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.'"
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?
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.
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?
especially in the last years parents pumping their kids full of behavior adjusting drugs? Ritalin maybe?
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
Ha! Are you using the data from one type of standardized test (CQ) to criticize the validity of other standardized tests?
Perhaps we need to just teach to the test (CQ). That will certainly make kids more creative.
Also, am I the only one who is confused on how you can use a standardized test to measure something like creativity? How can you objectively measure something that is so subjective?
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
Obviously, the population of America in 2010 is very different from the population in 1960
That's right! In the 1960s, they used more creativity enhancing substances.
I think this article is a case for the legalization of recreational drugs.
KEEP AMERICA CREATIVE! SMOKE POT!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
There's slightly more to it than that I fear.
One of the most important things I learned in art classes were in how to visualize things to produce better realism. This was important so that things that I would later imagine became more realistic and better developed. This all developed a more structured imagination which enabled more complexity of imagination and creativity.
The problem with today's young minds as I see it is a decrease in ability to concentrate and build complex things from more simple things. The famed "short attention span" often called "AD/HD" or the like are, in my view, the simple lack of a practiced mind. Kids don't play with building toys as much as they once did -- they play with action figures re-enacting scenes from their favorite movies. More, there is a decrease in the actual participation of adults in play! That is a HUGE factor.
When my older boys were between 7 and 10, they told me "we like you because you are always tricking us." And I was. I was testing their minds and perception with tricks and jokes of various sorts. Some times they would figure it out on their own, other times I had to provide clues and hints. Whatever the case, their minds were challenged and they enjoyed it. Fast forward to present day, I have a 19 year old entering the nuclear sciences field and a 17 year old in advanced college courses while in high school. They are both extremely fun and creative individuals with strong logic, reasoning and math skills along with interests in music and graphic arts. These boys can literally do anything they want in life as their skill set is adaptable and versatile. This was no accident... and strangely, they are also quite happy when compared to the common "achiever" who is pressured by parents for excellent grades and the like.
My boys targeted mastery and personal fulfilment as their paths. The common "achiever" tends to "study for the test" and fills in the blocks for achievement set before them by curricular academics. My boys aren't #1 in their peer groups though... they aren't any of those latin titles/ranks. Those are most often for the achievers to struggle and fight for. Instead, they are simply the best they can be while being happy and satisfied with themselves which is all I ever wanted for them.
What is lacking as much as things no longer available in school, is parental participation. And what is more unfortunate is that this has been a problem in my own generation and now two generations of parents lack the experience of good parent teaching themselves and have no clue nor inclination to provide that experience for their children. Our society of instant gratification and bubblegum pop culture has dug a hole that it won't easily climb out of until the next renaissance which isn't likely to happen again any time soon.
What gets me is that I didn't actually have the ideal family experience growing up. I had divorced parents. I had split custody juggling me around. I had a mother who more or less personified the parent who didn't care to teach her son anything (I once humiliated myself by assuming than an "address" was something girls wore and told my teacher that I didn't have one because I was a boy!) and a father who only had every-other-weekend to teach me the things he thought I should know and frankly, I wasn't all that interested in learning from him. He managed to teach me things anyway when I wasn't noticing and he taught me the nature of numbers... negative and positive, wholes and decimals/fractions... all in a matter of about 30 minutes in front of an oscilloscope. No exaggeration and no joke. That was when the lights came on in my head and frankly, I believe that's all a kid needs -- something to turn the lights on.
We do have a problem in our schools, but the biggest problem is with our parents. Many people reading me here today are parents. Are you challenging your kids? Are you "tricking" them with riddles and jokes? Are you showing them why wheels are amazing inventions? Do t
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?
In my experience the opposite is true. I'm old, and when I was young adults were never involved in our play. In the school holidays my mother would organize a day out about once a week but the rest of the time was almost exclusively adult free. There was no TV so my brothers and I had to (dare I say it) create our own entertainment.
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.
You think children's lives lack adult involvement. I think they don't get enough time to themselves. God knows which is better for them.
Everything today is "tamper proof", so it's not possible to open the devices, and if you are able to do it - there is nothing to learn.
Thanks to devices like the iPad the next generation won't even have root access to their devices.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.