Slashdot Mirror
The Creativity Crisis
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from an article at Newsweek:
"For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. ... Like intelligence tests, Torrance's test — a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist — has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect — each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. 'It's very clear, and the decrease is very significant,' Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America — from kindergarten through sixth grade — for whom the decline is 'most serious.'"
Shocking, who'd've thought that standardized testing, eliminating recess and general free time would have consequences. Perhaps actually letting kids play would help that.
I have a rising third grader. I've been informed that the next year will be all about memorization of the necessary facts which will get her to pass the Virginia "Standards Of Learning" (yes, they really call them the SOLs) exam at year end. Everything in the school system, from her promotion to the evaluations of the teachers, administrators, and facility are tied to these scores. There is no creativity required or recommended on these exams.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Never heard of it.
If you're familiar with the founding principals of the public education system this isn't a surprise. Schools were intentionally designed by early 20th century psychologists to reduce creativity and increase conformity.
If anything, it's surprising that it took this long before this effect started to manifest.
From the article:
"It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children."
One of the test questions was “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?”
If you went to the average TV viewer and asked them what could make their T.V. shows better, I sincerely doubt that they could give a succinct and "creative" set of ideas that would improve various shows. If you asked a video gamer for say an MMO like WoW or even a browser game like Farmville what suggestions they have to improve the games, you would probably have to gag them to get them to shut up. For video game fans, new ideas (some of them quite creative workarounds) are a dime a dozen, and the challenge is filtering them to find the best ideas for how to gear/play a character or how to run a farm.
Video games are almost perpetually linked with television by virtue of being activities in which one sits down in front of a glowing screen, but video games tend to be highly interactive with constant feedback/user response while television is nearly 100% passive. (American Idol voting doesn't count) I would agree that the increase of mindshare and time devoted to passive pursuits could decrease creativity, but I really wish that the media would, as a group, get a better idea of how different video games and television shows are. The difference between games and t.v. is the difference between using a kitchen knife to chop vegetables and using a kitchen knife to stab people, yet again, video games are taking more blame for making our kids less creative than the school systems' standardized tests and performance obsessed culture.
Signatures are the new names.
1980-1990 seems about the time cable television became more common than OTA TV. OTA TV used to be very boring for children, but cable brought Nickelodeon and the Disney channel in homes to become defacto babysitters for millions of kids.
It might clean my ass if I use it as a wipe, but that is where its usefulness ends.
The inevitable result of being taught to accept everything they are taught without question, rather than being taught the basics and critical thinking, is that students mostly stop asking important questions. Even if they do ask, they depend on someone else to provide "the one true answer" - because they don't have the tools to arrive at a useful answer on their own.
WHO IS TO BLAME?!?
Music teaches focus. Art cannot be done without fully applying yourself. Sports teaches teamwork and pragmatic execution. Yet we cut all that and emphasize stuff in text books, as if they were bibles. No wonder creativity is stuck in a pot hole.
Anyone with any slight interest in the topic must see:
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&playnext_from=QL&playnext=1
How do you measure creativity anyway?
90 for people that give all the correct answers.
90-100 for everybody that fills in answers that have nothing to do with the questions.
100-110 for those that draw pretty pixelated pictures using the multiple choice boxes.
110-120 for the people that draw pretty pictures outside the boxes.
130+ when they make the questionaire form into paper mache.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I wonder how much contribution the ease of information access and advanced tools have to this. A few generations ago, if you didn't know something, you had to figure it out yourself or go to the library and spend hours trying to see if someone else solved it (with much less chance of getting the answer than today).
However, with improvement in technology, it is much easier to find someone else's solution to the problem - odds are you aren't alone in your problem and someone has figured in out and disseminated their solution. If your typical problem solving techniques consists primarily of Google, how likely is it that you are prepared to use your own head when you need it?
Not saying that technology is bad, but maybe they should have given the kids access to whatever tech they wanted to solve their problem and then see how many kids run to the computer and are then able to solve these tasks.
"With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect — each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter."
No... the IQ test is a normalized test meaning that the median score is always 100, the variance is always 10.
rather than playing using our imaginations, most kids prefer to watch tv or play video games. both of these activities are the act of media Consumption, and not of using their own imagination. when i was a kid (now i sound like an old man), my folks would kick my brother and i out of the house and tell us to play until supper time. this meant playing cops and robbers or army man or explorer or maybe some baseball and football. aside from sports, we had to use our imagination a lot - LARPing for normals. of course by the time i was 15 I preferred playing D&D and reading books, which meant less time outside and more time PRETENDING and using my imagination.
that's why I started playing D&D with my daughter when she turned 8. she loves to read and we have a lot of fun in our campaign. we're always using our imaginations when we play, as opposed to when she's sitting at the computer playing her FLASH games.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
But creativity can and should be fostered outside the school system too.
There is less divergent thinking!
In other news, with more kids surfing the Internet, playing video games, and texting each other on their phones, researchers have found less time is being spent actively engaged in baseball and other sports!
The papers will be presented in this summer's conference in southern France. Follow-up studies backed by a NSA grants will be needed to validate these conclusions and explore their ramifications.
especially in the last years parents pumping their kids full of behavior adjusting drugs? Ritalin maybe?
Video Games and TV are the same. Video Games may require more creativity than TV, but it's substantially less than anything else. I'm a programmer by trade and I program and write plays in my free time. Video Games are a more active vegging than watching TV, but they're still something I do when I've burned out my creative capacity for the night, not something that uses that capacity.
Creativity tests... heh. Most of these tests are completely ridiculous.
I remember one of these tests where totally stupid answers were given points, just because they are "original". I hate people that think of themselves as "creative", yet, they cannot come up with something PRACTICALLY USEFUL. You can be "very original" and "totally irrelevant" at the same time. For me, creativity means original and usable (in a broad sense -- amusing, entertaining, enthralling, etc count as useful, too).
I hate even more those people that cry "all these rules just hamper my creativity". Again, bullshit! Limitations often stimulate creativity. Puzzles are all about limits on the solution space. Many writers, painters, poems made up artificial limits for themselves, just to see, what can they do within those limitations. Also, any engineer has to think inside some box, as the final result has to be useful and relevant to the problem at hand. Physicists are limited by the laws of nature -- still, many physicists are very creative -- especially because they have to use seemingly limiting laws to their benefit. Hacking is also a great example where the whole process is about seemingly bending the limits, but you really stay inside them, you just discover ways that were unexpected to be existing inside that "box". Logic is also a limitation. Are you original just because you deny logic? Sometimes yes (in these cases you end up with an augmented logic), but most of the times, no.
Rant off.
In order to ensure childres safety they are placed and encuraged stay in secuer safe 'creative' environments. Classic example, who here below tha age of 50 has every seen or even played with a 'real' chemistry set.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
If some evil mad scientist were to undertake building a device to systematically destroy creative thinking in humans, I doubt he could do better than the TV programming of this past decade.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
This is yet another example of the dangers inherent in over-parenting. "Don't climb that tree!" "Don't find out what dirt tastes like!" "Don't take the toy apart!"
