I have posted a new YouTube video this morning, and have returned to the theme of education. In this video I wonder what would happen if we had an education system that told people ‘you can do that' rather than saying ‘these are the rules that you must follow'? What might happen if we allowed all the resulting creativity to flow?
The audio version is:
The transcript is:
If you ask a child to draw a picture once they've reached the age where they can basically hold a crayon, they will draw you a picture. It may not be the most wondrous work of art that you've ever seen, but in their imaginations, they have delivered you what you asked for, a picture of a dog, their parent, or whatever else it might be.
Or they will explain exactly what they think the picture is about in very clear language, to the extent that they've got it. And that's an amazing ability.
It's staggering because if you ask an 18-year-old to paint a picture, most of them will point-blank refuse. They'll say, “I can't”, or “I've been taught about the rules of art, and I now know that I can't apply them, and therefore I can't paint a picture.”
What does that say? It says that school removes a child's creativity.
This, by the way, is also true of storytelling. If you ask a five-year-old to tell a story in a reception class at a school, they will. If you ask an 18-year-old to tell a story, most of them will be completely tongue-tied or say, “That's beyond my ability.”
I actually talked to some 18-year-olds recently about this very point and asked them, when was the last time they wrote anything creative? And their claim was that they hoped never to do so ever again in their lives. That was now behind them. School had removed that spark which they had at the age of five.
I find that profoundly worrying. We live in a world which clearly has to go through a process of change. Must do so if it is going to survive. It's impossible that it does anything else. That requires creativity and imagination from people to get through that process of change that will be demanded of us.
And yet, school basically teaches people that there are rules they must comply with, the whole purpose of which is to remove that creativity and make the person compliant with those rules, with the orders they've got, with the expectation of existing society, and the hierarchy within it.
What are we doing to children when we remove their creativity?
When you remove their ability to write creatively.
Maybe when you take away even, in the vast majority of people's cases, their ability to write a song.
Most of us will never try because we think we can't.
Suppose. we had an education system that told people you can, that was designed to make that possible, that explained how to release creativity and made that its focus rather than rule.
What will we then end up with?
Well, resilient people.
People who could cope with change.
People who could manage different careers, which many of us will have during the course of our lifetimes.
Who could manage changing life circumstances because they can cope.
See their way through it because they don't think there are rigid rules they've got to comply with, but that there are creative opportunities that they must deal with.
I believe we are selling our children short.
I believe we're selling our young people short.
I believe we're selling ourselves short by saying we can't do things because there are rules that stop us.
Blow the rules, liberate people to explore their creativity. That is the most important thing that education can do, and I don't think we're getting anywhere close to succeeding at that goal.
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We’re on the same page. Yay!
Whilst education in UK does stifle creativity, I think we’re still better than other countries such as China.
But the root of the problem is under resourcing of education. What do we expect of primary teachers, for example, who have to manage, and try to teach, a class of 30, primary school children? A s considerable number of these children have special needs. It would take a very exceptional teacher to manage this. Amazingly we do have some. And we expect them to do this whilst paying the same real wages as in 2001 (according to a recent Guardian article).
Yes, we very much need to encourage creativity (including in mathematics), but this is rarely possible when resources are so restricted. Shame on the Conservatives.
🙂
Was it ever different, Richard? Certainly not for a lot of us in the 1970s if you didn’t go to a private school – or perhaps a grammar school. I attended a Secondary Modern, as they were referred to in the two tier system that applied until comprehensives came along. There were some good teachers: I can still remember topics that our English, Geography and Biology teachers taught as they seemed enthusiastic about what they taught. But when it came to careers advice my ‘interview’ lasted about five minutes and consisted of being told I had three choices: work in a shop, a factory (of which there was only one large one in the area), or join the military. The last was clearly the one my careers ‘advisor’ thought best for me. I tried all three and more over the next ten years or so (although my military career only lasted a long weekend). But luckily for me by the time I hit my 30s grants to attend university were still available, as were foundation type courses (I attended the Coop College, but Birkbeck, Northern and others did the same sort of thing) for those of us who’d been deemed to ‘thick’ to attend university straight from school, and so off I went as a ‘proper’ mature student and the rest is history, as they say. But school and creativity were certainly not two words I’d have put together in the 1970s for anyone like me.
