NURTURING CREATIVE STUDENTS : !WOW!

HOW do families deal with children who show an inclination towards the arts? 

Drawing and painting and singing, playing music or dancing are considered adorable even in most of the developing world when kids are young, but troubling when they don't grow out of it.

One of our final-year fine arts students had his drawings regularly tom up by his father, who wanted him to concentrate on career in engineering.

Many famous artists developed their passion while being at odds with their families.

Edgar Degas' father wanted him to join law school. Paul Gauguin gave up his life as a stockbroker and Paul Cezanne attempted to become a banker as desired by his father.

Joan Miro attended commercial college but after two years as a clerk, had a mental breakdown before his parents let him attend art school.

While Toulouse-Lautrec's aristocratic parents did not prevent him from studying art, his physical deformity [having fractured both femurs in childhood] made him feel more at home in Bohemian Montmartre, amongst the outcasts of music halls and brothels of Paris.

Nurturing a child's creative spirit is a combined effort of schools and family. The US based National Foundation for Gifted and Creative Children lists 10 characteristics of gifted children that often get ignored or misinterpreted.

These include extreme sensitivity, high energy levels, getting bored readily, easily frustrated, compassionate and loving, needing lots of encouragement and poor at rote learning.

Average school systems are usually unable to cater to the needs of gifted children.

Thomas Edison, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Ludwig van Beethoven are some of the gifted students who failed or were expelled from their schools.

When parents or teachers failed to understand highly creative children, they tend to withdraw and refuse to learn.

Renowned Malaysian expert on creative children Dr Yew Kam Kam Keong in his book Nurturing Creative Children, has written a detailed guideline for parents and teachers.

Lucy Jo Palladino's 'Edison Children' are gifted dreamers who could who could become designers, architects and artists., discoverers who make good inventors, pioneering industrialists, dynamos who become great athletes, fighter pilots and emergency health workers later in life.

The honor and serving of the latest global operational research on creative students, continues. !WOW! thanks author Professor Durriya Kazi, University of Karachi.