“The Creativity Crisis.” That was Newsweek’s recent cover story that has parents and educators across the country worried. The story reports on recent data that suggests creativity scores of children have fallen significantly in the last 20 years -- even as their IQ scores have been steadily increasing. It’s a troubling trend that IdeaPaint would like to help turn around.
The Newsweek piece jumps off a recent study of the so called “Torrance kids,” a large group of Minneapolis children tested for their creativity abilities by professor E. Paul Torrance back in the late 50's. The study tracked those former grade-schoolers for adult expressions of creativity such as authoring books, holding art shows, starting businesses or filing for patents. Turns out that the kids who scored high on the Torrance test back in early grade school showed far more adult creative accomplishments than children with high IQs. That result has been big news within the group of scholars who study intelligence and creativity. Finding tangible connections between creativity scores and academic or career success has been a difficult challenge. Creativity, by its nature, is a hard trait to measure in both children and adults.
But the part of the article that has the public talking is the dramatic decline in Torrance scores in the last two decades. The trend is most significant with children between kindergarten through sixth grade. Just as social scientists have proved how important creativity is to adult success, the trait appears to be slipping away.
Suggested culprits include the increasing amount of screen time in the lives of young children. Electronic media -- even in the form of interactive learning games -- seldom encourages novel thinking or imagination. Others theorize that shifting trends in education -- the increasing emphasis on test scores -- is partly responsible. Even the toys children play with have come under scrutiny. Some scholars and educators have pointed out how fewer and fewer modern toys encourage open-ended play. A generation ago, for instance, Legos encouraged children to build anything they could imagine. Today they come prepackaged to create the “Typhoon Turbo Sub” and the like.
“Whether this trend can be turned around depends critically on understanding the nature of creativity,” says IdeaPaint’s Chief Marketing Officer Marcus Wilson. “Teachers and bosses often say they want to promote creativity, but they don't always have the real-world knowledge, or the tools, to engender it.”
Creativity scholar R. Keith Sawyer agrees that people often talk about creativity but seldom understand the trait. He's spent much of his career debunking the common myths that surround the topic.
Myth #1: Creativity Springs Spontaneously from the Unconscious
This assumption leads some to believe that creativity is a mysterious and unknowable process and to devalue the role of conscious thought and directed attention. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear to be true. Studies on the topic have shown that brilliant ideas rarely pop, fully formed, out of the unconscious mind. “Creativity is mostly conscious, hard work,” notes Sawyer. “Rather than a mysterious unconscious force, the explanation of creativity lies in hard work and everyday mental processes.”
Myth #2: Creativity and Intelligence are Opposites
Some teachers feel like they have to make the choice between teaching disciplined, rational thinking and fostering creativity. With limited time and resources they take the attitude: ‘You can be creative only after you finish memorizing your multiplication table.’ Creativity tests and intelligence tests do measure different things: One measures the ability to come up with the right answer and the other the ability to come up with many possible answers. Social scientists call the former convergent thinking and the later divergent thinking. But these two ways of thinking through a problem are not opposites. One’s ability to come up with a useful answer to a complex problem almost always requires a period of divergent thinking before one begins to sort through and pick the most useful options. “Kid’s are encouraged very young to search only for the right answer on a multiple-choice test,” says Wilson. “Unfortunately, in the real world of jobs and businesses there are no multiple choice tests. The challenge is not to come up with a single right answer but many right answers and then pick the best one.”
No one comes up with a useful novel idea unless one possesses a deep knowledge of the subject at hand. In addition, one’s ability to come up with a useful answer to a complex problem almost always requires a period of divergent thinking before one begins to sort through and pick the most useful options.
Myth #3: Creativity is an Individual Trait
This may be the most pervasive and misleading myth surrounding creativity but the science debunking it is clear: Creativity emerges as much from social worlds and physical environments as it does from individual minds. Sawyer points out that this myth probably comes from the American tendency to rewrite history in the form of stories of great triumphs by single individuals. Thomas Edison, for instance, is often given lone credit for the inventions patented under his name. In fact, his prolific career depended on his ability to build a workshop that sparked the creativity of the 14 men who worked for him. Understood in this way, the study of creativity becomes as much the province of anthropology, sociology, architecture and design as it is of psychology. “We’ve learned that creativity is almost never a solitary activity,” says Sawyer, “but that it’s fundamentally social and collaborative.”
The staff of IdeaPaint has seen this first hand countless times – recently through our work with the Drew Brees Dream Foundation and The Idea Village, a New Orleans entrepreneurial program that encourages high school students' to think like entrepreneurs. “It’s amazing what can happen when you get kids on their feet and working collaboratively to fill a blank canvas,” says IdeaPaint's Jeff Avallon. “Suddenly the sparks are flying.” Similarly, the Warren-Prescott School in Boston reports that "class-wide, there is a greater sense of 'chance taking' with IdeaPaint."
We are social creatures after all, deeply programmed to mimic each other’s behavior. If our social and physical environment effectively communicates the message that creativity is the currency in play, the activity becomes second nature.
IdeaPaint, whether used at home, work or school, is part of a matrix of solutions that can get people working together, solving problems, and thinking creatively.
Request a sample of IdeaPaint and watch creativity and imaginations grow.
