Dialog | Praise of creativity at school

On occasion, we present to you an exchange between a public figure and a being who impresses him. This week, director, producer and screenwriter Érik Cimon talks with teacher Francine Labelle.

I’ve always been interested in people who sail against the tide, maybe because I’ve always found that the mainstream, the mainstream, rarely goes in the right direction. This has been the subject of several of my films, whether from the perspective of counter-culture, food, or more recently education.

This is why I wanted to give the floor to people who offer a discourse that is both coherent and courageous, and who are not afraid to question the established order or the dominant thought.

This is exactly the case with Francine Labelle, whom The Press gives me today the opportunity to make you discover. If I chose to speak to you about Francine, it is because I have just finished a documentary on education, The school differently, which questions the role of the school and the way of teaching. As I could not include Francine in my film due to lack of space, I take this opportunity today to share with you her vision of education and her speech on the importance of teaching art.

Francine is 77 years old and has been teaching for over 40 years. Already there, she has just earned my respect and admiration. Having taught a single session in CEGEP, I know the level of commitment, energy and humor required to hold an audience captive.

Francine began her teaching career in CEGEP in the 1970s. She taught philosophy there for six years, then returned to do a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and a master’s degree in art education. Since then, she has been teaching drawing and painting in her own studio, outside the paths traced by academic art. You could also say that Francine teaches creativity.

I asked her why she thinks it’s important to teach art, whether to adults or children. “To get in touch with yourself, to discover who you are and to develop your confidence, you need a form of expression. A person who is not given the means to express himself is a submissive person. Societies that suppress speech keep their world on its knees because people doubt themselves. »

It’s off to a good start, I feel that our interview is going to be interesting…

Francine told me that at the time, children were taught to draw in coloring books to develop their fine dexterity, to prepare them for factory work on an assembly line. Above all, it shouldn’t go beyond the line, because on an assembly line, if you go over, it’s a disaster.

The problem is that in 2023, children are still given coloring books! Francine told me that she had a 60-year-old student who was terrified of drawing. She asked her if she had made a coloring book when she was little. As a matter of fact, she had been slapped on the knuckles for overtaking. Francine told him to get a coloring book and fill it out, systematically going over everywhere.

“The next week she came back, she had done it, and she had bawled the whole time! But she had freed herself from an enormous weight and there she was ready to paint and she tripped! Coloring in coloring books is the best way to learn to submit. You are told what to do and you are not allowed to express yourself. The drawing is drawn in advance. »

Break the mold

Giving yourself a means of expression to get to know yourself is full of common sense. That’s why we should go to school, right? To flourish, to gain self-confidence, to discover what you want to do in life.

So why is art so little valued at school, unless you are in a particular, selective and paying program? Are we afraid that children will flourish? That they develop their intuition? Do we want at all costs to push them to conform so that they fittent into the mold by building them from the outside rather than the inside?

Children have never been so anxious at school, they are increasingly medicated and the camp of dropouts grows by tens of thousands each year. Shouldn’t school be a safe and exciting place where one discovers the world, the culture, the knowledge? I asked Francine what she thought of it.

“That our education system does not allow students to develop a creative process is a disaster. Children are unhappy at school because they are taught in a way that is too rigid, too constraining, their creativity is not called upon. Too many constraints, it kills the imagination. Play must be valued in the learning process.

“The pleasure of learning is to try all possible avenues, it is discovery, trial and error. Otherwise, it’s extremely frustrating. If we always tell the child what to do, if we impose on him a way of learning, a single path to follow without any exploration, he will lose interest and will drop out.

“The process of creativity is not pre-reflected or predetermined, it is more like a dream, but in an awakened way. When you go to bed at night, you don’t say to yourself: I don’t know what to dream about tonight, I have no ideas! It happens naturally. If we accept this process, we will realize that each child has an incredible inner world. Picasso said that he spent his whole life knowing how to draw as a child. »

I asked Francine how learning to draw or paint helps students develop.

“Drawing is the only exercise that develops the right to look. If you have 10 people draw an apple, you will have 10 different versions of the same apple. The majority of people mistakenly believe that to draw is to reproduce. But in reality, to draw is to leave traces of perception. For a drawing to be expressive, it must not attempt to reproduce reality, but to perceive it subjectively. It is the artist’s subjectivity that is interesting. We do not copy and paste, we must try new associations, we must dare, not follow recipes. To create is to associate, to transform. We have been conditioned to distrust what we feel and what we perceive. As if we did not perceive correctly. It’s about power. If we are all looking in the same direction, we are no longer in a democracy. »

imagination and knowledge

Betty Edwards, the great American pedagogue, said that children should be taught from the first year to draw at the same time as they are taught to write, because drawing stimulates a part of the brain that writing does not stimulate. . Learning to paint or draw is training your brain to find solutions to a problem, otherwise. You may not have any interest in drawing, that’s completely legitimate. The goal is not to train future painters, but to use drawing to develop a part of our brain that uses intuition and imagination rather than logic. It’s about “thinking outside the box”.

This is what Einstein meant when he said that imagination is more important than knowledge. In our Western tradition, this way of thinking is valued in sports, in poetry, but not in the process of learning.

For Francine, learning to draw means learning to see in all its rigor, which gives immense confidence in the certainty that the answer will appear, but that it will almost always be unpredictable. It is by dint of making surprising and unconventional associations that the brain ends up finding the unexpected answer to a complex problem.

With all the challenges we are currently facing as a society, I think it would be wise to give an important place to art in the school career of young people so that they can train their brains to find innovative and creative to problems that obviously require us to think differently.

I watch Francine, all smiles and full of energy, and I tell myself that this is how I would like to be at 77, still experimenting, following my intuition, playing. Every time I talk to him, I feel like time has stopped and anything is possible. I like to think that she is the worthy heiress of Global denial. Both in his words and in his work, we feel this wild need for freedom. But what impresses me most about Francine is that she managed not to sacrifice her life to art, but rather to make her life a work of art.