Children must ‘indulge creative side’

School children should be encouraged to indulge their creative side and not have it stamped out, said Jane O’Meara Sanders, wife and senior political adviser to former US presidential Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders.

Speaking in Limerick, Ms O’Meara Sanders, who is the founding member of US think tank The Sanders Institute, said children should be encouraged in their education to “think outside the box”. As leaders of the future, this may help them realise better solutions to the many social, environmental, and economic problems facing the world.

Taking part in a panel discussion at University of Limerick on The Creative Agenda in Education, Ms O’Meara Sanders added: “What we need to do is not stamp out the curiosity in our schools, but to actually encourage it, and to reward it, and instil the confidence to be able to be wrong; to be able to be different; and to be able to be thinking of things that nobody else has.”