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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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no creativity required or recommended on these exams
So what? School only lasts a few hours a day. What are you doing for the hours, days, and months between classes to actually make a difference? Creativity is fostered in a big-picture way. Kids will bring creativity to their school work and opportunities if it's a solid part of the environment and circumstances in which they're raised.
Creativity is declining because parents are washing their hands of the responsibility to shape the minds of their own kids. You don't get an inquisitive, creative mind at school - you arrive at school with one.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
No one who is directly involved in the education of children should wash their hands of teaching creativity. Creativity should be fostered at home and at school and teachers should be very much aware of that.
A part of the problem is that schools focus too much on finding solutions to problems. That's a critical part of problem solving, but the much more crucial part is formulating the problem in the first place. That's a creative process and what is completely missed by teaching to standards.
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
Without conformity, there is no order
Without creativity, there is no enjoyment
We need both, but "success" in society requires a minimum level of bookish competence. I think our definition of success (middle class lifestyle, as practiced in the US) has outstripped the intellectual ability of the average human. Nonetheless, we keep focusing on drilling them with facts that we think will get people into jobs which will provide them with food, shelter, healthcare, and recreation they expect. The constant race to be at the top of the list of countries who rank high in student achievement - as measured by standardized fact testing - also drives this.
Sadly, there is no way to mimic the "best" school districts for well rounded children who also perform well on tests. No matter what they do, those districts have parents who are active in their childrens' schooling. No federal or state mandate can make that happen in a district with parents who just don't care. So we put on the screws to make the kids test scores hit a specific number, regardless of the consequences. The result is what we see today.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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
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.
Yes. It's the school's fault. I am perfect. I raise my kids as they should be: TV, Internet flash games, and pre-determined interactive iPad apps.
School lasts 6 hours a day, which is a pretty big chunk of time. And a lot of that time is spent turning kids into uncreative conformist machines - if they resist that then they label them ADHD and drug the creativity out of them instead.
But yes the fact that lots of families need both parents to work in order to make ends meet (though that pre-dates the 1990s a little) and that childrens' activities are far more structured than they once were isn't helping.
John Taylor Gatto's writings are essentially the ravings of a crackpot. Clear refutations of his thesis that compulsory public schooling is evil include:
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."
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?
You beat me to it. Creativity is promptly beaten out of you in today's society.
It's that way almost everywhere now. No Child Left Behind (and other, similar programs) has driven school systems to need these benchmarks to survive. I happen to live in one of the best places in the country, imho. Heck, I learned a new trade just so I could move here and make a living. I don't fear for my child's future, but there are lots of parents who just don't care - and that's a universal truth. As for moving to another country - everybody has their own problems. At least here I know what they are.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
> Where it is promptly beaten out of you.
BS. My three kids (15, 12, 9) are encouraged to express their creativity in ways that I was never allowed when I was their age. In fact, I get a little frustrated that their teachers focus so much on creativity and 'thinking outside the box' that they forget about things like spelling and grammar.
.sig
If that's what your school district is like, I would suggest you either get involved and try to make some changes or move.
When we relocated in 2008, the quality of the local public schools is largely why we picked the house we did. Yes, our property taxes are fairly high ($8000+ / year on a $250k house), but we have a public school within walking distance with small classes (20-22 kids), art, music, and theater teachers, a clean new building and a very active parent base.
I don't see anybody trying to change the kids into uncreative conformist machines. Unless you are talking about disruptive kids. That generally isn't tolerated, but then I don't know that it should be. The school seems to be a safe, fun, and nurturing place and discipline and self control is part of it.
Teachers know a lot more about how kids learn than they did when I was a kid (in the '70's). Totally unstructured activities have their place, but so do structured and constrained activities. You don't like how your kids' teacher is balancing the two, talk to them about it.
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 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.
I'm seeing this even in my work. I'm a mechanic at a large wind turbine manufacturing company. Recently, I moved from the repair side of the business to the new unit assembly. There is a written procedure, from our parent company in Germany (which sucks major balls I might add) to do the new assembly. Any deviation from the written procedure is severely frowned upon. I have found, based on my extended skill-set as a repair technician vs the people who are just assemblers, easier and faster ways of doing things. However, I have been scolded by my new supervisor for doing so.
It really chops my ass, but you're right. Doing things in creative and different ways is not acceptable for whatever reason...
I hate that first point, always have. An example is our high school students being compared to high school students in Japan. I am sure if we kicked out our lower 50% from high school and sent them to a trade school instead our scores would be higher too.
LMAO! You don't think the fact that the 60s commie pot smokers have been running the country for a while has nothing to do with this? American schools have been degenerating since the 1960s and we have been suffering from the results for a LONG time now.
Third grade? Yeah, there ought to be a lot of memorization going on in third grade. You need to have built a foundation of facts before you can be lead to conclusions connecting them. Third grade is your solid rock of foundation, of course you're going to need to memorize a lot of things. That's not the only thing that should be going on, but I doubt that even in your daughter's school that it is the case that that's all they're doing.
I can almost guarantee, however, that there is nothing in the testing criterion or curriculum guidelines that suggests simply memorizing the things that are going to be on the test. That's a conclusion come to by some of the teachers, or some group that ostensibly represents and aids the teachers in performing their duties. I can think of no other reason to sabotage both the test itself and the children's education at the same time.
I was in florida during the first few years after they instituted the FCATs. There were a lot of complaints that teachers would be "teaching to the test." and whatnot, but after the results came in it was clear than in some whole counties, they weren't even teaching to the test. How do you propose to discover and correct that?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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 ;-)
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 find your argument rather fascinating. Shortly after you graduated high school, your former school restricted students' ability to go off campus during the day; therefore, you feel you are able to conclude that American culture has shifted towards authoritarianism for the past 20 years.
A amazing conclusion, really, based on nothing more than what one single school did... once. You even admit that you have no idea whether they did anything else; you just assume. And you have no idea why they did what they did, or whether it was really authoritarianism that led them to do it; you just speculate.
I don't think you are necessarily mistaken, actually, but I find your argument to be wholly unpersuasive.
...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.
I call BS on this one. If you can't have a creative thought without a drug, I'd argue that is your problem not the "drug wars" problem.
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.)
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.
Damn right. Why the fuck do people shit all over the trades? I have a bachelors degree in CompSci but I have no fucking clue how to fix a plumbing problem or wire an electrical panel. So does that make me somehow better or worse than the tradesman? Hell no.
A crisis! Quick! Throw $500 billion at it! There! Done!
"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.
Right, and no one can criticize Smedley Butler's War is a Racket agitprop until they've risen themselves through the ranks of the Marines to become a general? No. Lunatic positions are lunatic positions, regardless of the author's past. Argument from authority is a fallacy.