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After Alice's presentation, I feel further supported in the idea that, maybe at times, educational planning and the educational expectations that exist need to be completely thrown out the window in order to "truly" inspire creativity and a passion for that creativity.  In my mind, creativity is sparked not through rigid planning, oppressive objectives, and a set of bureaucratic standards, but through spontaneous insight coupled with the comfort to express those ideas. Upon reflection of some of our greatest contributors to social and artistic change (Ozzie Osbourne, Picasso, Mozart).  These individuals are not recognized and revered for their ability to conform, adhere, and promote the status quo.  Yet, they are identifiable for their willingness to be spontaneous and flexible, and to act on those impulses, even if it is in conflict with what is expected from the establishment.  It seems to me that in order to recognize establishment, you need those and that which is counter to the establishment.  When this conflict appears, we see the greatest in human achievement.  One can believe that there exists the possibility that none of these individuals "planned" to have the cultural influences they had, but merely acted upon intuition, creativity, and passion to see these ideas come to life. 

This then motivates me to reflect on education and its role on planning for learners.  Is the purpose of education to help learners plan for a finite goal or achievement in life, or is it to provide them with the tools to better sort their way through the experiences of life in order to build their own understanding of what is happening around them?  In some sense, formal education can be an inhibitor of learner achievement.  We often start out telling students in the elementary years..."You can do and be anything you want.  You just have to work hard and put your mind to it."  However, that sentiment changes greatly when students reach the secondary and higher learning environments.  There the notion shifts to "what college are you going to go to" to "what are you going to major in" and so on and so on.  This becomes a much more rigid plan than one could have ever imagined based on the elementary perception that is passed along. So in this sense, we like to believe that the triangle of education is pointed at the bottom and opens up to a variety of opportunities as we progress through formal education.  However, this is in contrast to the explicit specialized nature of secondary and higher education.   Before you graduate, you must have a degree in a specialized field and certification before you are even able to consider being accepted by that field. Even the names of some of our institutions reflect this.

The role of informal education is critical.  The title "teacher" is now merely a word to identify a particular occupation for which you receive compensation for your services. But in a more global sense, parents, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers and so on offer a variety of learning experiences that no school or formal institution could ever emulate.  Therefore, it is in my opinion that equal attention to informal education, one without rigid standards, one that allows for the growth of the inquisitive self, one that encourages risks and the comfort to take them, and one that does deviate from a plan (if it has one at all), is well over due.