Valuing Creativity

If necessity is the mother of invention, then creativity is the father. Without creativity we languish, there is no more advance of culture, no more scientific progress, nothing to inspire. Being creative is one of my most deeply held values, far outweighing practicality or financial success.

So one of my frustrations with our current American education system is there is so little time for creative lesson planning. Now I’m not saying we can’t be creative in planning our lessons- we can. And I’m not saying we can’t have students being creative- we can. I’m simply saying we don’t value the time it takes to be creative enough to plan that time into a teacher’s day. The best education systems in the world do this. We don’t.

And that is ironic considering Gardner’s contention, in Five Minds for the Future, that perhaps Americans are creative enough and don’t need to focus on creativity in the classroom, where cultures such as China, who value uniformity over creativity, need to encourage creativity. It isn’t as though Gardner doesn’t believe in the value of creativity. On the contrary, he believes it so important he named it as one of the five minds we need to develop for future success. But he believes that mastery of a domain must precede creativity, and thus American students should focus on that first.

However, later in his book he writes about how the minds of young adults, from adolescence through early twenties, are naturally the most creative. And these are the students we work with. Thus it hardly seems wise to ignore their creative potential in an attempt to best prepare them for a future whose very success may depend on their ability to be creative.

In education, perhaps the use and creation of video is part of the answer. Assignments such as creating a simple video help us think both creatively and critically about how to present ideas. Clearly today’s youth are quite comfortable with video, to create and consume it. This may be one of our best mediums to consider when marrying the creative and the process of mastery.

Credits:
 Gardner, Howard. Five Minds for the Future. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School, 2007. Print.