideas based on challenging students to learn. It encourages educators to teach students how to learn, not what to learn. The education system today needs only to look to it’s past to see how liberals have taken learning out of education. The removal of phonics from the curriculum, the ignoring of civics, the teaching of life management, have all left our education a shambles.

We need to look back at the one-room schoolhouse. In that mixed environment students helped other students thereby fostering a sense of pride and community responsibility. Organized sports were not a part of education. Students learned the basics and then helped others. That system taught students from an early age how to share and work together.