This naturally evolves into the adult version. "Don't take pictures of that bridge!" "Don't try to find out what's behind that wall!" "Don't question anything your leaders tell you!"
It's all part of the plan.
He took a duck to the face at 250 knots.
Education in America today is focused almost exclusively on memorizing the tests that will be used to determine school performance. Little emphasis is placed upon creative thinking, deductive logic or expression.
It is no surprise that we are turning out "trained rats" who can perform a specific set of tasks to pass a test but do not have adequate skills to function in a society where creativity is the driving force for progress.
Tisha Hayes
I have noticed a distinct trend towards authoritarianism in American culture in the past 20 years. And this has been most especially pronounced in schools. Authoritarianism and creativity are at direct odds with each other.
My own HS started making changes shortly after I graduated in 1989. They started restricting student's ability to go off campus during the day. And I haven't really gone back to find out what else has changed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot more locked down than when I went.
I think America became afraid of its young people. There was this idea that young people were becoming increasingly violent and uncontrollable. For example, stories of cold-blooded killings and gang membership became the impetus for changing the laws so it was much more likely juveniles would be prosecuted as adults.
But I think there was more to it than that, and I'm not completely sure where the wrong turn was taken or what it was.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
How's the test structured? What's the researcher's definition of creativity? What are they measuring? Creativity is a very subjective concept as it is.
Just because someone creates a test doesn't mean it measures what they think it measures. We've been through all this with intelligence tests.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I grew up in a surrounding which i pretty much could understand (lets exclude politics here) at age 10. I was presented with toys which you can use to build sth yourself (lego bricks, later lego technics, electronics experimental kits). I was not allowed to watch television unsupervised and in average maybe watched 30 minutes per day. I helped renovate the parents house and played outside in the forest. When i started to play computer games i knew how they were programmed. Which means that for me the fun and the possibilities to do sth depended on and grew with comprehending the world and finding creative ways to use this understanding. To me it seems that kids today are raised under a different paradigm: give them an extreme amount of toys which are completely incomprehensible - and no level on comprehension which the kid could achieve will enable it to reshape this toy. An DVD player will never do anything else. Even computer are castrated nowadays (Hello, who of us did not start programming with typing something on the C128 for curiosity) to be game-consoles only. Electronics kit can never come close - even qualitatively - to the millions of gadgets surrounding us, I dont even want to talk about the sense of security which would forbid that children modify their bikes. Nothing which you paint, write, do, will compare to the best amateur thing you find on the internet. So let me formulate that way: we have raised the level of intelligence and knowledge required before creativity pays of visibly to a level not achievable for most of the kids.
From the article:
During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.
This reminds me of a recent article about lucid dreaming:
People who focus single-mindedly on a task during the day, be it a computer game or playing a musical instrument, are more likely to experience lucid dreams
I'm more a musician than a gamer, but I occasionally play a fast-paced classic such as Llamatron, in order to get into a particular kind of focused mood. For example, after a lazy day, I might use the game to crank up my brain for some academic work that needs to get done. Playing music gets me into a different kind of focus, more relaxed usually, but the end result is mostly the same.
So perhaps creativity has a lot to do with the ability to focus, and it is easy to see why it has become more difficult in the recent decades. The article talks about divergent and convergent thinking, which to me sound like a metacognitive skill, an ability to direct your thinking.
On another note, before reading the article, the summary gave the idea that CQ levels are falling as IQ rises. This was not as straightforward as described in the article, but I still cannot help thinking that people are becoming more computer-like.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The first time I heard it was with Sir Ken Robinson at a Ted conference. I recommend everyone to watch it. His thesis is that creativity is as important as literacy and we should treat it with the same importance. I highly recommend everyone to watch the presentation. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
"from kindergarten through sixth grade — for whom the decline is 'most serious."
So Hollywood is hiring kindergarteners to write and direct blockbuster films?
Quite coincidentally, The Simpsons debuted in 1989. Hmmmm....
to this, but I just can't think of anything creative to say about it.
More copyrights! more patents! We must teach the children that sharing ideas or being inspired by prior work are crimes!
We will determine your creativity index using this creativity standardized test, you have 1 hour. BEGIN!
I've sometimes thought, looking back at my own career in engineering, that my problem solving ability has got in the way of promotion. It's actually easier and more effective to find someone else to fix the problem, or persuade management that the problem doesn't need fixing (kill the product, for instance). And, if you aren't spending a lot of time on the 98% of perspiration that follows the 2% of inspiration, you have time to play golf with the boss and network your next promotion.
I think the rot really set in when the word "consumer" became a generic term for everybody. Umberto Eco made this point once, showing how industrial exhibitions had gone from showcasing technology (buy one of these and you can make whatever you can imagine) to showcasing products (buy one of these and your life as a consumer will be better.)
Schools only reflect society. If teachers are mostly consumers, they won't see the value of (genuine) creativity.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This sounds like a test developed by baby boomers to test baby-boomerishness in people. It's the get-of-my-lawn test.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The controls were put in place mainly to shield the schools from litigation. Schools don't have BP-style resources, so every dollar counts. Let's face it, the average family can't afford to send their kids to school (it's about $10k/student for public, somewhete between $17k-20k for private), so there's not going to be any new influx of cash in schools.
Some of the controls (I got out of HS in 87) were to prevent vandalism/waste - like making the copier off limits to students, though my best friend in HS and I were the only two, save the principal, who could fix minor problems with it. Much of it stems from very rare, isolated cases of injury/loss/death during school hours while the students were not accounted for. There is no wrath like a parent who has lost a child. When you have to have a perfect safety record with several thousand unpredictable teens 180 days out of the year, things get a little crazy.
We're not afraid of them, per se, but afraid something will happen to them. A college student gets drunk and falls out of a 4th story window to her death, so the college welds all of the windows shut. An appropriate response? To the parents who no longer have a daughter it would have prevented her death. Won't you think of the children?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just look at the entertainment industry.
Nowadays the best they can do are remakes of remakes of remakes.
The TV is just pandering to base human nature. Most people seem to like to see others fail, and to laugh at them. It's where reality TV got it's hold, but no more differently than the sit coms or soaps. Just as everyone slows down at a traffic accident - not to see if they can help, but to see the carnage - humans seem to revel in the failures of others.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Knowing - and probably more importantly learning - details is still quite valuable. Just a matter of how it's actually done.
You may be partially on to something. Many items are "too cheap to fix" now. If your TV breaks, you don't see which tube blew. If the lawnmower stops running, there's not much that's replaceable (save the entire engine). If your car or washing machine stops running, there's a good chance that fixing it would require diagnostic equipment exceeding the value of the item - you take it to get repaired or you replace it.
