September 12th
The Crisis in Creativity
The Crisis in Creativity
This past summer, Newsweek magazine produced a cover story on the crisis in creativity in the United States. (“The Creativity Crisis,” Newsweek, July 19, 2010, pp. 44-50.) One sentence in the article really caught my attention: “The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.” I believe we’ve been making that same statement at Glen Urquhart School for years. We feel that nurturing children’s innate creativity is one of the things that we do best, and it’s no secret that creativity is one of the pillars on which our teaching philosophy rests (the other two being knowledge and character).
According to the Newsweek article, creativity in the U. S. is declining because of television (surprise, surprise), video games, and simply the lack of a concerted effort to nurture creativity in children. I do agree that sitting in front of a television does little, if anything, to nurture creativity. I would not put all video games in that category. At least they’re interactive, and some require divergent thinking, but that’s a topic for another day. I think the third reason is the most important because, in general, those who lead our public schools have allowed themselves to think that high stakes testing, such as the MCAS, dictates how they should teach, and that it means focusing on facts, rote memorization, and adherence to a core, standardized curriculum. As the Newsweek article points out, that is not necessarily the case. Students can learn the information needed to do well on high stakes testing in a curriculum that nurtures creativity and requires divergent, as well as convergent, thinking.
GUS has had a reputation for years as the school on the north shore that most nurtures creativity. People seem genuinely surprised when they find out that our students also do quite well overall on standardized tests and go to secondary schools well prepared to meet their demands. Surprise, surprise! Do you mean that even in math students can be taught to think creatively? Yes, I do, and I mean that for all the other subjects as well. Creativity is not the province of the art room. It also belongs in the science room and the math class. Lynne Warren understood this more than three decades ago, and she founded a school that thirty-three years later is still nurturing creativity in children.
The article in Newsweek goes on to state that the decline in creativity is most serious for students in the elementary grades, from kindergarten through sixth grade. Our goal is to counter that trend. We believe that experiential education, integration of the arts into the academic classroom, and project-based learning are ways in which creativity is nourished. Our graduates have been proving that for the past thirty plus years. The crisis in creativity in the U. S. is driven by politicians and educators who believe that creativity and academics cannot exist within the same classroom. We know better.
Trust and Go Forward.
Raymond Nance
