Is it new? Creativity Is it useful?
So it is a myth that children are naturally more creative than adults and a large body of research suggests that school education supports both academic achievement and creativity( Karwowski, 2022).
Do schools kill creativity?
Dr Claire Badger Head of Teacher Professional Development at InnerDrive
It is a prevalent belief that schools somehow kill creativity, no doubt fuelled by the most watched TEDTalk of all time, Sir Ken Robinson’ s‘ Do Schools Kill Creativity?’( Robinson, 2006). However, far from killing creativity, schools in fact provide the knowledge that is essential for creativity to thrive.
One of Sir Ken’ s key arguments is the idea that young children tend to perform much better on divergent thinking tests, where people are asked to come up with multiple suggestions rather than focusing on one particular solution, for example asking people how many uses they can come up with for a paperclip.
However, even if young children tend to perform better on divergent thinking tests- and a recent meta-analysis( Said-Metwaly et al., 2021) suggested that this isn’ t necessarily the case- this does not mean that young children are inherently more creative.
This is because in order for something to be creative it needs to be both new and useful( Runco and Jaeger, 2012). Young children may come up with surprising and quirky ideas but many of these are likely impractical in reality; these young children lack the knowledge to be able to effectively evaluate their ideas.
Another misconception about creativity is that it only applies to so-called creative subjects such as Art, Music, Dance and Drama. Using the definition above – that something must be both new and useful in order to be creative – we can see that creativity can be seen across all subjects.
Picasso’ s Guernica is an example of a innovative artwork that shone a light on a horrific bombing during the Spanish Civil War; even now it is a highly effective antiwar symbol. Within the sciences, Einstein’ s theories of relatively were new and useful as they explained phenomena that had confounded classical mechanics. These are examples of creativity in a wide social context, creative ideas that have an impact across wider society.
But creativity is applicable on a smaller scale as well. A student constructing their own argument for a history essay or using a variety of different strategies to solve a complex maths problem. These might not be creative on the grand scale of Picasso or Einstein but these ideas are new and useful to that student in the context of their education. However, the knowledge and strategies required for that student to be creative in history will be different from those required in maths, hence researchers argue that creativity is a domain specific skill( see e. g. Kaufman and Baer, 2002).
A good analogy for the importance of knowledge in developing creativity is that of building blocks. Imagine you just have five Lego bricks, all of the same shape and colour – not a lot you can do with them right?
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