Thanks Ivan
My hatred of the secondary modern was my first political cause. I hated the discrimination.
Thank you for a valid and most important article!
Perhaps it helps to differentiate between education and learning, not least autodidactic skills and attitudes.
Attitudes are the key to the quality and style of living and learning. With positive attitudes including kindness, grounded self-confidence, resilience, analysis and synthesis expectations, the embracing of the valid heterodox and a determination to “learn as long as you live” plus a dedication to have as much kindly fun as reasonably possible, children can withstand the deliberately dulling and conformising submerged purposes of recent and current orthodox/subordinating education and blossom as children, students and alert citizens.
For some twenty years I was a member of a primary school which did this, much to the annoyance and multifaceted opposition of the local authority.
However, what useful fun it all was!!!
,
Educatiion as fun! Yes!
To help achieve this my stuidents on the last course i taught chose their own essay topics – subvjct to approval of course. That massively increased engagement, but not the ease of doing well
Yes Richard, wholeheartedly agree – it should be about the joy of exploring, finding things out, understanding things and creating things. – and how to continue learning later on.
Most of us remember one or more inspiring teachers – those who were in love with their subject and wanted to transmit their enthusiasm. (Teaching poetry to teens – must have been daunting – but loved Keats ever since).
Some teachers were (and still are?) actually sadistic and brutal.
Do they still categorise kids – I was always desperate to be top of the class but always just pipped by a girl! They were happy to number you from 1 to 30. That can’t do much good for self esteem of the bottom 10.
But learning how the world works – how society works and the basics of democracy – dont remember ever being taught any of that – do they do it now? Probably not.
We were often threatened with ‘theres a place down the road for you’ if we didnt conform – that was the Secondary Modern – where the unfortunate Patrick Stewart attended.
Thanks
Andrew,
As one of those annoying girls who – somewhat to my embarassement – couldn’t seem to help being always top of the class at my grammar school in the 1950s, regularly just pipping a boy (who became a high court judge and a life-long, if distant, friend), I agree with you.
As for “how society works and the basics of democracy – dont remember ever being taught any of that” – same applies to me.
That said, we were never threatened with being “sent down the road”, but that may have been because we were the top stream of 3 in our year; maybe it was different for the ‘bottom’ stream.
Education has been strait-jacketed – is has been the legacy reaction of the top of the Conservative government – to protect the system of education they already know, and have endured! They see it as a type of moral rigour to demotivate and segregate students to different strata of society based on grounds of required set-benchmark systems of exams. In a similar way to ‘New Public Management’ where bureaucracy is introduced in order to control and justify regulating (bad and ultimately less efficient) services. Education was pulled back after 2010 to focus on written exams and to establish rigid nationwide learning-outcome. Michael Gove was the main actor in dissolving all other forms of assessment as far as possible. (creating “PROPER” education…).
Prior to this and formalised by means of ‘Technical College’ style quals (BTEC etc), many exam boards were able to create qualifications in line with creative output where students could develop their own systems of thinking and processes of work – i.e. more project based submissions (or portfolios) for an award. Having written courses at Level 1,2,3 and A couple of degrees in creative subject areas myself – I can testify that you are still required to create rigorous schemes of marking (Learning Outcomes) and examples of different qualities of work to mark by (Grade criteria). I can also verify that these goals and examples, despite (due to their more open nature) being quite difficult to create – it is entirely possible. At the moderation stage – it can be demonstrated that grades given in portfolio based courses are verified between different markers and perfectly secure as evidencing different levels of ability.
These qualifications were slated by the R.W.Press, of course, as representing too broad a field for employers to actually know what the qualifications *meant* and the exact skills they rubber-stamped. But this is a huge aim of education – being able to work independently in loosely defined fields – with adaptable ideas and innovation.
At the same time the Conservative government was stamping out creative and open ended course structures (There is even no longer any direct live computer coding element/submission in a Computer Science GCSE for example – it’s all written) – the business world, on the other hand, was developing tools such as the ‘Skills Builder Framework’ – employers (countering the Gov’s approach) emphasising and requiring open ended skills like project work, team building and communication. Another example of bonkers policies favouring traditional values and systems of division (based in industrial times) rather than a progressive approach for the creative (AI enhanced – no doubt) future jobs for our children.
