The Creation Paradigm holds not just that morally good acts are creative and evil acts destructive but also that the good for an individual is to become creative—artistic perhaps, productive for sure, intellectually developed to the extent that their abilities will allow, original, and, above all, virtuous. It holds that engendering creativity (especially self-creativity) in others, the most important work of the teacher, is an act of special moral import.
On face, this implies the paramount importance of the individual, rather than of her family, kinship group, or country. On a deeper level, it implies it even more strongly, because to hold that the individual should be nurtured as a potential creator is to hold that she should be nurtured as someone who can be original—who can choose what she creates and how. If she is taught to follow the paths laid down by those who are related to her, similar to her in language, or culture, or skin color and other phenotypical features, or who live in the same part of the world as her, she cannot also be taught to be original. It’s no good arguing that she can be original within the paradigm into which she is forced. That’s transparently a contradiction in terms. We do not consider a musician a composer because she orchestrates the work of others, or if all she ever does it writes variations on the work of others (though great composers have done both in addition to composition). We consider her a composer because she writes original music.
So, a demand for conformity, whether to a family, kinship group, or country will negate individuality. Therefore, it will negate creativity, and, therefore, it will negate the realization of the good for the individual (and, therefore, of the individual’s greatest chance to benefit their family, community, kinship group, and country). It may force the person to follow moral rules, and, if these are good rules, may therefore make her look somewhat creative by the lights of the Creation Paradigm. But she will not examine the rules. She will not think about ways to improve them, or when to make exceptions to them, or how to balance one moral imperative against another. The supposed creativity that is her moral conformity will be dull. She is more likely to end up dogmatic and judgmental than good.
Teachers must encourage the development of true individuals, not of conformists to anything. We must also encourage our students to examine, question, and reason for themselves, rather than to conform to their parents or culture, whether in moral or political or religious opinions, or in matters of taste, or in personality traits or choice of personal interests. If their parents want them taught to follow a particular religion, or taught that their sexual orientation or gender identity ought to be a particular way, or that they ought to like football more than science or the arts, or that they ought to be extraverted, or socially conformist, or popular with their peers, or that they ought to aspire to only the highest paying careers, we must remember that the parents do not have that right to ask us to help them with this. Handling the situation might require great tact on our part, and even a measure of equivocation, but we have no right to do wrong by our students because of pressure from their parents.
Likewise, we have no right to allow governments or tyrannical majorities to use us to force conformity upon our students, whether they seek to do this through a curriculum that emphasizes a particular viewpoint or laws that restrict the teaching of alternative viewpoints, or through laws that aim to prevent our nurturing the individual that is the student. A particularly egregious example of this kind of behavior by a government is the Don’t Say Gay law (technically the Parental Rights in Education Act–an Orwellian feat of language manipulation) recently enacted by my own state of Florida. Besides prohibiting discussion of differences in sexual orientation, even though such a discussion would by no means have to involve information about sexual acts, this law mandates that teachers and schools out gay children to their parents, some of whom will bully and reject their own children if we do that.
But that’s only one part of a frightening trend. Florida is moving towards the insertion of unabashed Christian Nationalism into its K-12 history curriculum, under the hypocritical guise of creating an ideologically neutral curriculum. On 28 June 2022, the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald reported that, on the state government’s initiative, teachers were being retrained in an obviously Christian Nationalist reconstruction of American history, using a program created by an extremist Christian college, and that Governor Ron DeSantis’s former Education Commissioner has all but admitted that this is an act of propaganda:
DeSantis describes a battle for the next generation in education. His former education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, told the Hillsdale National Leadership Seminar last spring that education is “100% ideological,” which is why picking leaders is so crucial. He added that leaders need to be strategic and quick when implementing policies to make sure they have impact.
“Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education,” Corcoran said. “And we can do it. We can get it right.” [i]
In other words, when Democracy won’t give you what you want, you can just go the longer route of brainwashing children. While you complain endlessly that teachers are indoctrinating children into “wokeness.”
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Some might argue that giving primacy to the individual, revolving a scheme of morality, of justice, of education around the individual rather than the family, kinship group, or country encourages the individual to be selfish, and that it anatomizes the individual, leaving them lonely in spite of any amount of proximity to others. But this depends on the view that a person can neither serve nor even form a meaningful relationship with others unless their beliefs and lifestyles are in lockstep. Unless they are essentially copies of each other. It is absolutely true that, given the education suggested by the Creation Paradigm, people will become more original, and therefore their personalities, interests, tastes, and opinions will more distinct from each other’s. This will apply if the people in questions are members or the same family or kinship group, or if they are citizens of the same country. But that doesn’t mean they can’t value, spend time with, love, serve, and enjoy each other. Taught within the Creation Paradigm, they will likely be more inclined to do those things.
Unless, of course, their family, kinship group, or country is no longer willing to accept them. But do I need to say where the fault lies in that case?
Some might even argue that belief in the moral primacy of the individual is unique to Western cultures, and that to present it as a universal good is to favor a kind of Western cultural hegemony. I can’t rebut this argument, simply because it isn’t an argument. It’s a transparent excuse for the behavior of the autocratic patriarch, priest, or president. And, if the “argument” held any water, it would not need to be made in the first place. People in non-Western cultures would simply not choose to pursue the good for the individual, if, because of the places where and cultures into which they were born, this was antithetical to who they were. The patriarch, the priest, the president would not need to keep them in the line of the family, faith, or fatherland. They would not want to stray.
But they are inclined to stray, and that is why those with authority attempt to bully them into line. Because originality is the natural state of all people, regardless of where and to whom they were born.
Ignition for Education 
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