It is a question that many of us often struggle with: does creativity and innovation flourish when there is structure and discipline or when there is total openness and freedom?
The answer — to some extent — came to me while listening to American writer and teacher of literary journalism John McPhee talk about the way he approaches writing. He lays out the main framework of the article, planning out carefully the start and end points, and key milestones along the way. Then he looks at his notes and marks out what will go where. And finally, he goes about the task of actually writing. When asked whether this was not too “mechanical” an approach to something that was essentially a creative, free-flowing process, he said that he in fact felt “freed up” to focus on creative expression, once the main structure was in place.
In other words, it was the structure that allowed him the freedom not to worry about structure.
Looking at things this way opened up a deeper understanding for me, which could apply to learning and to living life. It seems to me the importance of structure plays out in three areas of our lives as students. The first (and I know I’m going to be greeted by yawns here) has to do with the structure of our days. We are often irritated by people (usually elders, whom we don’t always consider wiser) telling us that we need to have a routine to our days, a pattern to the way we work. They tell us that such a discipline is necessary if we are to get ahead. And that word — discipline — acts like a red flag, spurring us to rebel against what we see as limiting and constricting.
But if we think about structure as a form of support, as something that “frames” rather than “binds” or “closes”, we might be able to appreciate its advantages.
So if we schedule our days in a way that accommodates the different things we have to do, we are then freed up to build in time for the things we want to do. The structure works only to break up your time into usable blocks. Within those blocks, you can still allow yourself as much flexibility as you need.
The second area where structure helps is in creating a foundational understanding of subjects. Much of our early training — in school, and in undergraduate programmes — has to do with learning the structure of disciplines, the rules that are foundational to them. Once we grasp the broad outlines of a subject, we can begin to see how to work within it, and, as we progress, how to go beyond it and chart new areas of doing things in new ways.
That is what research at the higher levels of education is all about. In academic subjects, we learn the principles and concepts upon which the discipline is based. In the arts, one learns the tools and conventions of a form before one can use those tools in new ways, to innovate and create new conventions.
The third area is in handling the complexity of daily life — dealing with civic issues, transport, relationships and community. Across all this, it is structure, in the form of social and cultural conventions that keeps us going. As students, the rules of the classroom and the expectations of performance make it possible for us to take certain things for granted (such as the fact that teaching will happen at a particular time) so that we can focus on what we need to do (studying, writing assignments).
Of course, sometimes structure can also be used to keep people from growing, to restrict their movement, and that is something to watch out for and to resist.
And then there is that overused term — “out of the box” thinking. In order to think out of the box, we need to first understand the box, its shape, what closes it and opens it, and where its weaknesses and strengths lie. We are often told that we have to learn the rules (of any game or field) before we break them.
We need to understand what exactly we are changing and how. We also need a sense of the shape of that change — after all, most of the time we are NOT calling for a complete absence of structure, but for a NEW structure that does not have the flaws or shortcomings of the old one.
So structure is not merely about a plan or rules, but also the map or the layout of a field. It is a way of organising time, ideas, and objects. It can be changed and it can be completely set aside for something else.
Structure and freedom are not necessarily opposing ideas — one can use structure, like McPhee, as a source of support that gives one the freedom to explore both inside and outside it.
The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus. Email: usha.bpgll@gmail.com
