Are Teachers Killing Creativity?

World Teachers Day

Abid Rashid Baba

universalbaba99@gmail.com

The three most beautiful words in English language are not ‘I love you’. They are ‘I don’t know’. Learning to say I don’t know when you don’t know is the first sign of maturity. This is exactly what I learned during Earthshastra- an 8-day immersive journey at Auroville in Tamilnadu, many moons ago. We visited The Last School, almost a carbon copy of San Francisco’s Brightworks. They believe children should learn because they want to, not because someone is forcing them. Agency is woven into every part of their ecosystem.

But in Kashmir?, students are pushed into a suffocating rat race where everyone pretends to know everything, even when they don’t. Teachers enforce this culture of fakery. And this is where the decay begins. When Teaching becomes trading. Classrooms turn into cashrooms. Our schools don’t encourage innovation and critical thinking and bask in mediocrity. Just like jail inmates, the sleep-deprived tender souls are transported in particular vehicles. They wear the same clothes. The authorities call it “uniform”. There is total control. Then the warden comes and asks some inmates to sing the signature tone. Default or designed? How is it futuristic? Who has envisioned this future? Even in some colleges, students are not allowed to enter or make an exit before or after a particular time. This is not discipline, this is dictatorship.

The pressure to “succeed” has become deadly. Even the Hon’ble Supreme Court has called it a suicide epidemic. Thirteen thousand young lives are lost to suicide every year. Thirteen thousand! Who is killing these blooming minds in my Hindustan? Not fate. Not destiny. It is the unkind teachers and the cruel system they uphold. The unbearable pressure they build, the obsession with ranks and grades is hanging our students, one by one.

On the way to my workplace last week, I met a student who looked exhausted, her face heavy with frustration. She kept sighing, as if the weight of the world was pressing on her chest. I asked her softly, “Is everything okay?” She broke down immediately. Through tears, she said, “I am writing my exams. I am doing a Bachelor’s in Physiotherapy. But this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. My heart lies in literature. I love weaving stories.”

Her words cut like a knife. And no—this is not an isolated story. Throw a stone anywhere in Kashmir, and it will fall on a young person who has been pushed into something they neither love nor believe in. I spoke to another student once—someone who had been saved from ending his own life. His thoughts still haunt me: “There might be light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel is really long, and there is just darkness all around. Will it get better? How long until it gets better? What if it gets better a little too late?”

And then there is the story of 19-year-old Anurag Borkar from Maharashtra. A boy who scored a jaw-dropping 99.99 percentile in NEET exams. His family celebrated with pride. But behind the success, Anurag left behind a suicide note: “This is not what I wanted.” Do you see the tragedy? He conquered the system, yet the system still killed him.

So let us stop pretending. Free will in our education system is a cruel myth. We talk about “shifting definitions of success,” but the structures remain rigid, heartless, and suffocating. Anurag’s death is not just a statistic. It is a mirror we are too afraid to look into. The question that should haunt every teacher, every parent, every policymaker is this: Are we listening to what our children truly want? Or are we too busy shoving them into careers that feed our egos and family honor, while their own dreams rot and die inside them?

Our Teachers are not approachable, and that is the root of the problem. If they were welcoming, students wouldn’t be running to Google for every doubt. They would be walking to their teachers. But no, our classrooms are filled with dictators, not mentors. A student shows up a little late, and instead of empathy, they are shown the door. That is not discipline. It is tyranny.

And what do most teachers obsess over? Not ideas, not curiosity, not creativity. They are glued to attendance registers. When your focus is on ticking boxes, how do you expect your students to focus on innovation? Strict teachers don’t create disciplined minds—they create liars. Because students are smart enough to maneuver around their rigidity. Every time a child questions, teachers act offended. Mediocre teachers get annoyed. And in that moment, learning dies.

It is time we redefine what “school” and “college” even mean. You went, you passed tests, you got grades. You were programmed to believe this was the path to success. So you behaved well, followed the rules, did everything asked of you. And on the surface, it looked like it worked. But deep inside, you are haunted by the questions school never prepared you for:

Who am I? What do I really want? Why do I feel so disconnected when I did everything right?

That is the deeper flaw. That is why I call it a grand deception.

Behind every diploma, every degree, lies a blueprint. A blueprint not to create thinkers, but workers. Not to train insight, but obedience. Not to encourage reflection, but repetition. You were taught to memorize, not to understand. To conform, not to question. To meet expectations, not to discover your own voice. That is why so many of us are strangers to ourselves.

When teachers get irritated by curious questions, students begin to associate learning with fear, anxiety, and pressure. They learn to perform, not to pursue. To repeat, not to reflect. And guess what is worse? They get praised for it. So what kind of intelligence are we cultivating when obedience is rewarded more than originality? None at all. Independent minds don’t fit into standardized tests. They challenge the script. They refuse to be boxed in. But our teachers don’t nurture this independence. They crush it. When a teacher drills imitation instead of curiosity, the cost is creativity itself. The child who once asked bold, daring questions grows into an adult too afraid to be different. The learner becomes a docile follower. And the system celebrates this as success.

Factories do not need thinkers. They do not need poets, visionaries, or philosophers. They need obedient, disciplined, predictable workers. That is exactly what our schools and colleges are training. Look closely: a bell rings, you sit in rows, you follow a rigid schedule, divided by subjects. Just like factory shifts, you are commanded when to start, when to stop, and when to move to the next task. You are rewarded for compliance, punished for deviation. Creativity? That has no place here.

Learning in its purest form should be about liberation, about questioning assumptions, about exploring ideas. But our system does the opposite. And when life throws something messy, unexpected, unstructured at us, we freeze. We know how to solve equations and manage deadlines, but nobody prepared us to sit with uncertainty, to navigate storms that don’t come with instructions. We feel disoriented even when we earn a solid income or run a decent business.

