Many of the men and women who shaped
the world over the course of history, from Mozart to Albert Einstein to Steve
Jobs, have done so by thinking well outside the sphere of traditional
education. Famously, each of these men had some issues with authority, and it’s
hard to imagine any of them sitting placidly in a classroom and copying facts
and figures from a chalkboard. In the end, their genius was not simply in their
ability to understand complex systems, although that was certainly an important
part of it. What set them apart was their creativity—that is, their ability to
use previously held knowledge to produce something that no one had ever thought
to make before; whether a symphony, a scientific theory or a personal computer.
The
passing of Steve Jobs in 2011 rekindled an age-old discussion about the relationship of creativity and
innovation to
traditional notions of intelligence. (Jobs often credited the creative classes
he audited after dropping out of college with influencing some of his later
decisions at Apple.) Not everything about this relationship is completely
understood, but most people involved in education and public policy agree:
creativity will be a crucial characteristic possessed by anyone hoping to
succeed in the twenty-first-century economy. And yet, the education system in
its current state is not set up to foster this sort of out-of-the-box thinking.
One solution currently gaining momentum is the use of community-driven
non-profit organizations known as local education funds (LEFs) and public
education funds (PEFs), which are committed to improving access to quality
education for all members of society. While not the complete answer, these
reform-minded organizations might be the key to injecting creativity back into
public schools.
Fostering Creative Intelligence
in the American Classroom
It
is ten years after the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which
was enacted in order to help American schools compete with their foreign
counterparts, and their foreign counterparts are still outscoring them in just about every subject. This
might be partially due to NCLB’s use of standardized testing to measure school
performance. As many teachers will attest to, this emphasis on test scores leave
schools little room to focus on anything besides “teaching
to the test.” The United States has gone backwards, then, to a so-called
“drill-and-kill” system of rote learning and memorization, while many of the
rest of the world’s schools, especially those in Europe and Asia, have evolved
to place emphasis on big picture concepts, problem solving, and encouraging
innovation.
According
to a 2010 study by The College of William & Mary
education professor Kyung-Hee Kim, creativity has been on the decline among
American students since 1990. Using the results of the Torrance Test measuring
creative thinking, she analyzed decades’ worth of data and found that, while
traditional IQ scores have actually gone up steadily each decade, creativity is
on the decline. She also used the results to identify three types of students:
those with high intelligence and high creativity, those with high intelligence
and low creativity, and those with low intelligence and high creativity. What
does this tell us? One theory is that creativity and intelligence, while
related, are not exactly the same thing, and placing too much stress on more
traditional standards of intelligence might result in stifling creativity in
those who possess that quality. As Kim notes, “If we neglect creative students
in school because of the structure and the testing movement—creative students
cannot breathe, they are suffocated in school—then they become underachievers.”
While there are several factors that might be resulting in this “creativity crisis,” Kim puts at least some of the blame for lower
Torrance test scores on the culture of standardized testing encouraged by NCLB.
This
decline in creativity does not bode well for the future of the country.
According to John M. Eger, professor of communications and public policy and
director of the Creative Economy Initiative at San Diego State University,
creativity is essential to building an economy to compete with the rest of the
world in coming decades. In a Huffington Post article from 2011, Eger points out that, while
the word “creative” is often associated with the arts, the concept of
creativity is just as important for the STEM subjects that have received so much
attention from education leaders and government officials in recent years. In
fact, a recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs around the world
identified creativity as the top quality needed for future success in the
global economy.
Is Public Investment the Solution?
As
our schools struggle to keep up with the standards set forth by NCLB, they also
grapple with staggering budget cuts, with fine art
and music programsespecially vulnerable to the axe. Recently, however, a
number of organizations collectively known as public education support
organizations, or ESOs, have been created within communities to supply capital
for public schools through fundraising. Funds are then appropriated through
grants to finance things like teacher training, afterschool programs, community-based
projects, and school supplies. There are many types of ESOs, and they vary
greatly in both scope and size. LEFs are specifically associated with the Public Education Network,
while PEFs are a much broader group of education-related foundations. The Urban
Institute reports that between 1997 and 2007, the number
of ESOs doubled to more than 19,000, collectively spending $4.3 billion dollars
on improving education.
The Decatur Public Schools
Foundation (DPSF) out
of Decatur, Illinois, is an organization that’s representative of the
possibilities for PEFs to create opportunities rewarding creative thinking and
innovation. Decatur Science Investigations, funded by the foundation, is a
partnership with Millikin Universitythat brings undergraduate science students
into Decatur elementary schools to set up science stations and perform science
demonstrations at school assemblies. The goal of the program is to encourage
young students to use their imaginations and gain enthusiasm for science, and
100% of teachers polled in the district felt that the program
increased critical thinking and problem solving skills. Another DPSF program is
the musical instrument library, which provides band and orchestra instruments
to low-income students who might not have otherwise been able to afford them.
After the program started in 2009, participation in music programs increased by
15%.
Compared
to some of the larger LEFs operating with multi-million dollar budgets, DPSF is
a relatively small organization, but it’s easy to see how these small-scale
efforts can really make a difference to students who benefit from them, and how
they might be used to fill in the creativity gap that currently exists in
public education. As to whether these organizations will continue to expand and
become an important part of education funding in the future, there is no clear
answer. What does seem clear is that creative thinking will be the only
solution to the myriad complex problems facing coming generations. And,
appropriately enough, one of those problems might just be how we’re going to
fix education.
Contributor: Roslyn Tam
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