The commiditization of consumer items and the need to drive down prices has led to items which are not intended to be serviced by the end user (hey, Steve Jobs, I'm lookin' at you). There is little need for problem solving on a day to day basis.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Everything has been already invented. There is nothing more to invent.
taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages
So in one country the results from a single test have dropped a bit. That's basically just a single data point. Without knowing what's happening to everyone else, who's not american there's very little worth talking about, If it was the whole population of the planet showing signs of decreased creativity then there could be something to worry about. Without all those other comparative data this test tells us nothing.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Our educational system is designed to foster corporatism, mediocrity, and blind submission to authority. Creative thinking and action are purposely suppressed and individualism is held out to be evil. The real question is, why would anyone be surprised?
In my school years during the 1960s we had to memorize the mountains of Asia, rivers of Africa, which king in Europe started which war, etc.
It seems like nothing has changed.
Testing is the snake oil of our times; but a fool and his money...
What a surprise that video games would be considered a prime suspect (no doubt the Internet as well). As soon as I saw the date 1990 mentioned, I had a sneaking suspicion where some people would end up taking this. If there really has been a decline in creativity here, I think we need to look no further than an education system that focuses on rote memorization and the kind of linear thinking required to meet standardized testing requirements. We treat our children as interchangeable cogs in a one-size-fits-all, 19th century educational system. And then we're shocked, shocked I tell you, that they're not as good at thinking outside of the box we've stuffed them into.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." --Albert Einstein
Isn't that when the Super NES came out?
Considering that game sales and rentals are now impacting movie sales and rentals, I wonder if it's not a coincidence.
It is a thinly veiled excuse for furthering the "war on terror".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I had roughly the same schedule, but I didn't bother paying attention or doing my homework so I saved myself several hours a day. I think that was pretty creative thinking on my part.
Also, back then normal people couldn't afford laptops, so I would work out my BASIC and Pascal programs in a notebook and use the power of my imagination compile them. That's what I did most of the time when I wasn't paying attention.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I started programming because it was fun to do stuff which did not exists on the computer and letmy imagination run wild. Heck the first computer game I had *literally* required imagination to be enjoyed: Yeah that square stick figure is the avatar, and that stick figure with stick out of it is the spider you are attacking. Reading book was not overrated either. But then again i was a geek, and a few of the jocks were literally laughing at me for playing with computer. But if I was born today, I would NEVER be as creative, or I would not even learn to program a computer. General PC is too complicated, even ASM is too complicated in comparison. Console is closed. I praise my luck that I was born at a time of change and shifting rather than before , when computing was for elite, or after, when computing was a closed commodity.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED052254&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED052254
The Interpretation of Torrance Creativity Scores.
This study tests the appropriateness of Torrance's assumptions of trait independence and the combinability of measures (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) with respect to the scoring of the tests for a younger population and estimates the homogeneity of the scores. The sample consisted of 128 elementary school children. Results indicate that separate scoring for fluency, flexibility, and originality traits is not warranted, because any special dispositions for these traits that may exist are overwhelmed by the task specificity of the scores. It is suggested that the Torrance scores reveal nothing interesting about the individual, and the report contends that use of more than a single score from the Torrance battery makes little sense. The major question still unanswered is when, if ever, it makes sense to use a score from the Torrance battery.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
Pot smoking among school kids went down by the early '80s. I'd cite statistics, but those are all suspect, being produced to support claims for the effectiveness of government programs (in a word, "creative"). Still, there can be no doubt by any serious cultural critic that creativity in Western Civilization peaked in the '60s, along with peak use of creativity-enhancing drugs. Because that creativity was perceived as - and may have been - politically dangerous, it and the drug use which enhances it have been discouraged since.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Yes, it is a growing phenomenon that you see here on slashdot a lot: anarchy --> freedom/creativity. An artist realizes that there is positive and negative space in all their creations, and another word for the negative space is "limits" or "constraints". Of course, we're not talking Nazis here -- though slashdot will always eventually go there -- but the vehement hatred of any and all constraints that poops up here on slashdot seems like it has more to do with widespread daddy issues than anything else.
RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, DMCA, DHS, USCIS, PATRIOT, etc.
Any time you begin to enter a culture of control and conservatism (not just a machinery of, but a culture of, in which agency, originality, and deviation are considered morally/ethically wrong), you'll find that people begin to frown on creativity. Innovation is nothing more than deviance with a positive outcome. In an value system that places a premium on nondeviance and sees it as a primary measure of status on the one hand, and that normalizes or obscures awareness of the importance of others' deviance/innovation on the other (read: political and market-oriented historical revisionism the change in our understand of knowledge to that of a commodity to be manufactured), there will be no innovation.
Basically, intellectual property is killing innovation. 9/11 and the war on terror are killing innovation. Big capital is killing innovation.
Where you have a field of perfectly efficient and predictable consumers, you have zero innovation and creativity quotient. By definition.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Well, there's also the old adage that "necessity is the mother of invention". People were a lot more hands on back then with their day to day..well, stuff, plus a lot of things got repaired, not just thrown away when something trivial broke. This lead to "how do I make this better" type efforts..back to caveman days. As applies to children..they mimic adults, they don't see adults doing this anymore that much, repairing or building anything from scratch, figuring out a new tool or how to do something, so they don't either. How many kids today really watch their dad fixing things, or building anything from scratch? the world went from a lot of generalists who could use any tool thrown at them, plus make new tools, to now you need to be an extreme specialist in just one subject to even think about it. I know when I was a little shitter, I was following pops around as he tore down and rebuilt cars, did his own plumbing and carpentry, rebuilt TVs and radios, etc. So..I started doing similar, all the way to getting into trouble for disassembling the lawnmower, etc, building forts, etc with saws and hammer and nails. Kids today..are they really doing that, or mostly just..dunno..playing video games? Being a tool user means you need to use tools, then getting creative with that.
And then, where is the dividing line between art and tech/engineering? Hard to define creativity when we have no real distinction. Perhaps creativity is just not being recognized clearly enough today?
I think this applies.. http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
i always found the Flynn effect to be quite interesting - given that it is demonstrates quite clearly that IQ is something that is down to the environment and has little to do with innate or genetically determined factors.
imho, unless you looking to 'scientifically' justify right-wing or racist ideas then this would be fairly obvious to anyone who's interested.
i'm naturally rather suspicious of any similar such test for creativity - to try to capture or measure something as nebulous a concept as creativity seems at face value to be troublesome.
Well, that explains why Hollywood keeps remaking the same movies over again in ten different ways.
My daughter had a wonderful math teacher that finally got permission to give
an AP Economics class. We live in Washington DC, and this was at the beginning
of the financial meltdown, a wonderful opportunity to bring some real-world
situations into the class. What did they study? The AP curriculum, lockstep
week by week to cover it all. What a loss.