Have you heard of Paulo Freire? As teachers, you must know about him—the Brazilian educator who revolutionized teaching with a belief in hope-infused liberation. Freire listened as much as he spoke. A good communicator is first a good listener. Do you listen to your students? Really listen? There are four kinds of listeners—active, empathic, evaluative, and appreciative. When was the last time you paused to examine how you listen?

Freire, a lover of life, engaged with ordinary people because he believed everyone is extraordinary and valuable just by being. And you? Do you only praise a few so-called toppers while ignoring the rest? Then you have already failed as a teacher. In his brilliant book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire writes that the traditional “banking” method of teaching, where teachers deposit knowledge into passive students, is oppressive. It kills curiosity, discourages critical thinking, and produces meek, obedient minds.

And here is another educator our Kashmiri classrooms desperately need: Maria Montessori. Walk into her classroom, and it is an alien world for our rigid teachers. Children move around, explore, and focus on tasks of their choice. The teacher is not a dictator at the blackboard—they are a guide, giving equal attention to every student, creating activities that stimulate cognitive growth. Montessori teaching is self-directed, promotes independence, and allows children to learn at their own pace.

A good teacher can change lives. Did you watch Taare Zameen Par? Of course you did. Look around—there are hundreds of Ishaan Awasthi’s in your classrooms. They need love, encouragement, and mentorship. At home, they may be raised by Nandkishore’s, but in school, you have the chance to be their Ram Shankar Nilumbh—someone who sees their potential and nurtures it. Do you even try?

Benita Benjamin, a senior researcher at the University of Kerala, wrote recently that a good classroom is a space where conversations thrive, ideas clash, and perspectives are challenged. Not a room where students sit frozen, waiting for grades.

Here is the truth that will anger many teachers in Kashmir: every day you go to school or college, your intelligence diminishes. How is that possible? Because your teachers focus only on academic intelligence, conditioning you to believe that success means government jobs, degrees, and compliance. They are systematically destroying creative intelligence—the spark that leads to innovation, exploration, and true thought. Creativity is a high-risk, high-return game. It does not thrive in rigidity, it does not flourish under fear, it cannot survive standardized tests and rote memorization.

No one has ever changed the world by following instructions. No philosopher, no poet, no revolutionary ever became extraordinary by doing exactly what they were told. And yet, that is precisely what our schools demand: obedience, repetition, conformity.

If you are a teacher reading this, reflect: Are you nurturing curiosity or crushing it? Are you shaping minds capable of questioning, exploring, and daring? Or are you stamping out creativity, enforcing compliance, and producing another obedient cog in the machine? Let your students try and make mistakes. They do not have to be bang on all the time.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” Pablo Picasso said it best: all children are born artists. And who is responsible for killing the artists inside our students? Teachers. And since 2020, digital teachers have turned jokers.

Online education has turned into a desperate circus for attention? With student attention spans down to a pathetic eight seconds, teachers and coaching platforms churn out cringe content just to stay noticed. But is this garbage teaching anyone—or is it killing the very purpose of education? Education has been monetized and reduced to content for clicks. Teachers are no longer educators—they are vloggers, entertainers, slaves of algorithms chasing virality. Remember this: only a disease goes viral. Using student’s privacy as trigger points to get likes and views is not teaching. I call it intellectual abuse. A teacher feels happy about introducing himself as a columnist of a C-grade newspaper and not with his primary identity as a teacher in a local government high school. This should give you a clear idea of the rot that is recruited to take care of our future.

Do you know why we are not producing Nobel laureates? Because teachers are complicit in this intellectual abuse. Schools were designed not to nurture thought, but to produce obedient workers. That is why classrooms are straight rows, students are told to sit still, raise their hands if they want to speak, and eat only when allowed. Eight hours a day, you tell students what to think, and then make them compete for an “A.” And when anyone dares to deviate, teachers lash out, reminding students: we are the authority here, you are submissive, you are a slave. In the process, they destroy creative abilities.

But we don’t need robots or zombies anymore. The world has moved on. What we need are thinkers—creative, innovative, critical, independent people who can connect ideas and solve problems. Every scientist will tell you no two brains are the same. Every parent with more than one child knows it too. If a doctor prescribed the same medicine to all patients, the results would be catastrophic. Yet in our classrooms, the same tragedy unfolds every day. One teacher, standing in front of twenty children, each with unique strengths, gifts, and dreams, teaches them all in exactly the same way. This is nothing short of educational malpractice.

It is time to act. Students may only make up 20% of the population, but they are 100% of our future. We must listen to their dreams, because there is no telling what they could achieve if we stop killing their creativity.

Dear students, your 99% marks in today’s exams are useless. That was a test of memory, not mind. Dig deep, and you will see that none of the J&K toppers in the last 20 years have become IT experts, scientists, or innovators. That 90% was never yours—it was a pressure imposed on you. Earlier this year, in a famous Srinagar school, a student was killed due to bullying and teacher pressure because teachers invoked religion over a tattoo. Recently, a female teacher was terminated in a popular Srinagar school for moral policing, judging girl students for their attire. These are not isolated incidents. This is what happens when education becomes a tool for control, not liberation.

It is time we stop calling these people teachers. They are jailers of imagination, executioners of curiosity, and murderers of creative minds. Maria Montessori once said:

“I did not invent a method of education. I simply gave some little children a chance to live.”

In the chaos of rows, registers, and rigid rules, how many of our students are even allowed to live? How many are denied the chance to think, explore, and discover themselves? Montessori’s words remind us that teaching is not about control, obedience, or uniformity, it is about giving children the space to grow, to breathe, and to be.