Creativity Crisis

[xoxoxoBruce]

Creativity Crisis, that's a snappy headline... everything is a crisis these days.
But the article turned out to be interesting. The basic concern being...

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

Kind of makes sense if that kids (whippersnappers) these days spend so much time with TV and electronic games that develop skills but less imagination.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

The Chinese aren't the only ones, other countries have caught on too.
Of course here, parents and even the pros, want to dump the problem on the schools to solve. Teach them readin', writin', 'rithmatic... oh, and creativity too.

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

The article gets into a little of what Lookout123 was talking about in his Bounce thread, practice is a key.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

I think it's worth reading if you have any interest in kid's development...
or just want to feel superior to these whippersnappers.

[glatt]

I've always thought the one thing that the USA had going for it was its creativity/ingenuity, but if we're losing that too, we are screwed.

[Clodfobble]

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing.

This is exactly what happens when you insist on doing everything you can to bring the bottom performers up... you end up dragging down the top performers as well. No Child Left Behind means No Child Out in Front either. We need to bring back the concept of the vocational high school that is decidedly not college-preparatory.

[classicman]

Well said Clod. We are not all equal and to try and equalize them by standardizing every-effin-thing, we make the situation worse.

[jinx]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

We need to bring back the concept of the vocational high school that is decidedly not college-preparatory.

Hear hear! How many of the great unemployed have degrees but no skills anyone wants to pay them for RFN?

Read more: As tradesmen age, new workers in short supply - Boston Business Journal

[Sundae]

I also think that pushing every child towards Uni (college) is damaging to the adolescents who love learning for its own sake. For the future scholars, lecturers, Professors etc. With Universities clogged up with students aiming to scrape through with the lowest grades in order to say they have a degree, in a subject they have no real interest in, the HE experience also becomes watered down.

I'm amazed at the creativity of the children I work with. In all aspects from a simple display of imagination to more complex problem solving (age-appropriate of course) they still throw their whole focus into things. I'm lucky that I'm working with them at an age where so many things are new, but I hope this is something that is encouraged throughout their educational life.