Posted on 01/02/2014 10:27:33 PM PST by Jack Hydrazine
If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity. “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country. We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity. In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset. In a recent IBM poll, 1,500 CEOs acknowledged this when they identified creativity as the best predictor of future success.[1]
It is sobering, therefore, to read Kyung Hee Kim’s recent research report documenting a continuous decline in creativity among American schoolchildren over the last two or three decades.[2]
Kim, who is a professor of education at the College of William and Mary, analyzed scores on a battery of measures of creativity—called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)—collected from normative samples of schoolchildren in kindergarten through twelfth grade over several decades. According to Kim’s analyses, the scores on these tests at all grade levels began to decline somewhere between 1984 and 1990 and have continued to decline ever since. The drops in scores are highly significant statistically and in some cases very large. In Kim’s words, the data indicate that “children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
According to Kim’s research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average Elaboration score on the TTCT, for every age group from kindergarten through 12th grade, fell by more than 1 standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. Yikes.
You might wonder how creativity can be assessed. By definition, any test with questions that have just one right answer or one correct pathway to solution is not a test of creativity. The Torrance Tests were developed by E. Paul Torrance in the late 1950s, when he was an education professor at the University of Minnesota. During the immediate post-Sputnik period, the U.S. government was concerned with identifying and fostering giftedness among American schoolchildren, so as to catch up with the Russians (whom we mistakenly thought were ahead of us in scientific innovation).
While most of Torrance’s colleagues focused on standard measures of intelligence as a path toward doing this, Torrance chose to focus on creativity. His prior work with fighter pilots in the Air Force had convinced him that creativity is the central variable underlying personal achievement and ability to adapt to unusual conditions.[3] He set about developing a test in which people are presented with various kinds of stimuli and are asked to do something with them that is interesting and novel—that is, creative. The eventual result was the set of tests that now bear his name. In the most often used of these tests, the stimuli are marks on paper--such as a squiggly line or a set of parallel lines and circles—and the task is to make drawings that incorporate and expand on those stimuli. The drawings are scored according to the degree to which they include such qualities as originality, meaningfulness, and humor.
The best evidence that the Torrance Tests really do measure creative potential come from longitudinal research showing strong, statistically significant correlations between childhood scores on the TTCT and subsequent real-world achievements.[4] As the authors of one article commenting on these results put it, high scorers “tallied more books, dances, radio shows, art exhibits, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed” than did those who scored lower.[5]
Indeed, the TTCT seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.[6] The correlation coefficients found between childhood TTCT scores and real-world adult creative achievements have ranged from a low of about .25 to a high of about .60, depending on which tests are included and how adult creative achievements are assessed.[6]
So, the decline in TTCT scores among school-aged children indeed does appear to be cause for concern. Kim herself calls it the “creativity crisis,” and that term has been picked up in a number of articles in popular magazines.
Well, surprise, surprise. For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.
Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today. In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world. But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes. We are also, as I documented in a previous essay, increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential.
In the next essay in this series, I will present research evidence that creativity really does bloom in the soil of freedom and die in the hands of overdirective, overprotective, overjudgmental teachers and parents.
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And now, what are your thoughts on all this? In your experience, what fosters or inhibits creativity? Have you seen evidence that either corroborates or counters Kyung Kim’s findings of a decline in creativity or the suggestion that current schooling practices and other restrictions on children’s freedom inhibit children’s creative development?
As always, I prefer if you post your comments and questions here rather than send them to me by private email. By putting them here, you share with other readers, not just with me. I read all comments and try to respond to all serious questions. Often, other readers whose answers are better than mine respond to posted questions. Of course, if you have something to say that truly applies only to you and me, then send me an email.
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See new book, Free to Learn
America is not a unique democracy and has never been.
Yes, I know.
So? Just order them to be creative. Tell them they owe it to Dear Leader and First Narcissist The Won. They'll create like you wouldn't believe.
This is one reason (among many) that I try to encourage my kids to be as self-reliant as possible. I put them outside, in an unstructured environment, so they have to work to find things to do i.e. I let them play in the backyard where there are trees to climb and things to explore.
It’ll be a challenge to find schools that let them continue that process. I’m really tempted to override my wife’s desire to live in or near a city, so I can get a place out in the woods where the kids can run (relatively) free.
Gotta get her over her fear of living in a house more than 10 years old (too many “horror” movies involving older houses).
Even if they overcome the childhood decline in innovation, they face additional hurdles as adults. We’ve offshored so many industrial processes, that they opportunity to learn those processes and experiment with them is diminished.
That’s going to result in reduced innovation too. They told us that off-shoring production didn’t matter because the important jobs stayed here. They don’t. Research and Development happens close to production. Marketing happens close to Research and Development. Operations Management is done local to production. All kinds of support jobs, automation, machine service sales and repair, supplies, all happen close to production.
keep the ipad away from your children. It is poison to creativity.
There is nothing more inhibiting to creativity and innovation than politically correct behavior and speech. Coerced or self censorship results in the sort of dullness and torpor that toppled the Soviet Union. Productive capitalism and the fruits it produces requires freedom. Freedom of thought, speech and action.
Teach them to be slaves and you will not get creativity. Not hard to figure out.
Don’t forget about how putting them on Ritalin and similar drugs is not helpful either.
Ditto for my grandkids. Hell I didn't know what "creative" was at that age! Really though, they're pampered and catered to in a way my generation never was. I was not raised strictly by any means, back in the fifties this was, but boy! Well, there's got to be a limit somewhere, and they do have limits, certainly according to their own lights!
Well, my own generational thoughts have not been so much along the lines of creativity, but of freedom. My GK are totally unintimidated by authority, even if they begrudgingly accede to it ... never submitting to it, mind you. So, it occurs to me, how is this going to fly? Of course, my GK's parents are uniformly liberal, but I don't think they know what they're bequeathing.
If you are a parent that is involved in every aspect of the kids life including what they are doing on the ipad then I think they are beneficial. My kinds have Kindle’s and I let my daughter use my ipad.
I want them to be able to use every new device that comes out..I don't fear the technology I worry they will be left behind...
Yes, slaves and POWs just seem to lack that certain sparkle, a joie de vie, that je ne sais quoi...
Who knew!?
(If I were better @ HTML I'd insert the "Independent Thought Alarm" button from THE SIMPSONS)
I think a governmental panel should be convened to address this issue at the end of the day to send a message. No longer can we now is the time. Let’s find a properly qualified not-yet-convicted pedophile to chair the commission “for the children”.
Come to think of it, creativity is the last thing this admin wants to see in its future voters. It’s an attribute of the individual; a concept this admin wants to eradicate.
All this stuff you think is bad; an inevitable if not predictable outcome of a generation-plus of liberal public school initiatives; the educational equivalent of quack medecine...is exactly what Dear Leader and his pals have had in mind all along.
Probably coincides with the increase in video and other electronics.
a giant kumbaya to a hypothetical god that makes everyone into carbon copies, in spite of lip service to diversity.
so called white “supremacist” (actually, meritist) society had more diversity, and GOOD diversity too.
“America is not a unique democracy and has never been.”
President Obama, what a surprise to find you here.
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