Teaching Creativity

I want to talk today about creativity.  Our good friend, Webster, defines it as “1. the bringing into being; originating, designing, inventing, etc. 2. the bringing about; causing.” Modern neuroscience, meanwhile, defines it as the brain’s capacity to combine previously unassociated ideas in new ways (Leslie).  But regardless of one’s specific definition for it, creativity is a critical cognitive skill for success in life, and one that Fortune 500 CEOs unanimously vote is the most important quality for leadership in any discipline.  Creativity matters.

It can also be measured and taught.  We determine an individual’s “CQ” (joining IQ and EQ as identifiable brain capacities) by taking a measure of a brain’s “fluency” (the number of ideas possessed in long term memory [LTM]) and a brain’s “flexibility” (the number of conceptual categories in LTM), and from these derive an individual’s capacity for creativity. Furthermore, like IQ and EQ, an individual’s CQ is malleable and can change over time in response to environment and training.  Hence, in the same way that we can develop and strengthen a person’s IQ and EQ, we can teach someone how to be more creative.

Yet data suggest that by the time most of us reach adulthood, our CQ levels have actually declined. What’s more, the data suggest a possible culprit for this decline:  education.  When the CQ of preschoolers is measured, 98% of them score at the “creative genius” level (relative to the others in their age group).  But by elementary school, that number drops to 30%. By high school, it is 12%, and by adulthood 2% (Scala & Wolking).  Imagine! Just 2% of today’s adults have CQ scores at the “creative genius” level. What’s going on here?

I have already written about digital technology’s impact on the declining levels of creativity we see today and its corresponding decline in entrepreneurship in this country. But that decline is across all age groups.  What I believe is driving the observed steady decline in CQ as individuals grow up in our culture is the way the vast majority of them are taught over the course of their educational careers.  As I discuss in the Introduction, the dominant paradigm in most of our educational systems is a Cartesian one, where students are “machines” to be assembled and operated to acquire predetermined properties and then graded on how well each “machine” has successfully achieved these properties in order to assign it a specific value to society.  Thus, as a student progresses through this system, each is steadily told what they are good at and what they are not good at, and the “not good” is increasingly removed from their learning, depriving them access to the additional ideas (“fluency”) and categories (“flexibility”) that inform a person’s CQ.

It is little wonder, then, that by the time even a college educated individual has completed a major (the ultimate in restricting “fluency” and “flexibility”) and earned their degree that they have lost their “creative genius” as future adults.  Which is not say that they are incapable of being creative within the limitations of what’s available in their LTM, but the key word there is “limitations.”  Most schooling in this country steadily places more and more limits on what students are allowed to learn (can everyone say “tracking?”), and therefore, by adulthood, most of those preschool “creative geniuses” have ceased to exist.  CQ’s very malleability in this case works against itself.

Furthermore, it should also come as no surprise that the impact of schooling chipping away at a person’s CQ is even worse for students of color and those in poorer communities.  After all, as I discuss in more detail in To Grade or Not to Grade, the whole point of tracking is to socialize and adapt certain designated groups to “fill low status positions” (Spener, p. 61) that not only require minimal creativity but in fact actually need low CQ in order to tolerate what is being demanded of them.  I have little doubt, for example, that it is far easier to work for Walmart or Amazon if your “fluency” and “flexibility” have been systematically stunted by classes with lower standards and expectations, and so I suspect that if we explored even the small 2% of adults identifiable as “creative geniuses,” we would still see the impact of inequity there as much as anywhere else in our society.

However, what is most worrisome to me as an educator gets back to the fact that for everyone, CQ’s malleability seems to work against itself in our current educational systems.  And the reason why I find that so worrisome is that the same CQ malleability that can work against itself in the wrong educational environment can also be said to be true of IQ in our school’s as well.  As the work of Dweck and others have shown, intelligence is highly malleable, and the impact of grading and tracking on changes in individual students’ IQs over the course of their school years (both positive and negative) is well documented (Hammond).  Therefore, not only is the predominate existing school structure in this country undermining the capacity for creativity in children and adults alike; it is undermining our capacity for cognition as well.  Add in the fact that our digital technologies are making nearly all of us functionally autistic in our EQs when it comes to interacting with one another (el Kaliouby) and our repeated failures to tackle our entrenched social problems should no longer come as a surprise to anyone: we are basically systematically building brains to fail at empathetic, creative problem solving.

But we don’t need to be.  The alternative educational paradigm presented in this project works.  When children are authentically engaged by their teachers, all the “Qs” increase; I have seen it firsthand and in myriad educational settings.  Educators who employ the co-learning, appropriately intimate rapport, and brain science elaborated on in Part I transform their students’ lives for the better and produce effective citizens who can create a more just, economically fair, and ecologically sustainable society. 

What we can no longer afford, though, is for simply individual educators to do this in the isolation of the occasional odd classroom.  We need an educational system that does it, and we need that educational system ASAP.  Time IS running out on some of the problems facing us (see It Could (Will?) Be Worse), and unless as a society we start producing fully equipped empathetic, creative problem solvers, the January 6 insurrection will be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of what is to come in the future of this country.

Which brings me to one last thought about creativity.  In our everyday vernacular, the word has very positive associations; we think of highly creative people as value-added and creativity as something aspirational.  However, I provided Webster’s definition at the start of this post for a reason.  Creativity is simply that: “the bringing into being” or “the bringing about” of something new. What that something new actually is depends not on how large a person’s CQ is but the qualities of the “fluency” and “flexibility” that produce it.  The number of ideas and the number of categories in someone’s LTM can be enormous and their CQ off the chart—a true “creative genius”—but if those ideas and categories are those of bigotry, prejudice, hate, etc., then what that genius creates can be horrific and decimating—the Nazi’s “Final Solution” and the American “Manhattan Project” were both examples of highly creative problem solving.

Therefore, it is not going to be enough to construct an educational system that improves the “Qs.”  How the system improves them matters, too.  Teaching entrepreneurship, for example, is a great way to teach creativity, but it also a great way to teach greed.  That is why the ecological paradigm of authentic engagement presented in this project is so critical for restructuring our schools.  Otherwise, we risk producing the “technically sophisticated and highly skilled barbarians” discussed in Chapter 7—right along with the highly creative conspiracy theorists and demagogues who can threaten a democracy.

References

Dweck, C. (2016) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.  New York:  Ballantine Books.

Hammond, Z. (2015) Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

el Kaliouby, R. (2021) Girl Decoded: A Scientists Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology.  New York: Currency.

Leslie, I. (2014) Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. New York: Basic Books.

Medina, J. (2014) Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.  Seattle:  Pear Press.

Scala, K. & Wolking, J. (2021) Innovative School Model Showcase: Entrepreneurship at Aspen Academy. NAIS Webinar. https://www.nais.org/articles/pages/member/webinars/2020-2021/nais-webinar-recording-innovative-school-model-showcase-entrepreneurship-at-aspen-academy/?utm_source=bn&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mc&utm_content=cip.

Spener, D. (1996) Transitional Bilingual Education and the Socialization of Immigrants. Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy, ed. By P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum, & S. Sherblom.  Boston:  Harvard Educational Review.

Whitman, G. & Kelleher, I. (2016) Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education.  New York: Rowman & Littlefield.