I watched the movie Idiocracy last night and got a sense of our culture's non-creative future, 500-some odd years removed.
In one scene the time clock spins forward over centuries, pausing intermittently only to capture a single image of a restaurant storefront in evolution: "FuddRuckers" devolves to "RuddPuckers", "PudSuckers", etc. (or some such). When the clock stops the culture has christened the restaurant "ButtFuckers".
Apparently the references to FuddRuckers, Costco, Starbucks et al caused Fox to bury the film, which portrays a future where creativity and intelligence have largely disappeared.
I'm speaking purely for the United States here. The first thing that came to mind was this great scene from the movie Apollo 13 where engineers are told they have to fit a square filter in a round hole using only the elements on the table. First reaction? They dive right in.
So to use this as an example, it sometimes feels like we've lost the raw brilliance and creativity that allowed us to put human beings on the moon. And we did it years before the development of advanced composites, sophisticated integrated circuits, and computer modeling. The moon missions were calculated with slide rules; even the astronauts had to be skilled mathematicians.
In that sense, it feels like our creativity is on the wane. On the other hand, perhaps it's just changing form.
True, we haven't put anybody on the moon in a while, but we've instead built a giant worldwide interconnected computer network. We've built a search engine that aggregates and indexes it all. We've built touchscreen devices that can make phone calls, access websites, pinpoint your location to within 30 feet using satellites hundreds of miles in the sky, and put it all into a tiny package that slips into your pocket and runs all day on a battery charge.
That's pretty creative, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. So I don't necessarily know that we're less creative today; I see the emotional and anecdotal evidence for it, but the contrary evidence suggests that we're still exceptionally creative and eclectic with our skills.
Necessity is the mother of invention, sufficiency is her lazy childless brother, and opulance is the serial killer who lives next door.
Someone mentioned above that so much has changed over time that it is basically impossible to discern with assurance the causes, exactly as they are, of such a decline in creativity, without much more in testing. This is no doubt true.
However, I would still offer a view that, in large, attitudes today not very congenial to fostering creativity. This goes deeper than any one policy or practice. This is because many people believe that there is very little that can be done to foster creativity at all, and that creativity is vastly more innate rather than it is developable.
This brings with it the belief that training children in music or poetry is futile, and so, with the first sign of resistance on the part of the child to learning either, the parent gives up. Parents will put more effort into getting children to clean their rooms than they will in having them learn to sing or play an instrument.
So also it brings the the holding of bad art in high repute, because the artists who develop their work are disregarded, because their work is not recognised as being any more creative than those who present only the most basic forms, and indeed it is regarded as restrained or stuffy. So, generally young artists are lionised in today's media, and their styles hold sway. (This is not to say that young people cannot make good art, just that it is harder and less likely for them to make art as good a person's who has had more time to develop).
Though plenty of people here are being labeled as curmudgeons for listing times in their lives where they were forced to be creative, I think they may have something. Over the years it has gotten a lot easier for us and as the old saying goes, "necessity is the mother of invention". We need problems in order to be creative, especially interesting problems. The example that keeps popping up in my mind is the shade tree mechanic. Your trained and bonded mechanic has most of the necessary tools as his or her disposal, as well as resources and references. The old fashioned shade tree doesn't always have that privilege, so he/she has to get creative in order to survive. No computer for diagnostics? Hack one together. It may take years, but all we have is time. No lift? Well, we have some scrap rail, chains and an old truck that we can't afford to put tires on, or even better we'll dig a trench lay this concrete pipe to where we will place our vehicles and tunnel our way. Why not? We can't find this part? Screw it, we'll make something work.
Though I'm sure I'll get it from an artist, creativity is something we can inspire, but without need or want, it is often an unnecessary waste of time and resources.
I wonder if there is a correlation with the rise of Apple computers?
1.Kids arent being allowed to be kids anymore. When I was a kid in primary school, I used to take my 2 bucks pocket money on a Saturday morning and go tearing out of the house, down the street and across the local oval to the local shop to spend the 2 bucks on assorted lollies, most likely shouting who knows what at the top of my lungs at the same time.
Kids need to be kids, they need to be allowed to go outside and play, to kick a footy (Aussie Rules football) or a soccer ball with their mates, to get out in the fresh air.
2.TV, kids are watching more of it than ever (and what they DO watch gets worse and worse, a lot of what passes for kids TV these days is pathetic compared to what was on when I was a kid)
3.Lack of creative toys. These days parents are more likely to buy their kids a Nintendo Wii instead of toys that encourage creativity and imagination. Instead of playing with a GI-JOE action figure or a pack of army soldiers making "Pew Pew" noises, kids are playing video games where the "Pew Pew" noise is created by some guy in a sound studio.
4.The ever increasing pressure on schools to "perform" (and to "perform better" than the school one suburb over). This leads to pressure on politicians to institute measuring systems (usually in the form of standardized tests) so that they can see which schools are doing well and which schools arent. Then, the school principals (fearful that bad scores will negatively impact the schools funding) force teachers to "teach to the test" so that schools can get higher scores (and keep their funding). Courses and lessons like music, art, dance and drama are being removed from schools as they continue to focus more on academic performance and (for those kids who show talent) performance on the football pitch or the basketball court or whatever.
... the Department of Homeland Security. After all, they've got to keep an eye on what everyone is creating.
Have gnu, will travel.
when i was a kid, there were three channels, black and white tv only & they sucked, no kids watched more than 1 hr tv a day, if that.
so we played. outside. all the time. there was no such thing as crime, it simply didn't happen in our town (not one murder in 250+ years... until recently of course)
so there was this pond (the pond is gone, it's now a forced housing development for low income minorities to be integrated into towns deemed "too white" by an NJ judge), and a tree over it with a branch maybe 75 feet over the water, & so we were wondering, how in the world can we get a rope up there so we can swing over the pond and jump in from the rope (we were all about 9-12 years old). the tree was unclimbable (we were all very good at tree climbing -- how many kids have the upper body strength today to climb trees?)
It took us two days to figure it out, but that rope was still there until the low income housing developers came in and cut down the forest, filled in the pond, and put the stream that fed it into underground pipes. i leave it as an exercise to your imagination how we did it -- suffice to say we would have all been put into psychological counseling and put on meds for YEARS if some kids tried the same thing today. we had so much fun swinging into the pond!
Our culture is 100% the opposite of what it was 50 years ago. Everything socially then that was accepted as normal and right is now abnormal and wrong, and visa versa. How anyone can expect this country to continue to go upward, when the culture that was driving us to the stars is now, by design and intention, completely the opposite of the society that was capable of doing that?
Now certainly, back then, the culture SUCKED for a lot of people. It sucked if you were gay, and probably sucked if you were black too (although black families stayed together then), so it is probably better for a lot of previously marginalized groups now because of the changes we made. But those changes were made, and cannot be undone. There were choices we made as a society - that inclusiveness was better than achievement, than elimination of risk was better than solving a problem, etc, etc -- thousands of choices, many of them now hard coded into law.
