Yesterday I wrote a post about the "creativity crisis" recently reported by Newsweek. Over the past 20 years, American children have steadily lost ground on a long-standing creativity assessment that's strongly associated with entrepreneurship and invention. This is a serious problem.
I've spent the past 20 years interviewing social entrepreneurs in different countries and fields—and if there's one quality they all have in common, it's creativity. Not a specific talent like a flair for painting or writing poetry, but a generalizable kind of creativity that can be applied to many types of problems.
This creativity has less to do with knowledge (although it requires knowledge) than with a willingness to ask unconventional questions, absorb new information, and try ideas out. It's both playful and bold.
A society that does not nurture this kind of creativity is in trouble.
The irony is that it is so easy to encourage. If you look at young children, they are continually experimenting. Most of their experiments are failures—in the sense that their efforts to control their environment usually backfire. A toddler quickly discovers that he can't stand on a ball. Or he pulls a glass of milk off the table and SMASH! Big mess. But the wonderful thing is that there are no penalties for those failures.
There’s a robust and incredibly accelerated learning process in the first five years of life. And it can be a joy to witness. A first grader (who hasn't been suckered to think that he's really supposed to build the Star Wars ship featured on the Lego box) will concoct the most marvelous paracosm out of a bunch of Lego pieces, Pokemon cards, and plastic reptiles.
Then you get to school and you discover that if you put up your hand and give a wrong answer, it doesn’t feel good. Maybe the other kids laugh at you or the teacher frowns. The impulse to experiment gets abruptly curtailed. How many students come to avoid failure more than they embrace learning? It depends on how much we value 'right' answers over self-directed learning. In this regard, testing can be a huge impediment.
Schools can do much better to nurture the kind of creativity that helps children grow into powerful changemakers. In our new book, Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, Susan Davis and I devote a chapter to this subject. Here's a brief excerpt:
In their book The Scientist in the Crib, authors Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl observe that babies and toddlers from their earliest years “think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments.” Children know far more about the world than adults imagine, and they seek to understand everything they touch and taste. During their first two years, they make extraordinary intellectual leaps.
For most children, intellectual development slows dramatically within a few years. By the time they are in grade school, children have lost much of the curiosity and resourcefulness that a few years earlier made them incomparable explorers. As the educator Eleanor Duckworth explains in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas, once children enroll in school, their natural enthusiasm and inquisitiveness becomes subordinated to the needs of adults enlisted to teach them. A young child who breaks something to see what it looks like inside, or asks a question that is socially embarrassing, or wants to discover how it feels to wear shoes on the wrong feet, will often be met with a discouraging glance or tone from an adult.
Duckworth argues that educators should encourage and structure moments when children can have their own ideas and feel good for having them. Only if children honestly believe their ideas are valuable will they develop the interest, ability, and self-confidence to be lifelong learners and doers. “Having confidence in one’s ideas does not mean ‘I know my ideas are right,’" notes Duckworth. "[I]t means ‘I am willing to try out my ideas.’”
Photo: ScienceWorldCA
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