Reading your May article "Investing in Creativity, Unearthing the Treasures of the Mind," I was reminded of the incredible things I have seen in my year and a half working in the promotional team at the Ministry of Education. During that time we've had a hard road to hoe, but the astounding results I've seen have given me the strength to stick with it, and now I couldn't bear to jump ship. I have been lucky enough to see firsthand the effects of creativity on Taiwan's education system, and am now convinced that creativity education is here to stay.
In the course of my work, I've realized that creativity isn't just something you're born with-more important than any innate talent is what you and others around you put into it. And you could go so far as to say that creative education is a low-risk, high-profit investment; no-one's likely to oppose it, and the results can be great. It can really give people a chance to excel, since creative endeavors don't rely on physical or intellectual excellence, nor on whether you come from a well-to-do family.
But although we at the Ministry of Education have made a good start, there's still a lot more we need to do. For example, there's still the matter of dealing with the piles of submissions from schools, individual teachers, and students. As you can tell, it'll be anything but a simple task. But as they say, "give a man a fish and he'll be fed for a day, but teach him to fish and he'll be fed for life"-and even if he doesn't catch anything, at least he'll be able to enjoy the fun of just going fishing. Through abandoning the ego through the creative process, a certain kind of tempering occurs, and that tempering will bring about better and friendlier interactions throughout Taiwan at all levels of the educational hierarchy, from school-community relations right down to student-student ones. Examples of the effects of this kind of education can be found in our "Mobile Creativity Classroom" and "Creativity and Innovation Train" projects, mobile units traveling from campus to campus. These projects not only attract students to creative work, but also challenge teachers to take on the "textbook-less classroom" and really put their hearts into their classes. As media liaison, this is my message, which I believe with my heart and soul: the seed of creativity has already begun to sprout, and will continue to thrive, and the quality of its results is proof positive of this.
