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.