How Obama can help America create a better civilization

The most important word in that title? ”Create.” It’s the key to our success. And the United States needs to be more successful in many ways.

That’s why at this moment – with a president in office who embodies the nation’s new attitude toward difference and change – I think America is, at long last, ready to begin the creative revolution it must go through to become the thriving, peaceful, stimulating, wise, caring and accomplished society that its citizens have always hoped it would turn out to be. 

I call it a revolution because a culture of creativity will turn the U.S. completely around, away from narrow, outmoded perspectives and failed ways of operating and toward a broader view that encourages people in every field of endeavor to imagine and experiment, discuss and collaborate – and then innovate. When we can embrace fresh ideas and support each other’s efforts, we will be able to solve a lot more of our problems.

How can President Obama lead us through this fundamental makeover? Americans for the Arts has made official recommendations to the new administration; what follow are the suggestions of other arts leaders, as well as some of my own. 

Education. As with any lasting change, education matters most.  But our educational system itself – what it teaches and how it teaches - desperately needs the same transformation as the rest of our culture. So it must be both the agent and the subject of change.

Like the military-style, 19th-century factories and workforces on which they were modeled, U.S. public schools still aim to turn out masses of identical products through a rote process. They largely emphasize conformity and uniformity - children stand in line, sit in rows, raise their hands to speak and are made to repress their natural inclinations to move around, explore and question.  They generally learn identical lessons in large groups, take identical standardized tests and are often strongly discouraged from deviating in any way from a predetermined norm. 

That may have been effective learning in an age when most people ended up working on assembly lines for rigidly structured corporations, but it doesn’t prepare today’s students for the flexible and adventurous thinking demanded by our 21st-century’information and service economy, where competition requires constant  reinvention of complex processes and products.  Even more important, a tool-and-die schooling makes most people bored, restless and miserable.

Our system ignores “the fundamental truth about how young people learn,” says Steven Tepper, associate director of The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.  “Clearly, refocusing U.S. education around creativity and creative engagement is central” to improving educational results.  

Studies, including the RAND Corporation’s significant 2004 Gifts of the Muse report, have shown that creative teaching methods and creative subjects help people learn better, enjoy themselves more, stay in school longer and develop the creative skills they need to lead successful, productive lives including, but not limited to, better employment. Creative disciplines such as the arts can provide the inspiration, stimulus and opportunities for discovery and self-expression that students often miss in standard curricula. Arts-related teaching methods - movement, building, illustration, composition, acting a role – can also help students better understand the concepts of their academic subjects.

In just one example cited by the Cleveland-based Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC), young people attending Cleveland’s School of the Arts  – part of an extremely troubled public-school system – last year scored higher than Ohio statewide averages in eight types of Ohio proficiency tests; 100 percent of them passed their Ohio graduation tests. (Full disclosure: I work with CPAC as a free-lance writer and editor.) 

America needs more arts in its schools and more creative teaching methods. We also need better teachers.  Here’s what Obama could do to help:

•  As Robert Lynch of Americans for the Arts suggests, create a Secretary of Arts and Culture position, or the equivalent, to oversee and coordinate U.S. arts and creativity policy and initiatives
• Direct that official to work with the U.S. Department of Education on a task force to develop what Tepper sees as needed curriculum standards for creative instruction, to give state education departments guidelines for what methods to use, what to achieve and how to measure success 
• Fund and foster teacher training in creative classroom methods through community consortiums of arts, science, technology and arts-education organizations similar to Cleveland’s annual Summer Teacher Institute  
• Encourage, through Department of Education funding for teacher salary enhancements, the abandonment of tenure and the adoption of merit-based pay determined by administrative, peer, parent and student review 
• Establish an Artists Corps, as Lynch recommends, to provide jobs and job-training to artists of all ages in the effort to improve America’s infrastructure – but make it one section of a permanent  Service Corps offering environmental, technological, educational and entrepreneurial services to communities, and jobs and job-training for retirees, students between high school graduation and college enrollment and adults in career or life transitions in need or desire of employment, new skills or contributing to society. Coordinate the different sections’ initiatives to encourage collaborative programs, such as having artists and environmental workers provide creative and green-practices training to businesses

Which brings us to the next area of change …

Organizational culture. Like our schools, our other organizations – from bureaus and agencies to companies and unions - tend be structured like the  Army: highly regimented, top-down outfits with their own strict class systems, ingrained operational methods and culture of absolute power at the top and absolute obedience everywhere else.

The Army is not known for its creativity. Neither is the Navy, where insiders describe their institution as “over 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.”  But they have missions vastly different from civilian groups, which must use the imagination and knowledge resources of all their members or risk being ineffective, inefficient, outmoded and – in the case of business enterprises – uncompetitive and eventually bankrupt. 

