Creativity, as well as money, may reduce drop-out rate

Urban kids – both American and European – keep dropping out of school.

Most of us are familiar with the whys. The usual causes include poor home-life conditions, including lack of support for academic achievement; disintegrating school buildings and facilities; cultural pressures and social issues, from gang influence and teen pregnancy to sheer poverty; and teachers and curricula that fail to engage students’ imaginations and interest.

In the United States, communities and governments have been struggling for decades to find solutions – any solutions – to the problem, leaving us with a mess of voucher programs, sketchy charter schools,  unequal distribution of funding (including Ohio’s long-unconstitutional, property-tax-based school funding) and ever-more-desperate inner-city schools.  The few models of success, such as magnet schools focusing on arts  or science, aren’t being widely adapted fast enough to make a difference to the majority of students, especially those lacking obvious special talents.

The U.S. House of Representatives has embarked on a new effort to improve the drop-out rate: Two weeks ago, Democrats introduced the Graduation for All Act , which would offer competitive grants to community school districts to help with the cost of improving low-performing high schools and middle schools. Okay idea, but a wretchedly cumbersome process. The legislation would require each district to invent its own wheel by forming a task force, bringing in experts and devising a strategy - allowing communities to custom-design policies to fit their particular needs, but swamping everyone involved in the bureaucratic equivalent of cold molasses.

Europe has at least a more imaginative approach, if no less burdensome procedures to overcome. As part of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009, 100 students from 25 nations were invited to an innovation and creativity camp in Brussels last week to think up fresh products and services to engage schoolkids and keep them from dropping out.  

Their ideas? A Facebook-like service that would let classmates and teachers discuss schoolwork and share educational materials online. “Creative -thinking” classes. And most intriguingly, a student-mobility program that would give all European Union high-school-level students  the chance to study in another member state – a program that officials want in place by 2020. 

This would be a bear to set up, what with costs and the mind-melting details of information access, program enrollment, insurance, transportation, host families and curricula to cope with. It’s possible that existing student-exchange programs could be linked and expanded to form the organizational basis for a continent-wide system.

But at least the Europeans have had the sense and inventiveness to go to the students themselves for ideas and to commit to bringing some of those ideas about. 

What’s the difference between them and us/U.S.?  They say, “You’ve thought up a terrific concept. Let’s make it happen.” Our leaders are saying,  as usual, “Here’s some money.  Go figure out what to spend it on.”

Which approach do you think will result in a dynamic and effective solution to the problem?

How to bring about creative change

Perhaps the greatest problem in making imaginative and effective change of any kind is getting any two people to agree on a goal and a strategy for achieving it – and then seeing the plan through to success.  

Americans, with their deep-dyed romantic traditions of rugged individualism, always seem to be starting their own little solo things instead of working together on projects that could have more impact because of their larger size and numbers of participants. I’d be entertained to see, for instance, a comprehensive list of all the foundations my countrymen and -women have started over the last 50 years to help stamp out diseases, problems or moral wrongs that hurt their loved ones. I’d also like – maybe less – to see a list of all the redundant little businesses Americans have set up and seen fail. 

Being American myself, I think individualism matters for many reasons, one of which is that encourages every person to have confidence in the power of his or her own initiative. You don’t get anywhere if everyone waits around to be led.

But the truth is, you also don’t get far enough if everyone is charging off in 300 million different directions. We tend to do that here.

Maybe we should try something else – like identifying our most important creative goals, pooling resources and working together to get results instead of each one of us closeting himself with his ambition and reinventing the wheel by the light of his own ego? 

Europeans seem to be doing just that kind of collaborating. At a major conference of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 (a project of the European Commission) this month, thinkers and doers from all over the continent got together, determined what the three main focuses of their creative efforts should be – employment, well-being and education – and made a list of things to do. A lot of it involves reaching across barriers, sharing resources and being regional in attitude.

If they can make this plan work – with over a  thousand more years of tribal, national, ethnic and class strife to overcome than does the U.S. – we Americans won’t have any excuses left for our own fractious, short-sighted and self-involved approach to the future.

Check out FestLab – and see what’s on the slab

In the United States, we have incubators for artists and arts projects of all kinds, from dance and theater to popular music and digital design. Why not an incubator for festivals?

Europe has one. It’s called the FestLab for Creativity and Innovation.

Set up by the European Festivals Association as part of the European Commission’s European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 - a multinational effort to encourage awareness of the personal, social and economic benefits of creativity and innovation and promote better education and training in related skills – FestLab aims to draw attention to the important role of festivals in creative social and cultural processes and help individual festivals fulfill their artistic missions.    

The European Year site currently features a conversation with Ruta Pruseviciene, executive director of the 13-year-old Vilnius Festival, which has resisted catering to popular tastes and trends and set its own artistic agenda. We all need to learn how to do that better, no matter what creative enterprise we’re developing.

Creativity smackdown? Europe vs. the U.S.

Happy Monday! It’s the start of a new business week and here, to kick things off in an interesting direction, are a few words from an interview with Edward de Bono, described as a leading authority on creative thinking  and the European Community’s  recently appointed ambassador for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009:  

What are the main hurdles to unlocking creativity and innovation in Europe?

“There needs to be someone who takes it seriously. I think businesses ought to take creativity as seriously as they take finance and legal affairs. We need someone in every organisation who is directly responsible for creativity and new ideas, who organises training and puts together lists of new thinking, who listens to new ideas, who transmits them and stands behind them. Otherwise you risk having an individual innovator who doesn’t have the political muscle to make things happen and nothing happens.”

Sounds like a good idea to me. But I get the feeling de Bono thinks the United States wouldn’t have the chops to make the concept work within our own borders. Here’s what he has to say about American creativity:

“In America, they have quite old-fashioned ideas about creativity. They think it is just about feeling good and sitting around and brainstorming some answers. And it is not.”

Zut alors, a challenge! What do you think? Is he right? Read the rest of the interview here.