In spite of the increasing presence of “Fed-Ex Days” and such at companies that are looking to make money from new products, while some schools (more independent than public or religious ones, of course) say they prize creativity, if you look at the way the administration governs the faculty and the way faculty run their classrooms, they clearly do not.
The reasons for such a contradiction are predictable and, let’s face it, understandable. It’s partly a matter of scaling. Creativity requires, in a certain way, lack of discipline (even where in another way it’s an extraordinarily disciplined activity). In a class of seven students, a lack of traditional discipline is unlikely to be a problem; in a class of fourteen, significantly more so since student-student interactions grow much more than linearly. (And who says math is not useful in real life? LOL) In a class of 25, it can become unmanageable if you’re not a really skilled manager and a bit lucky.
It’s also a matter of goal. While parents say they want their children to be “successful individuals,” for many of our parents, that involves first and foremost getting into the “right” college (whichever one that is), which generally is thought to require a certain kind of curriculum and certain levels of standardized test scores. There’s time for creative thought, independent reflection, and such later.
Then there’s the slippery matter of what “creativity” is. To some people, it simply means “anything goes”–any student-generated work with minimal teacher constraints is “creative” and we can’t judge it except through process–which means “creative” classes tend to give lots of high grades.
As I tell my English students, though, on “creative” assignments I give them, don’t be foolish enough to think “creative work” can’t be assessed. At a minimum, there’s the power of the marketplace: some books sell much better than others–as do some works of art, some concerts, some shows. You may not like the public’s criteria (I certainly don’t always–I’m surprised when a book I like is a best-seller, for instance), but decisions on the merits of creative work are made every day all across the world.
I try to meld thoughtfulness with wildness in my creative assignments. I make students tell me what they were trying to do in rewriting a scene from Hamlet, for instance: the goal they wanted to achieve, the means they chose, and how those means are supposed to have worked to achieve the goal. I don’t suppose a “true genius” needs such reflection and thoughtfulness–it will all have been internalized. But then, a “true genius” is extraodinarily rare and doesn’t need my help anyway. It’s the one-step-below kids who can benefit from my assistance. Sometimes, these assignments produce great results. At the very least, they give the budding writers a new appreciation for the difficulties of being the Bard…
Then there’s the question of modeling. Lower School teachers are more likely, I think, to be comfortable modeling “creative work” than their Upper School colleagues, perhaps partly because an audience of first-graders may be more easily impressed and more tolerant than an audience of seniors. My experience is that modeling of desired behaviors–whether in writing or how to solve a math problem you’ve never encountered before–is limited in classrooms. We mostly tell them what we want, give some examples, have them do it, and provide feedback on how well they did (or did not) accomplish the task. Not an inherently bad system, but one that fosters several definitely non-creative ideas in students:
- There’s “one right answer” or “one right process”
- The teacher is an expert
- (and maybe even) I’m not all that bright because these things seem so much easier to the teacher than to me
- I need to memorize lots of kinds of problems/questions and the algorithms/answers because all these examples don’t seem to have a lot in common.
The big conundrum in developing creative thinkers is going to be twofold, then:
- How do we evaluate creative work in a way that doesn’t seem totally arbitrary yet doesn’t value everything equally?
- How do we (if at all) blend in the same individual the discipline necessary to work for someone else with the freedom to be innovative?