Impacts of Educational Macro-Policies on Developing Creativity in Iran

Abstract

Many educational and training approaches aim at improving creativity in students. In today’s world, tremendous need for individuals who can adapt to rapid changes, and also help bring rapid developments into their societies have made educational systems place more importance on creativity. However, developing creative minds may lead to criticism of the status quo, which is considered as a threat by ideologue governments. Hence, to ensure their survival, ideologue governments tighten the scope for individuals’ creativity by implementing uniform education systems that can be directly and strictly controlled. Violation of academic freedom is one of the methods implemented by such governments in order to narrow the space for creativity. The stifling educational environment suppresses creative and critical thinking. This paper studies how educational macro-policies affect creativity development process in Iran. The main objective of this study is to identify the factors resulted from educational macro-policies, which suppress creativity development process and critical thinking in students. The results indicate that lack of freedom in educational system of Iran leaves long-term devastating impacts on individuals’ creativity development process. The research methodology is qualitative, and observation and in-depth interviews are used to collect the data. The research sample includes teachers and employees of 15 schools in Tehran.



Author Information
Mehrang Monfared, University of Texas, United States

Paper Information
Conference: NACE2014
Stream: Education and social and political movements

This paper is part of the NACE2014 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon