Are engineers more creative than musicians? Are creativity scores declining in the US? Are disruptions good in the classroom? Is the US embracing the Chinese educational approach and vice versa?
Newsweek just ran an article entitled,"The Creativity Crisis," in which they cover these topics and many others. The complete article is at:
And we've pulled out some highlights, below. The really good news for those who've been through our programs is that the most successful programs for identifying what CEOs think is the most important quality -- creativity -- are precisely what we've been training our clients in since the beginning. Graduates of our programs should highlight to their managers how they are ahead of the curve, and preparing for what the CEO needs from their departments.
Some highlights from the article:
- "(According to research) the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment is more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ."
- "With intelligence,... in each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling."
- "In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked [one researcher] to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. 'After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,' [the researcher] says. 'They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
- "The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly."
- "Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process."
- “The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity,” observed William & Mary’s [researcher Kyung Hee] Kim.
- "Is [creative thinking] learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better."
- "The good news is that creativity training that aligns with the new science works surprisingly well. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University each independently conducted a large-scale analysis of such programs. All three teams of scholars concluded that creativity training can have a strong effect. 'Creativity can be taught,' says James C. Kaufman, professor at California State University, San Bernardino. What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages."
Read the complete article at:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
What are your solutions for the creativity crisis?
A creativity and innovation network that I have been part of for over 14 years (it was originally created when I worked for 3M) had a noon time discussion on this same topic. We talked about the role of parenting and becoming involved with parents when their children are first born, that the onus is NOT all on the educational institution but all of us as a community and society
Posted by: Kimberly Anne Johnson | 07/29/2010 at 12:16 PM