This week’s edition of Newsweek jumped out from the cashier stand today at the grocery store. The title, “Creativity in America: The Science of Innovation and How to Reignite our Imaginations,” intrigued me. The cover art (an American flag made of broken-up red, white, and blue crayons intrigued me). And it was cowritten by Po Bronson, who makes excellent commentary on the state of our world at large usually, so I grabbed it.
A shorter piece than I expected (Newsweek has certainly shrunk in multiple redesigns in the past year or so), but interesting. While our nation’s collective IQ has risen, our children’s collective CQ (creativity quotient) has dropped. Bottomed out, flat-lined, died. We’re raising a brood of kindergarteners through sixth-graders, for whom the decline is “most serious.”
It’s because of boredom and discouragement. Lack of engagement with parents, teachers, peers. Maybe even lack of hardship? The article cites the fact that the most creative individuals grew up with hardship. “Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible–and flexibility helps with creativity.”
And yet,
“It’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: There’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.”
And we’re not using the right techniques to do it.
“According to University of Oklahoma professor Michael Mumford, half of the commonly used techniques intended to spur creativity don’t work, or even have a negative impact. As for most commecially available creativity training, Mumford doesn’t mince words: ‘it’s garbage.’ Whether for adults or kids, the worst of these programs focus on imagination exercises, expression of feelings, or imagery. They pander to an easy, unchallenging notion that all you have to do is let your natural creativity out of its shell.”
This sounds really similar to classical education training: you teach children to learn all sorts of information BEFORE you make them attempt to make sense of it aka to be creative with it. Hm, sounds like modern scholarship is catching up with the forward-thinking classical education experts. It’s a good thing. We have to be pass our creativity along.
Three things the Newsweek article recommended (that we all already know):
1. Turn off the TV. The boob tube has become central to every home, but even more pervasive in recent years with the extension of computer live streaming, Wii and Xbox live streaming of movies, cartoons, anything, and then there are the smart phones and the iPads and everything in between. Best thing sometimes is to just turn it off.
I didn’t watch much television as a child (I was too distraught over Little House on the Prairie, so my Mom turned it off), but I do remember spending hours with a basket full of old wooden spools left to us from our great-grandmother. She saved them all those years and then we got to play with them by the hour. And I mean for hours, creating houses and roads and forts and boundaries and rivers. It was like a gigantic geography game.
2. Follow a passion. What is a passion? I remember for a while our passion was our Mini Bake Oven with our friends F. and J. We made cinnamon and sugar covered bread pieces (we called them “tidbits”) and we tore up the entire house one Saturday and made it into a town (each room was a different business).
And then our passion was making mud pies out in the backyard or flooding the flowerbeds to swim in them (we wanted a bigger pool so badly) or playing in our friend’s cabin playhouse or flooding their backyard to have a swimming hole. Kids get passionate about many things and I appreciate that my parents turned us loose!
3. Get moving. Exercise and movement is one thing we always had. We hiked, we biked, we ran, we danced, we swam, we played hide and seek. We never could sit still for very long and I love that the Newsweek article includes this. Kids must move and must go outside a lot to inspire creativity. Our backyard (and our front yard, for that matter) was a place of imagination and discovery. We were always delighted to be sent outside for a few hours, because we could always find something to do.
Action Tip: Our creativity inspires the next generation. How will you help?
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