The Creativity Crisis

This is a very good and thorough article that discusses how one can teach creativity (or suffocate it) in the classroom, and in life.

One thought: the article makes a point that creativity is not the exclusive domain of the arts, and can be brought into the curriculum in other, more accepted areas (editorializing snarkiness mine), such as math and science. What does that mean for those who advocate for arts education in schools, when most schools are cutting those programs? If that's one of their big arguments, that art helps foster creativity while other fields don't, what then?

I have to agree with the article's point, that creativity is not exclusive to any one field. However, I've always felt that art's main contribution to the learner goes beyond creativity, into something more psychological, more spiritual, more mystical. Art feeds a 'mood' part of us that cannot be fed by science, math, or engineering, and that mood part of us must be fed if we are to remain psychologically healthy. Or at least, I believe the research (if it were done) would indicate.

That being said, I can only hope that our educational system can indeed cast off the shackles and of standardized tests, those murderers of creative thought and creative teaching. As someone who once worked part-time grading standardized tests from across the nation, I can attest to how those tests punish the most creative of the correct answers. Even if an answer were correct, even if the student exhibited a more thorough, comprehensive understanding of the problem (for example, representing fractions by pie charts rather than just applying a formula to the numbers), the answer would be marked wrong if it were not included in the pre-fab rubric of correct answers. The rubric was provided to the graders (teams of hundreds or more) to ensure consistency in the grading, which it did superbly. At almost 100 percent consistency in grading, we were most assuredly grading everyone fairly. The problem was, we were not grading them accurately. And we were punishing the creative students among them, and, probably, indirectly punishing the creative teachers who had likely explained the same concept from a number of different approaches to heighten comprehension among students of diverse abilities and learning styles. So much for education.

But why should you listen to me? Well, let's just say my new favorite word is paracosm. And I had one as a kid that lasted years.