It has been interesting to watch it all.
We're still as creative as ever! Anytime we don't have enough rainfall for our crops, we were creative enough to realize that we could just spray them with Brawndo. Brawndo has what plants crave!
It takes creativity to figure that out.
If they would stop giving junior so many "legal" drugs for everything from temper tantrums to being moody, maybe the kids could think on their own. Instead Mom and Dad, and the schools drug the kids up, which makes thinking clearly much harder, and wonder why they can't think on their own. Mom and Dad arrange "play dates", drive them to every sporting event, plan their college schedules, and tell them what jobs to take. My God don't any of these parents understand letting kids be kids, and letting go...when they are 18 or 19. How about letting little kids just "play" outside, without having someone "plan the event", kids don't run and play anymore, they don't do anything on their own. No wonder creativity has gone down the tubes.
I'm still pretty young, (21 right now) so I feel that I have a bit more first-hand accounts of what is happening to us.
The one thing that I've noticed that I have that the children born about a decade or two before me is that my computer now does my creativity for me.
Many people are talking about how children to play with models and learn the basics of being creative. This just isn't really a choice anymore. Most of our bright young minds are drawn early into computer focused fields, and have a natural interest in technology, because it's neat, it challenges us, and we don't fully understand it.
Everything is so visually amazing now with the advent of advanced animation techniques, I'm not sure the last time I saw a movie with people actually acting on a set that wasn't just a blue room. Who needs imagination when James Cameron has already captured the coolest looking thing that a team of professional writers could dream up and made it available on my magic light screen for me to call up at any point. (and if I don't mind crossing a few legal gray areas, it's free to boot! Can't say that about a new Lego set)
But now comes current day, where I'm basically locked ball and chain to this damn machine. I was one of those kids who was diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, but honestly, I was just a normal "wiz kid". But playing Real Time Strategy games when I was young built up my ability to micromanage multiple tasks, and the internet could answer any question I had in fractions of a second. And that's always how it's been. The real world just doesn't move as fast as the eWorld, and those of us who grew up on constant instant satisfaction just don't think to take time and figure out a problem for ourselves. I simply never learned the patience that creativity requires. If a solution is not readily apparent, I've learned to instead of trusting in my own intuition, to merely find the answer online.
Technology is wonderful, but it has bred some little monsters. I'm one of them.
Simply put, the online games robs people of the creativity but standardizing on how they think and perceive fantasy world. Compare the follow.
When I used to play MUD, the text read by me in the game, generated in my mind images and the setting. How I see the world, how I interact with it in my mind projected on the text.
VS.
Everyone sees and thinks the same way, based upon an few artists conception on what is a troll, a gnome, or a dark elf looks like. And millions upon millions of children robbed of their views and thoughts - why think, and create when Blizzard does it for you? So a cookie cutter generation will continue to think Elf are tall and skinny and not short, small and shy.
Our imagination is under the attack of terrorists and other omnipresent dangers. We must nuke it to stop it from running wild.
It's easier to sell to dumb people than to smart people. Diesel's "Be Stupid" campaign praising the virtues of being stupid is an eye-opener. Companies like customers to "be stupid" and they only need a few smart people to get their business going. A more stupid society is good for business. It's not an evil ploy, it's just that years and years of profit oriented marketing have inevitably changed the society. Good for us (I'm not a kid anymore), it will be easier to maintain an edge over the new generations ;-)
...now you need to be an extreme specialist in just one subject to even think about it.
It's not just the complexity of modern devices though - it is also that manufacturers now go out of their way to prevent people fix, modifying, learning etc. from things they make in order to prevent you from either improving on it or doing things with it that they do not want you to. When manufacturers actively stop you from 'playing' with their devices the result is not only that it is harder to "fix" it but you also risk breaking the device....and generally those with the free time (students etc.) don't have the money to be able to afford breaking expensive equipment. Hence rather than innovate creatively they just use the device as told.
Of course the above only applies to electronic devices but, as the newest and most capable tools we have these are the ones most likely to motivate creative and intelligent people to play with them because they can, in general, do so much more with them.
we've created the destruction of the financial system as you knew it. - CDO.s SIV's, off-balance sheet accounting. We are truly Leet Hacker Doods.
It used to be that people had to LEARN DISCIPLINE so that they could pay attention in school and learn. Meanwhile, the randomness of the thoughths they had to learn to keep under control was funneled into directed creativity.
These days, every kid is labeled with ADHD and given drugs that suppress random thoughts. Oh, sure they SEEM a little more disciplined, but we're chemically robbing them of creativity.
(I'm not saying that ADD doesn't exist. I know, because I have it. Indeed, I rely on it to help me come up with interesting random ideas. And it was indeed a long, challenging journey to learn to focus. I also realize that some people have it SO BAD that giving them some chemical help makes sense. But MOST kids in school labeled with ADHD just have discipline problems. But let's not leave it there, because often the discipline problems aren't their fault. Their diets are absolute shit. If parents would feed their kids properly, we wouldn't have half so much trouble.)
Why are most people here blaming schools? I was in school from 1976 to 1987 and I don't recall all that much "creativity" back then either. We didn't watch Hollywood movies in class like seems to be the norm in high schools now, but still. We just taught rote memorization and conformity. (For reference, this was in a small city in Quebec, english schools).
I'm curious if there is correlation with the rise of computers and video games? Perhaps less Sesame Street and more mindless video games? OH but in my time I was wasting time on computers, video games too. So that theory is shot down. Or is it? My computer just shows "READY" when turned on, so it was inherently designed to get the user "creating" or figuring out how to get it to do stuff. Today's kids are very very used to "you do X by doing steps A, B and C" for pretty much everything, since everything is on a computer now. They learn to use the OS, and they learn it damned well, but then that's it.
What surprises me though is that usually very intelligent people are also rather creative. It's not uncommon for a smart logic type person to also be quite capable at one of the arts (be it drawing, painting, a musical instrument, etc). Maybe only the top percentile are like this? So maybe it's wrong to be expecting any rise in creativity when the supposed increase in intelligence is not intelligence at all, but just good memorization of "how to do things".
That's pretty much when Ritalin use in "rambunctious" children began to skyrocket.
As an adult with ADD, I can tell you for certain that Ritalin squelches creativity. I am a musician, and when I'm steadily taking the pills I always see a marked decline in my songwriting and recording.
It's often the more creative kids that get diagnosed as ADD as well.
Vicious cycle, America. Learn to teach creative, energetic kids, and we'll stay on top. Start turning them into rank-and-file automatons and this is what you get.
The scores should be checked against drug usage. Ritalin for the younger ones, street drugs for the older ones.
The bogus social scientist engage in more trivial and useless experiments.
