THE RELEVANCE OF TEACHING CREATIVE THINKING AT PRIMARY SCHOOL LEVEL IN NIGERIA

Résumé

In our fast changing world, where those skills that were adequate some decades ago are grossly inappropriate to prepare children for the general existence beyond school, and where technological transformation has created and annihilated jobs, the foundation of creative thinking skills needs to be laid very early in life. Learning as the acquisition of past inherited ideas gives rise to reproductive learning as the acquisition of established body of cultural knowledge, approved skills, set outlooks, methods and rules used for a fixed pattern of society. Such style of learning (reproductive learning) served people’s needs in the past; but it is highly adequate for today’s rapidly changing world. What is actually required in our contemporary society is innovative learning if we are to shape a certain future and ensure the overall healthy survival of the society. A philosophical analysis of this belief reveals that instituting a subject in primary school level that will cultivate creativity, which begins in formative years when the identity of a child as a thinking person is being established is urgently needed. Hermeneutical investigation of the ultimate goal of education, for instance, reveals that those who are creative, inventive and innovative are those who have sound imagination, critical and creative minds, and this makes the teaching of creative thinking at the primary school level crucial.