May I thoroughly recommend:-
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society
Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Postman and Weingartner Teaching as a Subversive Activity
AS Neill Summerhill
Jerome Bruner The Spiral Curriculum
All provide alternative approaches and thinking in education, and were all essential reading when I trained as a teacher in the 1970s, when liberal philosophies were emerging from the old academic style of thinking. Only Bruner has really managed to become established pedagogy and Neill’s approach at Summerhill has been widely rubbished, mostly by traditional educationists.
Birbalsingh is the current living embodiment of didactic education.
I was fortunate to have two brilliant teacher/tutors at Goldsmiths who went a long way beyond the square peg round hole / empty vessel to be filled conventions so beloved by conservative Education ministers, and who basically destroyed the enquiry and discovery method approaches that had emerged through such as the Schools Council Project and then replaced them with the facts/knowledge academic model of their own public school educations.
Sir Keith Joseph was notorious in his rigid public school tickbox approach, and one of the main figures who is to blame in preventing a wider range of child based teaching and learning developing. Gove was the latest dinosaur in this.
Rigid exam based assessment can be very destructive indeed in my experience.
It simply is not true that schooling destroys creativity. There is much excellent work going on in schools at every level in fostering student learning. For example, the Scottish Higher Drama syllabus means teenagers are still being introduced to Antigone, and all the complex relationships in that play. However, the current model is flawed.
Primaries are still, thankfully, more child than subject centred, and very many children really do thrive up to age 11 or 12, and child development has long recognised that.
The rigidities of academic subjects in Secondary and that narrow tunnelled curriculum then represent a shift in style and approach, that can smother genuine learning, and yes, creative impulses.
My most longstanding gripe is that all subject boundaries are artificial, and we only value specialists, not generalists, whose perspectives are across the margins of academic subjects.
Where does Physics or History end and Geography start ?
Where does Art end and Technology start ?
Being a teen can be really difficult for so many youngsters and social pressures are immense, probably more so nowadays. I think that means that conventional schooling often fails students, as the most significant metric for success is confidence. This is a difficult area for many teens racked with self doubt. For me as a teacher building self confidence and especially curiousity are and were much more important than the imparting of any body of knowledge.
Real education is much more expensive than state budgets allow, and underfunding is a key problem.
Then add the strict controls exerted by the exam boards and the UK practice of rigid assessments as standard, whether by SATS, GCSE, National 5s or Highers.
These are also millstones around the neck of liberal educationists.
Personally I prefer the Finnish approach, of self discovery, (but which needs much more money invested in education) and lament the lack of courage of Scotgov in fully transferring to that style and thinking when we shifted to the ‘curriculum for excellence’ which has been so compromised in practice.
I wish Scotland had tried harder…
Much to agree with
Good points, Tony.
“My most longstanding gripe is that all subject boundaries are artificial, and we only value specialists, not generalists, whose perspectives are across the margins of academic subjects.
Where does Physics or History end and Geography start ?
Where does Art end and Technology start ?”
Indeed. At school in the 50s, I loved Geography, along with Chemistry, Physics, English Language and – of course- maths, but dropped History (which I now enjoy) at the first opportunity because the teaching was so dry & boring – mostly a string of dates and battles, and ending well before the start of WW1! In any case we had at that point to choose between History & Chemistry, also between Art (which I was really never good at) & Physics. That said I got free violin lessons at school, leading to a life-long love of music and playing in good local amateur orchestras until I moved to France, where such opportunities rarely exist outside Conservatoires, mostly for the young. Well, no system is perfect, but I suspect France is generally better for schooling.
My father having died when I was 2 years old, I grew up , an only child, with my mother (a Sec Mod science teacher) & her older spinster sister (head of the infant school), in a female household where politics was never discussed, it took many years for me to make up for the lack of any education in how society works and the basics of democracy (as noted above). While I did manage to find my political leanings by the time I was 21, Family History research helped history come alive and finding this blog did much to educate me on the finance side.
Thanks
I admit we denied our children the chance of a politics free childhood. They do not seem to have suffered.
This is well outside my sphere of expertise but perhaps 13 years of formal education gives many 18 year olds a fine ability to apply their critical faculties – to themselves as well as others – at the expense of the ability to create autonomously.