I'd have to say my creativity isn't declining. Are we talking about the new generation of snowflakes in school?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A crisis! Quick! Throw $500 billion at it! There! Done!
One could propose that intelligence and creativity are qualitative (i.e. not quantitative) variables. If one accepts this proposition, then it is impossible to impose an order on the values of the variables.
I work in the oil industryfor over thirthy years and can tell you first hand how education is treated as just another expense to be avoided.
Outside of the US to be in charge of a platform/project you need something called the IWCF certificate (international Well Control Forum).
15 or even 10 years ago it started with an in-depth course explaining the various pitfalls of well control (that what BP/Trans Ocean didn't do) and it was concluded with a serious exam.
Last couple of times, the certificate is valid for 2 years, the course consisted of a bunch of old exams to give you a good idea what kind of questions to expect during the exam.
We see the results in the Gulf.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I think competition among kids could help improve creativity.
For example, in engineering, it's going to be relatively boring if everyone is asked to build an electric motor. But if they are instead asked to build the most efficient, or the quietest, or the smallest electric motor, kids can think of ingenious ways to beat their classmates.
Same in art. Don't just ask kids to paint a picture, rate them according to various attributes (and overall), and see who did the best.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I agree with you on many points, especially the lack of unstructured time. I find that even now, the only times I really start feeling especially creative are when I'm stuck somewhere with nothing to do, like riding on the bus or out camping.
I wonder if some of it too is that because there is no scarcity of cheap stuff, kids hardly have to "improvise" or fix things anymore. There's not as much of that hacker mentality since if something breaks, it's so cheap to get a new one. Same with free entertainment... there's no shortage of music, videos and reading material online so again, less downtime means less creative thinking time.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Different vaccines? How about food, when was high fructose corn syrup added to everything, or aspartame or...anything like that? Could there be an ingestible or injectable correlation? Air quality and different trace pollution gases around then?
Besides social differences in the latest generations, that I addressed in a different reply, I would also suspect some biochemical differences. And someone else brought up the deal where they now force addict kids to ritalin and so on, this just wasn't done in the 60s and earlier. When did this become common?
Piracy is killing creativity!
"It's the medium, not the message."
The quality of programming really is just a small part of it. It's the staring at a flickering box which sends ALL viewers within two minutes of sitting down into an induced hypnotic state as measured by EEG. -It's the effects on physiology, (decreased metabolism, serotonin production, etc.) and wastes hours which might be spent doing ANYTHING else. Staring at a flickering light isn't how the human body is designed to learn and grow strong, and it shows.
-FL
It's because there is no money or percentage to be creative any more. Why should anyone learn a craft or an art when someone in China can knock off what you're doing for 95% less? And I'm not making this up - my wife used to make fused glass beadwork and jewelery, and quit because nobody was buying her $75 work when they could buy similar items for less than a sixth of her *material* cost. Even when she was selling them for a single $1 markup, she couldn't sell them.
She blames China, I blame Wal-Mart, but the end result is that people always, always, always, look at price first and everything else later
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that all brains work the same way.
It has been soundly demonstrated that certain types of kid excel using one method of learning while other types excel with another, and that the two learning approaches are pretty much incompatible. This is a scientifically solid stone cold fact with fucktonne of data to back it up.
What I find ASTONISHING is that educators and society in general fails to recognize this incredibly useful bit of knowledge and insist that one size MUST fit all. It's like arguing with creationists.
-FL
Huh. This is about 10 years after the federal Department of Education was established. Who would have predicted this?
There's no shortage of new ideas. People readily share their ideas if you ask (and many managers don't want to hear them). The patent office is full of ideas that never went anywhere. The real problem is filtering ideas. It's hard to tell what will take off and what won't. Sure, there's the rare "Eureka" moment where something truly and obviously good comes along, but for the most part it's hard to tell what's good and what's a yawner.
Many inventions we now take for granted were either frowned upon or ignored at first. Companies were reluctant to fund development of integrated circuits, for example, partly because they didn't know if they'd work in practice and didn't know how to convince buyers to spend on them. Some were afraid you couldn't mix and match as well as is done with isolated parts. It took a while for standard IC components and usage knowledge/vocab to develop. Buyers had to learn to think on a larger granularity.
And often it takes years to make a concept practical. The Xerox process took roughly a decade to make usable, and the inventor could have easily given up and moved on under slightly different circumstances rather than keep tinkering.
Table-ized A.I.
Clearly, this is George Bush's fault. Go ahead, down-mod me - you know you want to. It'll make you feel good.
Don't you know that there are predators waiting on every corner? According to the NCMEC, 1,500,000 children go missing each year!!! (if you count 17 year olds who run away from home multiple times for each escape attempt - an average of 115 if you only count "typical" kidnappings).
But seriously, I recently traveled through South America, and the kids there are like actual human beings. With a little capital and rule of law, they'll go far.
As for North American kids: two words - "opportunity costs".
What luxury, no wonder people are soft today, they coddle their kids!
Back in the day, we had to stop work in the granite quarry at 4 AM, then they hitched us to travois (none of your fancy "wheel" gadgets), where we had to drag granite boulders to school. Playtime at recess consisted of banging larger boulders into smaller ones, to make gravel, which we spread on the playground, all the time dodging the pteranadons they let loose to pick off the slower kids, to improve the gene pool.
Can't say we really liked it, but you got really creative learning to dodge those snapping beaks!
I, for one, hope the problem is very real. If so, my children will have no problem succeeding.
I'm surprised by my five year old - he learns things on his own, without being taught. Even though he has a limited vocabulary, he has, on several occasions, figured out from context clues what my wife and I were spelling. Even though he can't spell the word pizza, when she suggested we order a P-I-Z-Z-A, he jumps in immediately with, "Yeah, let's order pizza!" That which he doesn't know, he inately figures out. This is not something I or anyone else taught him. He just does it naturally.
He has lots of legos, but I'm the only one who builds the toy on the box. He takes it apart and builds what he wants. I built him an aircraft carrier out of legos; he modified it to include torpedo tubes. And now he's building functional dump trucks from them. As in, the back goes up and the gate opens to dump the cargo.
I think, if anything, creativity is something natural which is destroyed by our public education system. Should it survive that, there is no shortage of corporations with cultures for which creativity is seen as a liability, rather than an asset. The stupid person who works overtime on the boss's pet project is more highly esteemed than the creative genius who works banker's hours because he's figured out a better way of doing things.
The most pressing problem for our generation has been how do deal with the
management in Corporate America. Creativity means very little if your company is more concerned with: reducing cost rather than building revenues; the short term profit rather than long term viability; the politically correct instead of the provably correct. Seldom do companies fail because they lack creativity; most fail because their culture prohibits them from treating their customers and employees in a humane way. They literally *can't* do the smart thing, because it's not politically acceptable. So they don't. And we're buying Japaneses cars and Chinese electronics because of it.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I have always wondered why people deride "teaching to the test". The real question should be how to structure the tests so that they measure what we want them to. Perhaps we should be teaching to Torrance's test?
