The first crayon held by the child fires his imagination in every direction as he draws and paints his imaginary boat and moon and apple which only he can recognize as the same. The colourful world of a child paints its imagination in formlessness or rather assumed forms of what only the child can interpret and as the child grows up his adaptability of the external environment makes him understand the relationship between form and its already allocated name in his language, making him interpret the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Gradually in the due course of time, the crayon is replaced by a pencil and eraser and the child starts imitating the forms laid out in front of him whether numerical or linguistic. The loss of innocence is pervasive when the child is inducted into the straight-jacket of our education system smothering his / her innate creativity shifting him from the vast creative horizons of formlessness to the narrowed perspectives of our so-called civilized society.
The existing education systems have been designed to cater to the needs of an industrialized society, asphyxiate, the creativity of the young minds with the burden of structured syllabus and marks, possibly nipping in bud many an Einstein or even a Tansen, for that matter, simply because the boat or the bird drawn by the student is no reflection of the actual boat or the bird.
In today’s pandemic ridden world, the education systems have to find ways of keeping the creativity of the crayon wielding child alive for finding novel solutions to a world drawn asunder with future uncertainties and we as teachers and the mentors, have to unleash the crazy creativity in the students for guiding them to paint the future in technicolor rather than in black and white