Ask about music or the environment or TikTok or some other subject that captures their attention and most would be able to explain at length what they like or dislike and why.
But for a creative mindset I firmly believe it is important to switch off critical faculties in the first instance. Allow the mind to wander and create. Once the first draft or sketch or whatever is done – which may be good or bad indifferent – then you edit mercilessly.
Fear of failure holds people back (and I include myself – I hold myself back from starting, and then from finishing, but I know I have to push against my own mental barriers).
Perhaps more accurately it is a fear of negative responses, from oneself as much as from others. Young children are happy to do what they do and move on. Teenagers are particularly vulnerable to peer pressure.
Much to agree with
PE & Sports?
What is it that small children want to do?
Run around in my experience, job done!
Why dont Girls do PE? None of the obvious questions, clothes, changing facilities etc seem to be addressed or the things they want to do, Dance, swimming etc seem to be provided.
Nuff said
Perhaps a glance into our history could remind us why we really have school: “Tacitus, Life of Agricola “§ 17. The following winter passed without disturbance, and was employed in productive matters. For, in order to familiarize a population scattered and barbarous and therefore inclined to war with rest and repose through the charms of luxury, Agricola gave private encouragement and public aid to the building of temples, courts of justice and dwelling-houses, praising the energetic, and reproving the lazy. Thus an honourable rivalry took the place of force. He likewise provided a liberal education for the sons of the chiefs, and showed such a preference for the natural powers of the Britons over the industry of the Gauls that they who lately disdained the tongue of Rome now coveted its eloquence. Hence, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the “toga” became fashionable. Step by step they were taught in things which led to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.”
I’m not sure who today’s Romans might be, but it seems highly likely we’re schooled not for our own benefit, but to be useful to them. Those triumphantly brandishing their hard-earned academic qualifications might like to consider them in that light, in particular while they’re trying to work out how to pay back, with interest, student loans and mortgages, all conjured by the gleeful lenders from thin air.
While I don’t disagree with your overall conclusion (I often found the academic rigidity of school quite stifling), is there any general evidence to suggest that people who aren’t subjected to such a routine during their formative years end up any better? Are they more resilient, more creative, and so on?
I think to at least some extent, the guilelessness and spontaneity of youth is going to give way to teenage uncertainty and self-doubt at some point come what may. Becoming an adult is just really hard.
I think those home schooled might keep this curiosity – not wholly, but more
Home schooling is actually quite problematic. It can liberate but it can also imprison.
I have taught a number of students who have had extended periods of home education.
All have been substantially behind their peers in basic skills.
An eight year old who can barely read, and a nine year old who can’t do even basic arithmetic do not reflect well on the practice of home schooling.
Social isolation can also present problems for some home schooled children who are naturally introverted or lack social skills.
The fact is that although parents mostly know and love their children, many parents have no formal training, or knowledge of learning practices. Teaching is not that easy.
That we have all had over a decade of schooling does not qualify us as educationists, just as the fact we have all had experience of the NHS does not qualify us for administering a professional level of medical care at home.
Some home schooling can work, for some youngsters, but much does not.
At one time I thought home schooling would mostly be both positive and productive for children, but my experience of home schooled students has regrettably made me revise that hope,
I agree: home schooling is no panacea and I am not promoting it
I have some experience of home schooling with my own children.
One of my sons was falling hopelessly behind in basic reading and writing when he first started school. By the end of reception we were told he needed to repeat the year, we worked with him over summer to get him through and we were told at the start of year 1 they couldn’t see a problem. He went a few terms through year 1 and we were told he really needed to repeat year 1 because he wasn’t up to it.
We wanted him at home with us in the morning and to go to school in the afternoon. Our feeling was that give a few of his best hours and one to one activity we would be able to teach him to read, but we were told by the teachers that we weren’t teachers and didn’t know what we were doing.
As the teachers at the school weren’t being cooperative we opted to home school him instead. At the time I thought we could fix the issue within a term, in reality we rapidly noticed all sorts of problems that suggested our child that was seriously dyslexic and this was going to be a long term problem.
The wife and I taught him for almost 2 years, working one-to-one for 4-5 hours every day on basics like reading, writing and arithmetic. I also wrote apps to try to deal with the weaknesses I could see and we eventually got him to the point where he could read well enough to be able to attend school and make something of it. I don’t think any educational system would ever have given him the one to one attention he needed and he could so easily have ended up one of those children that could barely read.