First of all: aren't we getting tired of everything being called a 'crisis' all the time? Humanity has faced 'problems' for thousands of years. Only a few were a 'crisis' ... demanding immediate action.
... what with so many youth un- or under- employed. Because, as the article points out, IQ scores tend to go up and up.
That said: this isn't a creativity 'crisis', it's a creativity-test 'crisis'. People are finding different ways to be 'creative' (by definition not something that typically shows up on cultural radar until it's well-advanced). And there is *shitloads* of creativity on the net. Is that being tested? By whom?
By the time society becomes aware of the products of 'creativity', it has already moved on to new spheres. Basquiat. So if the test is no longer working to detect 'creativity', that's 1. not a crisis, 2. about the test.
It's much more complex; there are many factors stopping the kind of creativity that was acceptable in the past. IP laws and "chemistry-set prohibitions", to name two. In conservative times, and bad economies, creative outlets and places to demonstrate creativity always suffer. Had Obama responded with an arts program like Roosevelt did, we'd probably be swimming in examples of creativity
Give them opportunity and the technology and step back. And shut up about artificial 'crises'. Quit blaming the victim.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
why are you so...oh! *whistles*
The amount of Ritalin consumed in America from 1990 to 1998 almost quadrupled (link to chart). Might that have something to do with it?
Demonstrating that parallel/concurrent programming is still hard even when you do it with people!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I blame the media industry for their lack of diversity and their formulas for sucess; they create profit at the expense of creativity and inhibit or appropriate any form of entertainment that they dont control. Then they complain when we share their stuff.
In Google we trust.
Why aren't you homeschooling/unschooling then?
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
If you "saw the spark in these kids eyes extinguished" why not move to somewhere less affluent (cheaper) to live if you have to so you can make homeschooling work? Why pay so much taxes for "good" schools that are really just fancy prisons?
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
And often lead to a lifetime in fancy prisons?
http://disciplinedminds.com/
See also:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
But if homeschooling absolutely can't work for you, see also AERO, the Alternative Education Resource Organization for lots of other possibilities that don't kill off creativity so much:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
(From a parent in a family that has given up a bunch of material stuff to homeschool and hopefully keep that spark alive...)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It is as simple as that. If you want a starting NBA Centers, you won't find too many Chinese guys capable of doing that job. Approximately one in half a billion. If you want starting NFL Corners, and Safeties, you won't find too many Koreans, or White guys, or Mexicans at that position. If you look at the finalists in the 100 meter dash in the Olympics since 1980, you won't find a single White guy. Conversely, you won't find a single man of West African (plenty of East Africans however) descent in the Medals in the Olympic Marathon.
Athletic talents are not evenly distributed among races. They just are not. Neither is size, strength, endurance, resistance to Malaria, ability to process milk, and a host of other evolutionary adaptations by humans to their environments, including social and otherwise.
It is folly to think that importing half of Mexico will get you anything other than Mexico's ability to be creative.
Mexicans have some minor (compared to the Italians, Dutch, French, Spanish, and English painters) visual arts creative accomplishments, none at all to speak of anywhere else, the creator of Mono.net being the equivalent of Yao Ming. Sure, a nation of enough people will throw out a guy way on the outlying part of the bell curve, in whatever attribute (height-strength-hand/eye coordination; creativity in math/science; cooperativeness-competitiveness) you want to measure. But the laws of means and varying means in populations has serious implications.
If you want a population of potential Olympic Medalists in the sprints, import lots of folks of West African descent. If you want creativity, then you should certainly not import Mexicans. That doesn't mean a hierarchy of "value." Is Stephen Hawking more "valuable" than Ruben Blades? Is Usain Bolt more "valuable" than Lang Lang?
"How many kids today really watch their dad fixing things, or building anything from scratch?"
My daughter, for one. And she's only three years old. I hope she will grow up to be as bummed about Chinese "epoxy blob" Electronics as I was when I was a kid. I had to start dumpster diving for broken stereo receivers to get anything worth taking apart when toys turned out to be so pointless.
I'm saving a working Robosapien for her. Those are very hackable.
I've had to change a lot about the work I do in order to make it kid-safe. For instance, I can't have high voltage power supplies (backlight inverters) open with her around and switching entirely from Tin/Lead solder to Lead Free was a bitch. But it still means I can have her watching what I do and maybe even helping sooner in life than I.
I learned to solder when I was eight. She'll probably learn long before that.
She has been watching me build a render farm from trash computers over the past nine months and turn broken LCD and plasma TVs into working sets for over a year now. During the past six months, she has taken a genuine interest in the work. She will watch me work for far longer stretches than she'll watch Dora or Diego.
That makes me proud and gives me hope that our world isn't heading toward Idiocracy standards after all.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
Related stuff with more links (my me):
"College Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student
protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Off to a good start. To build on it, see my other posts here and http://www.alfiekohn.org/ and http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Then 'Learning to Think Korean' by Kohls will freak you out.
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Think-Korean-Working-Interact/dp/1877864870
It starts with ten or so business scenarios which will make no sense whatsoever to you, then explains why. There are reasons, you're just not attuned to them.
This is cool too...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKtSHKWkrXs
OMG, ANIME. I can talk about Anime in a slashdot comment and not be offtopic!! I BLAME ANIME!!
You sound like a great dad..
Mine would let me watch, and would answer politely asked questions, but no chatter. I also could borrow tools if I was careful to clean and replace after use. Growing up poor in the depression made him really treasure even simple tools, or anything functional. And no waste, like you, recycle, make do, cobjob, make it work. I got a lot of that from him. My electronics training though, said to say, lacked, just too color blind to deal with it back then, so I skipped it for the most part. He was very good at it, eventually became a big iron fixer in the early days of mainframes, but I just couldn't follow it enough to absorb much, so my pursuits went elsewhere, basically anything to do with the outside or nature. Still that way today.
I would love to reply to this, I just can't think of anything to say.
engineering change request procedure. I was working as a e-tech quite some time ago at a company building some first-generation voice analysis products ... around 68000 microprocessors to give you an idea of the time frame, and it was small enough that test techs were doing final assembly as well as testing. There was a screw that was a PITA to get to that didn't need to be there, i.e. it would have worked equally well in an accessible place.
... it went through.
So I found out how to do an engineering change request, did the paperwork including drawings (pre-CAD)
Tech Public Policy stuff
"$100mil machines that require expensive experts may be a new phenomena to them."
in a country with which has had quite a few Class One wafer fabs for quite some time? I doubt it.
Tech Public Policy stuff
If you'd said "My three daughters" then there would be a glimmer of hope. If you'd said "My twenty children then we'd really have some hope.
One kid isn't even enough to replace you and your wife. It's pitiful. The general-purpose idiots have a half dozen at minimum, more if religous.
