Freedom and creativity: an approach to science education for excellent students and its realization in the Israel Arts and Science Academy's curriculum.

The contemporary world of knowledge, characterized by an explosion of information and ways of communicating it, requires creativity more than ever in handling scientific knowledge. Thus, science education, especially for the gifted, must encourage the development of creativity. But, as creativity is not something that can simply be taught, we must create the conditions for its development. The main condition is freedom--freedom to raise original unorthodox ideas, freedom to deal with complex issues even when the student's body of knowledge is insufficient, and, most importantly, freedom to fail. This article describes, through examples, the main principles of the science education program in the Israel Arts and Science Academy and how the foregoing ideas are translated and applied there.

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Freedom and Creativity

Excellence can be understood in several ways. I shall examine three of these: excellence as being gifted, excellence as achievement, or excellence as creativity. I shall then explain the reasons for the choice of one of the three as a leading approach in formulating the guidelines of the program of the Israel Arts and Science Academy (IASA).

Excellence as Being Gifted

The concept of being endowed with a gift or talent is an efficient one for the purpose of identifying students' skills, mainly in the younger age groups, and guiding them on that basis toward programs of enrichment and advancement. There is no doubt that this is an efficient concept in organizational contexts, but in the purely educational context, it is problematic. Frankly, I find no educational value in this concept because it is essentially passive; the gifted person is perceived as having been granted something extra. This passive concept does not motivate toward any special performance on the part of the gifted student. In addition, the concept presupposes that the rest of the students are lacking; they have not been endowed with the unique gift of talent. Landau (1990) has noted that the French concept surdoue, on the other hand, is more positive because it presupposes that all children are talented, but some are more talented than others. However, this concept does not solve the problem of passivity either, and therefore it cannot be considered an operational concept in the framework of the educational field.

Excellence as Achievement

This concept is not a passive one. The excellent student is the student who competes with other students and achieves the highest results. This kind of excellence is what Renzulli & Reis (1986) called "schoolhouse giftedness." This approach is taken in most academic frameworks, but its drawback is that it tries to quantify achievement on an axis that is essentially a time axis. This is the most common approach to gifted education. But, is there any intrinsic value in the fact that a talented student might start out from the same point of origin as other students, only to arrive at the same final destination as the others, only faster? Speed in itself has no value in contemporary society, which tends to prolong adolescence.

Excellence as Creativity

We prefer this definition of excellence. In terms of the imagery of sports, we prefer the all-terrain motorcycle that seeks out an original, unique route for itself, over the racing car that arrives first on a predetermined course. Furthermore, excellence, in our opinion, is a constant self-demand. Only those who are never fully satisfied with the achievements they've attained in certain fields will always be motivated and able to continue and will aspire to improve their achievements. Excellence is a demand made upon the self. As faculty, we address it to ourselves and attempt to educate our students in its light.

By one's demand of oneself I mean not only a demand that is on a higher level than most people's demand of themselves, but a different demand. It is a demand for originality, uniqueness and creativity. For us, excellent people are those who are not only willing to work hard in order to be the best on a common axis, but are also ready to take risks and create a new axis.

This definition is made for adults, but how can we recognize girls and boys with the potential for this kind of excellence? It is those who express much better study skills than their environment, but are also full of curiosity and a willingness to work hard to fulfill this curiosity. The potentially excellent student we are looking for fits Renzulli's (1986) nonelitist definition of giftedness, which means they have the three clusters of high ability, task commitment, and creativity. Those students are usually not satisfied with education in school and search for other frameworks of enrichment. The problem is that students in these frameworks are usually from the well-educated middle class.

The belief that these girls and boys exist in every environment was so strong in the minds of the IASA's founders that they created a framework for identifying potentially excellent students in communities that were known to have weak educational systems. This framework received the name "The Discovery Program" and was based on the local educators. It was meant to recognize the upper 10% of the community's students and to nurture them in scientific and mathematical thinking enrichment.

Freedom as a Necessary Condition for Creativity

Creativity is the capacity to confront a given problem in an original way. It is the capacity to look at a situation or problem from a different perspective or even from a variety of perspectives that are not derived directly from the problem's definition. "Major creative innovations often involve the seeing of an old problem …