Creativity – huh! What is it good for?

Newsweek had a cover story a couple of weeks ago noting that the creativity levels of children in the United States are dropping, especially in grades K-6.  Titled  The Creativity Crisis, the July 19 piece by parenting-science writers  Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman  recounts the history of creativity testing over the last 50 years and — after noting that the causes of kids’ recent creative decline are unknown and briefly suggesting that excessive screen time and lack of school-nurtured creative activity might be to blame – makes a  case for developing children’s powers of imagination and invention by teaching them creative problem-solving skills.

I’m all for the results they want to encourage, but I think some of their key assumptions need questioning. One of them stopped me like a red light in the story’s second paragraph: “The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests.”  

By whom is this definition accepted, exactly?  Presumably, by E. Paul Torrance, who designed the creativity tests administered to thousands children since 1958 and the psychologists and pedagogues who took part in them. I think calling creativity an act of production begs the question of whether or not ideas are “products,” but the more important problem here stems from the word “useful.”

Are imaginings and ideas and their Earthly manifestations creative only if they’re useful?  Is Michelangelo’s Pieta useful? Maybe it’s of psychological benefit to Christian believers or religious propagandists or anyone who derives comfort or stimulation from art. It’d make one heckuva doorstop. What about Christo’s wrapped islands or the Who’s Quadrophenia? Are they useful? And if not, does that mean they aren’t creative? 

I don’t think creativity can be determined by its practical value, unless by ”useful” you mean anything that answers an urge of its creator or makes an impression in the mind of  an observer.

I suspect that, in an admirable effort help people see that creativity encompasses more than the arts, Torrance et al have erred in the opposite direction: They’ve essentially excluded the arts and any other form of “useless” imagination from their definition and their testing. The widely used Torrance tests mostly set “tasks” and “problems” for children to solve and then measure the number and diversity of a child’s ideas about how to accomplish those tasks. Only one test, the “imaginative stories” task,  seems to invite pure invention and fantasy. The results measure “creative accomplishment.”

And there’s the hitch: Creative accomplishment and creativity are not the same thing. That’s why creativity testing that emphasizes functional improvement to toys or the design of rocketry or any other practical problem-solving can’t accurately assess a child’s creative potential. His or her productive potential, maybe, which is perhaps why Bronson and Merryman tout the Torrance tests’ value in predicting who will become a person of high professional standing and/or output.

But a person’s tally of books written or patents held isn’t necessarily a measure of how creative that person is — just how motivated they are to succeed professionally and how lucky they are in getting published or beating some other inventor to the U.S. Patent Office. What makes a person creative is neither the logical patterns of reasoning that lead to solutions for problems, nor the entrepreneurial drive to get those solutions (or him/herself) in front of the public or on the market.  Creativity is a process of cognition that we all have and use, some more comfortably and freely than others — an original way of synthesizing knowledge, ideas, perceptions and experiences  into some new idea or impression or understanding that few or none have ever had before.  It can remain an idea or be translated into a physical thing, but it’s still creative. It can have practical use or not, but it’s still creative. It can cure cancer, change the way we construct our homes or simply be beautiful. Or disturbing. Or whatever its creator made it.

But it’s still creative.

Which is what our children certainly will not be if all they get is training in creative problem-solving systems. They’ll just turn into slightly less conventional worker bees of the kind American schools have been designed to produce since the Industrial Revolution. And that’s because creativity isn’t just about solving problems and meeting deadlines, and doesn’t thrive if you impose some outside thought-system on it. Creativity is a universal ability among humans, but how it’s put to use is personal and individual. It can’t be assembly-lined without destroying the very spontaneity and originality that make it valuable. 

So, of course, teach children focus and self-discipline. Give kids tools and materials, from sticks of charcoal to silicon chips, and teach them how those things can be used. Turn every classroom into an interactive lab, where children can use their growing skills to explore and test. But most of all, give them time in which to think and daydream and then get out of their way. With opportunity, resources and enthusiastic encouragement, each will come up with his or her own special, mysterious way of  creating something where nothing was before.

And while they’re thinking and messing, let’s teach all the adults to appreciate creativity, all the organizations and corporations to allow it and reward it,  and all of us to practice it every day. Kids are naturally creative … until systematized adults and societies stamp it out of them.

It’s a fit: Creative-conference promotion gets Brand management

Stephen Brand believes in creativity. And what he believes about it  is that there’s little good in having an idea if you don’t do anything with it.

  Brand has found a place to work that’s all about both getting ideas and putting them to work. The first president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio – who also served as Innovation Fellow at NorTech, Cleveland’s technology-based, economic-development association,  and earned an executive doctorate from Case Western Reserve University by studying the early childhood influences of successful inventors – has landed at the Creative Education Foundation in Amherst, Mass. 

CEF specializes in helping people learn creative and effective problem-solving techniques. As the foundation website explains, “Every day principles fostered by CEF programs are helping someone, somewhere in the world develop new products, make business operations run more profitably, restructure organization and agencies to become more effective and less encumbered, reinvigorate economies, make improvements in our schools, revitalize communities and replace ineffective methods and systems with new, more workable ones.”

Through the Journal of Creative Behavior, which it publishes; a youth-outreach program; awards (“Creative Class”  economic-development guru Richard Florida won CEF’s 2005 Sid Parnes Pioneer Award); and the annual International Creative Problem-Solving Institute, CEF has been trying to get people to innovate since the 1950s.  

Brand, who recently moved to western Massachussetts, was out driving one day about a year ago when he saw the CEF sign and thought to himself that he ought to be working there, he said. He’s currently helping the foundation promote its next CPSI conference, called the Revolution of Creativity, in Boston this coming June. And it sounds like man was matched to task by some Heavenly Headhunter, because CEF teaches what Brand has been practicing for years. 

Creative problem-solving is not so much like the flashes of inspiration that lead geniuses to make great art, he noted, as like a means of organizing your ideas, and following a process of deductive reasoning to a solution.  With regular mortals, Brand said, “All you need to do is lead them through a journey from A to B to Z.”

But  imagination is required and Brand thinks the times have never been better for putting it to use. Instead of being worried by the recession, he said, “I’m excited about it. This is a great opportunity for innovators.”

He also thinks it’s vital for businesses - nonprofit and for-profit alike – to keep innovating.  (“The traditional nonprofit model will not work into the future. Period.”) But most do it only when times are bad and their companies are in crisis. Instead,  they have to innovate even – and maybe especially – when times are good.

“They’re crazy to be happy when things are fine,” he said, pointing out that Starbucks, for instance, rested on its laurels and look what happened: Competitors such as McDonald’s got smart, took away customers who wanted fancy coffee without the groovy sit-down-coffeeshop experience and high prices, and by the time Starbucks woke up and smelled the,  er, you know, it had lost so much business, it had to close 600 stores. 

Education is crucial. “We have to teach the next generation of innovators and problem-solvers” instead of just training young people for assembly lines, Brand said.

That’s where CEF tries to help. And how exactly does it teach these skills? Stay tuned.