Sorry to say it, but your genes are being selected against. Ditch the birth control if you want to improve the world.
The children I know today spend virtually no time playing in the sense I understood it. When they're not being ferried from one structured (adult led) activity to the next, they're in front of a TV or computer with an adult nearby.
Plus, I know very few parents among my peers who had more than one kid (or who plan to). With both parents juggling full-time jobs, it just seems like too much work (to say nothing of the expense). As a result, the single child gets the absolute total focus of the parents' attention. Simply put, a lot of them are spoiled rotten. I see kids with whole rooms full of toys, games, computers... basically everything they ever asked for. When something isn't going their way, they pitch a fit until the parents change their minds. When you're in the car with them, you're going to listen to what they want to listen to on the radio. When they feel like watching their Disney DVDs, they're going to watch their Disney DVDs -- which is why mom and dad have to buy them their own flat-panel TV. The child is the focus, pretty much from sunup to sundown. And I know it's not right for me to judge, particularly since I don't have children of my own, but I look at my friends and I know for a fact they weren't raised the way they're raising their kids. I'm sure the temptation to spoil your kids must be huge, but I sometimes fear we're raising an entire generation of narcissists.
Breakfast served all day!
I wonder how the numbers compare to those who die prematurely on as a result of obesity.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
ask the supervisor you get along with how to fill out an engineering change request and document the time and money savings along with the description of the exact procedure.
Before you do this . . . ask yourself if anyone without extra training in repair that the average assembler probably wouldn't have can do what you have in mind. Or alternately, if your proposed procedure is so much more efficient that it's cost-effective to give assembly personnel extra training. Remember that if the change goes through, everybody will be doing it that way, to make this kind of process change worthwhile, everybody has to be able to do it that way. Alternately, there may be some very good reason you don't know for doing it the original way.
Back when I was doing electronic tech work a generation ago, there was a PCB mounting screw that was in a location it was a PITA to get to that had no discernable reason for being in that specific location, there were non-PITA locations which would have worked. It was a big enough PITA that I asked for and got the engineering change request paperwork to fix the problem once and for all.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Idiocracy.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/02/flynn-flynn-effect-has-reversed-among.html
This makes us wonder if it wasn't a bias artifact to begin with.
Creativity in the USA is declining because the USA is declining and -- the article did not mention this -- the average US IQ has also dropped. We were near Germany's 107 average at the turn of the century but now are probably closer to 98.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
It seems to me that average IQ is the cause of a nation's degree of wealth, not an effect of it. Which came first?
Futurist Traditionalism
Unfortunately, the issue that's causing creativity to drop isn't necessarily to do with standardization or how children are treated. It's something that's much, much, harder for us to deal with in society.
Namely, mass media. The global village.
The problem is that, for example, if you want to try and be a famous musician nowadays your only real option is to devote as much time as you can to it (otherwise you certainly won't be good enough) and even then you still have a 90% chance of failure, simply because famous musicians consume so many resources in terms of marketing, production etc that the world just can't support that many.
Thus, both schools and parents are having to quietly discourage pupils from taking this path, because it leads to almost certain failure and then to being disadvantaged in real life.
...stimulate them creatively!
When my kid is old enough to help me by actually using the tools, I'm going to teach him to HELP, not just hold the flashlight.
Look, I agree that we've kind of gone overboard with kid's safety. Kids should be able to just run around outside without parents freaking out about it. But geez, complaining about wearing helmets on bikes? Sure, lots of kids survived childhood just fine without them. But some didn't.
Come on, people. Making kids wear appropriate protective gear is not exactly child abuse. It's not that expensive, pretty comfortable, and it saves lives. Spare me the tales of woe that you're not able to let your kids jump their bikes, helmetless, off 15 foot high ramps without cries of child endangerment. Because that's what it is.
... but this part is nuts:
You're going to put a soldering iron (or god forbid, a torch) in the hands of a child way before she's eight? Something (or someone) is going to end up getting burned. Speaking as the parent of a seven year old, I can't help but think this is a really bad idea. But as for the rest of it... very cool.
Yeah, tell me about it. In my city (also New England), we just built a new middle school a few years ago. It's got nice fields, nature trails, a small wetlands pond, an "outdoor classroom" (a boat on blocks).
In my four years there, you know how many times I used these facilities? The boat: once. The trails: once.
My little brother graduated from there just this year, and as we were leaving, we heard what sounded like a tree coming down in the woods. Naturally, we went to go investigate. We didn't find the tree (or at least couldn't agree on which one it was), but we did discover a trail going along the riverbank for quite a ways. I never knew that was there (and this is about twenty feet from the parking lot!).
Kids these days need more involvement in their environment.
Why on earth not? If you can imagine a stick is a shovel or a gun or whatever, you can imagine a lightsaber as any of those things. My daughter does it a lot - she has a Barbie car that's been a surface boat, a submarine, and a spaceship (so far - she hasn't had it that long). Kids press toys into service as things other than what the manufacturer intended all the time.
Obviously Video Games + mobile phones + internet = braindeath
These comments are very creative so this story is moot.
... do any of you people advocating going back to the good old days (before children's toys had safety features) actually have kids? Look, I agree that kids are overprotected these days, but seriously... letting your kids play with phosporus and sodium metal? You don't have to be a raving helicopter parent to see the problems here - think about it. Phosphorus is extremely poisonous, and both sodium and phosphorus can set your children on fire WITH NO PRACTICAL WAY TO PUT IT OUT. Some amount of protection here is a good thing.
Not hardly. I launch water powered rockets in the city park all the time, and no one has said a word. And if only fire will do it for you, my buddy frequently comes along and launches his (home built) Estes rockets in the same park. The situation isn't as bad as it's made out to be.
What? It's completely legal and people do it all the time. From body mods (look up the term "ricer") to rechipping/reprogramming to exhaust mods to all sorts of other changes, people still chop up and reconfigure their cars as much as they ever did. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea.
Heck, I learned to solder around 3rd grade, in an after-school class no less, which would have made me what, 10 or so. And yes, someone did end up getting burned (me) -- in a couple different ways -- and I learned from it. :)
I'm reminded of a scene in the live-action Hogfather movie (available for streaming on Netflix, actually quite good indeed), where Death is filling in for the missing Hogfather (Discworld's Santa Claus) and makes an appearance at a department store. A little girl comes in with her mother, and when Death asks her what she wants for Hogswatch (Christmas), the mother interrupts with requests for frilly things until Death freezes her, at which point the girl asks for a castle and a sword (and a few other things I forget). Death *does* give her a real sword:
I'm not advocating that we hand out claymores to children. But I do think that US society has gone a bit too far off the deep end when it comes to "safety" -- past a certain point, protection becomes actively harmful by keeping people from learning what is actually bad for them.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
...more worker drones for my homeschooled kids to employ :-P