Quite honestly it was hell for him and for us, but without the ability to read you just can’t access the curriculum. After a couple of years we had him assessed by an educational psychologist who confirmed that he was very dyslexic but also told us we had worked nothing short of a miracle.
Home schooling can work, but, depending upon the child, it can require a huge investment of time and effort by parents. If you think home schooling is going to just work for every child you may have a very rude awakening. Most (but not all) children need the structure of a school to make progress. I completely believe that some parents with children struggling at school take the option of home schooling and are either unable or unwilling to make it work.
Our child was extremely lucky to have parents who were dedicated and had the time, resources and ability to deal with his issues. These were issues that would never have been fixed in either an independent or state school.
Well done
Growing up in an era when few understood dyslexia, I really struggled in school. However, even as young as the age of eight I had started to draw house plans, not front of house, door, windows and roof, but what the living space would look like from the top down. We lived with my grandmother who kept insisting that my brother would be the Architect and I must be the wife and mother; it put me off motherhood for life! Such was the extreme prejudice of the day. Despite the evidence of my obvious interest in design, my brother, who drew stick men fighting each other, was considered better drafting material; as an adult he excelled as a salesman.
My mother worked exceptionally long hours juggling between several jobs in an effort to raise us without the support of a father. The care my grandmother provided came at a cost, she demanded private school education. Most of my brother’s education and about two thirds of mine was in private schools. While in state school, the eleven plus was a torturous and demeaning experience that thoroughly drained my self-confidence by needlessly instilling failure. Having experienced both private and state education systems, I have to say that the most talented and engaging teachers I had were all in state schools.
The pressure to succeed is greater in private school, smaller class sizes, but very rigid learning by rote. None of the teacher’s stand out for anything beyond the cruelty of smacking me for scrambling numbers and letters. Speaking the ‘Queen’s English, manners and deportment were emphasized; the sense of entitlement is instilled during private education. Although boarding is dehumanizing for some, I wanted to be a boarder; instead I was a smuggler. There is always something that needs to be smuggled in or out of boarding school. MPs would not have fared well in my first school where the motto was “always tell the truth”, but ‘telling tales’ was not tolerated. The good memories are of spacious grounds and, in schools that were two thirds boarding, meeting children from all over the world at a time when my home town was exclusively white British.
However there were sacrifices that had to be made to pay for our education. The rambling rental maisonette where I grew up was damp and freezing cold: I dreaded winter. There was dew on my dresser and even on my bed in the morning and you could see your breath in the bedroom, not helped by my grandmother’s insistence on keeping the window partially open. Because my Gran had grown up with servants, she was a hopeless cook; lunch at school was our only hot meal in the day. When children go to bed after a junk-food tea or just bread and butter, and then they sleep in cold damp bedrooms, their blood sugar drops overnight. Sugary cereals or toast in the morning provides a very brief recovery before blood sugar will drop off a cliff without proper balanced nutrition.
A simple finger prick test would reveal that many of the poorest children in our state schools are struggling to learn despite low blood sugar. This is caused by a combination of their abysmal diet and living in poorly insulated, unheated UK housing stock. When I was in school we were expected to drink a small bottle of milk at the morning break, which may have prevented me from passing out in school when my blood sugar dropped. I did not recognize the signs back then, but I have no doubt that it exacerbated my dyslexic brain fuzz that got worse with the stress of teachers punishing my errors. The Tory Government has been happy to oversee the dramatic increase in child poverty and I am sure they understand just how it is ‘dumbing down’ their ‘worker drones’ ready for future exploitation.
Starmer’s pitiful tale of growing up in his version of poverty, as exemplified by having the phone cut off! This was laughable; we never had a phone to cut off. At a time when every home had a TV, we were the sorry exception, we didn’t even have a refrigerator and my mother used a flat iron that she heated up on the gas stove. Welcome to the ‘Sordid bohemian charm’, that’s how I would jokingly describe my childhood home without whining about poverty. Sunak is even further removed from the concept of poverty as are the vast majority of our current politicians.