If American education becomes more creative and sends more inventive, unrepressed people into the world, chances are that our other organizational structures will change, too. But with all this bailout money being handed to dangerously flawed corporations and the president reevaluating the usefulness of government entities and programs, now seems a good time for Obama to urge some new organizational creativity by:

• Making a bailout contingent on the internal restructuring of receiving companies, to allow greater employee input, eliminate reprisals against whistleblowers and create transparency in communications and reporting
• Ditto for government departments and agencies, which can be made more creative and open while being streamlined to reduce spending and waste 
• Making creativity a goal for all government departments by directing them to work with the new Secretary for Arts and Culture and/or an expanded National Endowment for the Arts on incorporating arts, design and cultural heritage components into U.S. transportation infrastructure, health and human services programs and education, as Americans for the Arts director Lynch and CPAC president Tom Schorgl recommend (for more on the NEA, see Matt Charboneau’s Geniocity blog)
• Capitalizing on the unions’ delight at being included in the national agenda once more by urging a creative modernization of their missions and rules, especially as regards teacher tenure and arts unions’ restrictions on the ways their members’ work can be used. Theater companies, for instance, would be able to support themselves more effectively if Actors Equity Association permitted to them record their own professional stage performances for sale as CDs and DVDs       

Which leads to a final creative area …

Entrepreneurship. This country will never get anywhere if creative individuals and their endeavors don’t get more support of all kinds. As things stand now, people with ideas that will innovate society and the economy face a desperate struggle to get noticed and encouraged with advice, seed money and start-up resources. Whether they’re one-person projects, nonprofit organizations or for-profits, smaller enterprises generate billions of dollars in economic impact, create jobs, provide needed services and products and inject fresh energy and ideas into communities. But only if they don’t die a-borning.

To help, Obama should:

• Encourage public-private partnerships among banks, credit unions, foundations, industry associations and private investors to seek out creatively promising individuals and embryonic projects and provide them with grants, loans, mentoring, resources or combinations of all four. These services should not be open to the high-growth-potential tech start-ups exclusively favored by venture capitalists and incubators (See Will Limkemann’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• Change any tax restrictions preventing nonprofits, including arts groups, from supporting themselves by selling products derived from, or related to, their own work and missions
• Support revisions to intellectual property law, especially copyrights, which can discourage creativity by preventing entrepreneurs, artists and others from sharing ideas and work, Tepper suggests (See Peter Friedman’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• And because creativity depends on the even bigger and wider flow of ideas that comes from intermixing peoples, Tepper says, change American immigration policy to permit greater freedom of cultural exchange and increase entrepreneurship

We and our president have a big job ahead of us, revolutionizing America. It’ll be hard. But because it’s creative, it’ll be fun, too.

Nature or nurture? Whatever causes creativity, keep it coming

Though a lot of people who never thought much about it before have begun realizing that creativity is essential to every kind of human success – including the money part that Americans value so much – nobody has a real grasp yet on where creativity comes from.

All over the nation, government leaders, business people and school adminstrators have been moved by their desire to develop a smarter, more capable work force and boost economies. They’ve gotten behind efforts to promote imaginative thinking, seek out and fund innovators and involve artists in teaching and neighborhood redevelopment projects.

They see a use for creativity the way early humans saw a use for fire, without understanding what it is. 

But that’s not their fault, because not even scientists are sure yet. Some, such as V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California-San Diego, have postulated that creativity began 20,000-30,000 years ago when neurological structures in the brain finally developed enough to make physical contact with each other, suddenly allowing humans to, in effect, cross-reference their thoughts. Humans could then compare one experience or perception to another and discover likenesses or patterns that helped them understand what they saw more deeply. Using real experiences as a starting point, they could imagine experiences that weren’t real. They could recognize that one thing – an object or image – might represent another quite different thing – an idea. 

 Source credit: www.mindpowerzone.com/article1.htm

They were no longer limited to the literal – they understood metaphor. And so, quite abruptly by evolutionary standards, humans developed religion and art.

But postulating that creativity was the result of brain development is not the same as knowing exactly what the development was and how it works. The scientific theories seem contradictory, to say the least, with some camps scoffing at common lore such as the idea that creative people are right-brained, while others find evidence that seems to support it.

For instance, here’s a story about a study of schizotypy from about three years ago. People with schizotypal personalities – such as Albert Einstein and Emily Dickinson – are somewhat like schizophrenics in their oddities of perceiving, thinking and communicating, but not actually schizophrenic. They also tend to be highly creative. In the study, though all participants showed activity in both brain lobes while creatively engaged, the schizotypes showed much more intense right-brain activity when performing a creative task than both normal people and schizophrenics.

“In the scientific community, the popular idea that creativity exists in the right side of the brain is thought to be ridiculous, because you need both hemispheres of your brain to make novel associations and to perform other creative tasks,” Brad Folley, a Vanderbilt University psychologist who took part in the study, said in a news release. “We found that all three groups, schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal controls, did use both hemispheres when performing creative tasks. But the brain scans of the schizotypes showed a hugely increased activation of the right hemisphere compared to the schizophrenics and the normal controls.”

Interesting. Yet, just today, Peter Chaban , a teacher-researcher at the Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto, called the idea of right-brain specialization one of the “widely held misconceptions” and ”outdated myths” about creativity.

Chaban does credit cognition in both halves of the brain with some responsibility for creativity, but he gives equal weight to personality and environment – nature and nurture – as well. In his blog, he mildly takes issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s buzzed-about new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, in which Gladwell tries to make the case that creativity is more the result of environmental influences and constant practice than the luck of the wiring in a person’s head. Chaban agrees that external factors have an effect on creative ability. But he asserts that, together, cognition (how your brain functions), personality (high motivation) and environment (outside encouragement) form the three-legged stool on which creativity stands and that without any one of those legs, a person’s creativity will not flourish.   

I’m inclined to suppose that personality is directly related to cognition and that it also affects environment (if you’re disagreeable, are people apt to support and encourage you?), but that’s a topic for someone with actual psychological and sociological chops to pursue. 

What I can say with some authority is that creative people care a great deal less about the cognition and personality sides of it than about the environment. They want and need support and encouragement. So whether or not science catches up to the current economic and educational fascination with the benefits of creativity and proves either that all of us can be extremely creative or that only a few special people can, the ones who are talented right now are just fine with the increasing appreciation and resources they’re getting.