Have a look at Sir Ken Robinson's TED talks here (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)

I completely agree that today's -so-called- education at school starts to kill our future generation's creativity.

Actually, it may start at the gen-xy period, where our elders start to think how to make education more 'uniformed'. The idea was good, at that time, but if we look at today's life evolution, that kind of education method or approach has been proven to fabricate students into something too general to be a person.

Where is the long-lost free-education that happened in the past?

Where is the well-known the best knowledge come from?

What kind of today's knowledge that will sustain future challenges?

Why do kids 'must' go to school, if they personally doesn't fell that school fits to them?

Why do teachers delivered their knowledge in the spoon-fed method?

How can we improve this, and how can we make sure that the basic of fundamental learning process has been adopted by each kid?

The list of question can just build more and more as one question leads to another question.

If you are the 'well educated', I bet you are going to end up in the 'why'-type of questions.

While, if you are the street-smart punk, you may just end up on the 'how-to'-type of questions.

I grew up in one of the South-East Asian country, where education was spoon-fed, teachers are always right, and there is no-way that students allowed to make mistakes.

Even though I agree that mistakes have penalties, but to have mistakes judged by mark (or known as score or grade), this method doesn't always apply correctly.

How do I dare saying those words?

Well, put it this way, if you are reading this and you are a student and you are living in Asian country, try asking your teacher the 'reason' of his/ her conclusion.

If he/ she can't answer your question simply because he/ she said 'the book wrote it that way', I would suggest that you'd better re-think your future all over again.

Another example is quite easy and will surely shook almost all closed-minded teacher: if you said doing corruption is wrong, how come our government do it?

But I am not doing some politic campaign here

Still need another example: why I am not allowed to make mistake?

This question is the type of question that I don't like as well

The better question to your teacher: how can I be better, so that I don't repeat the same mistake again?

... and you must be ready to have your mind open and also being critical to whatever guided to you.

At times, teachers just simply busy, because they are. But, at other times, teachers do their jobmerely because of they need job.

What happened to those teachers that has 1000% motivation to educate a lot of people when they enrolled into the institution of education?

What had happened to that spirit? ... and we can simply asked them more and more questions ...

I used to be a teacher and I know that the payment is not what I like.

So, I tried to find a way of having an earning that can cover my living expenses and yet stillbeing able to teach.

Sadly, having this idea and doing it is not always supported by your teaching peers. However, I found one place that supports this idea, and this is due to my answer when I was interviewed.

The interviewer's question was simple: why do you want to teach?

My answer was just any thing that crossed my mind, as I believe that is the most true answer that came from you: I wanted to teach in order to share my knowledge from what I gained out there doing other job and transfer it to the next generation for their better grasping of simiilar knowledge or experience.

Surely I got the job, and you may have wonder: that answer is to ideal to be done, and yet to goodto be true.

Well, I have done it that way. Not because I told that answer and bound by it, it is more on my real teaching approach that I'd like to do it that way.

So, if you were one of my former students, you may have recalled that I put the assignment(s) in the most practical way.

If you were an art student, then try to come up with an idea of how art and computer can go along.

If you were a science student, no question asked, but you are required to come up with some creative way of using computer into something that your friends may not think of (or don't want to use it that way)

... and the example can just go on an on.

I faced one group of students that happened to be a group of students that analyze tons of data about weather (no, they were not studying to be a meteorologist or something similar). I asked them, since this is a database class, why don't we play around with possibility to use that tons of data into something easy to work with.

They were just lost me when I said 'database'

But, guess what? At the end of the semester, they were amongst one of the best student that understood the third normal form in their own way!

I remember about the 'Last Lecture' by Randy Pausch. He was one of the amazingly dedicated teacher that also went into more than the extra miles, but extra thousand miles in order to ensure every single student in his hand can come out as 'someone'.

As a closure, why did I wrote this article?

There is one item in my bucket list to build a 'free education foundation'.

I may be nobody today, as I am still employed and have not gone back to teaching world (yet) again.

But, I have several items in my list that I am going to achieve as the supporting items to get the Free Education Foundation a reality.

I believe I am not the only person that has this item in their wish/ dream list, and I strongly urged you out there to start making your move in getting back our long lost education