The really serious issue that absolutely must be addressed with great urgency, as Jamie Oliver and Marcus Rashford realized, is the proper nutrition of our children. The brain does not function without nutrition; it is the first function to become impaired and cold excellerates this process. The insulation of holmes should have been the top priority in the Green agenda, but it has been scaled back and will probably be dropped altogether. Children who grow up in cold, damp homes their family cannot afford to heat, while subsisting on cheap junk-food, cannot be expected to do well in school. Despite not having any children of my own, I firmly believe that we all have a collective responsibility towards children and young people; it’s time our Government stepped up to the plate.
Perhaps an impediment to conventional education like dyslexia forces children to think creatively to get around those restrictive rules of learning to pass exams. I have come a long way since the days of handing in blank sheets of paper that proved less problematic for me in school. I have become convinced that the greatest accelerator of innovation is some type of deprivation. For me that was the time-limited deprivation of having to make do with what I had aboard a small yacht at sea on an ocean crossing. Necessity is the mother of invention and through my travels I found that the developing world has ‘the mother of necessity’! For some that deprivation is the result of losing a limb and learning how to cope, for others it is surviving in a conflict zone. On our finite planet we must learn to make-do, mend, recycle and become a lot more innovative.
Sadly, I discovered, to my detriment, that innovative minds are not welcome in large organizations. I was ousted as a whistleblower from hospitals on both sides of the pond. My return to education at Uni was sabotaged when I exposed NHS negligence during retraining in surgery. Innovative people are more likely to notice a potential danger or suggest a creative way of doing something that often infuriates Managers who do not ‘think outside the box’. The response of those degree educated Managers, who were taught to remain inside rigid guidelines in every respect, is invariably the same: target the messenger. All of these scandals we are dealing with right now in the UK are a product of the ultra rigid teaching that stifles creative thinking, root cause analysis and thinking through things logically.
Breakfast clubs only really started about 35 years ago, when it became obvious that a lot of primary age children were coming to school without breakfast, and hence were impeded in their learning, and with a knock on effect on their behaviour.
Ensuring adequate nutrition was not really a standard primary teacher’s duty, at least until the 90s, but increases in child poverty, despite Surestart, made it a pragmatic imperative, even under Blairism.
Now we have politicians promising breakfast clubs in every school as an election policy.
How things have changed.
Teachers are now expected to be social workers as well as educationists and schools have to provide food and clothing for so many students, such is the rise of family poverty and malnutrition in the 6th largest economy on the planet.
And we tolerate this ?
I shared your mirth at the story of Starmer’s telephone being cut off during his childhood.
I wouldn’t have viewed my own family as poor, but by the time we got a phone Starmer would have been in his 20’s. You can only come to the conclusion that his family was rather better off than he is prepared to acknowledge.
Going back to your original topic, I agree that schools rarely foster creativity in their students.
One factor recently has been government, the invention of the “English Baccalaureate” as something to assess schools with has meant creative subjects (and I would include ones including performance, even PE) are less valued and fewer children are encouraged to continue them through school.
But also there is an educational orthodoxy that has developed which sidelines creativity. All kids study English Language up to age 16 but somehow creative writing is rarely part of it when it should be a major stream (alongside expressing arguments clearly and succinctly). As children become more self-conscious on their passage through teenagerhood, they will drop things that expose their emotions and personal ideas unless these are encouraged and given supportive feedback. And at the same time other subjects are taught without showing students the creativity which went into their major findings (thinking science, and harking back to your blog a couple of days ago, maths).
English teaches frontal adverbials, which is knowledge significantly less useful than trigonometry.
“English teaches frontal adverbials, which is knowledge significantly less useful than trigonometry.”
Indeed! I wonder when that came in. I have always felt proud of my ability to write good English (often remarked on by peer reviewers of my scientific papers). In 1958, I got 80% in English Language at O-level without ever having heard of frontal adverbials (until 2 days ago on this blog!) and still have no idea what they are and no desire to know!
In the sentence ‘Back at home, my dog was sleeping’ the phrase ‘back at home’ is a frontal adverbial (I think). Who cares, I ask? Is there a frontal adverbial in that sentence? Who does care?
Thank you for giving an example of a frontal adverbial, now I’ll know one when I see one. (To me it’s always sounded like something you’d go to the dentist to have fixed.)