Rsolyn Tam.
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.
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 programs especially
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.
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