Creativity in Schools: Preventing Kids from Building a Better Mouse Trap

           Creative and critical thinking are two different processes that use many similar and divergent techniques to accomplish great outcomes.  Creative thinking is what pioneers the human race forward through innovation.  Critical thinking applies analytical skill in discovering why something is the way it is.  Both creative and critical thinking are highly important for a growing mind (and for those already grown). Despite this, schools today often give way to a curriculum focused more on critical thinking, which hampers the growth of creative tendencies in children.

            To clarify, I’m certainly not trying to say that learning critical thinking skills is bad.  Obviously, understanding why events took place in history, why rhetorical appeals work, and why a certain compound is made when combining two elements are all important as a general education.  Being able to apply that critical thinking to other areas of learning and teaching is wonderful as well, but there comes a time when someone has to say “I understand how and why it works, but how can we make it better?”  This is the main idea behind creative thinking.

            One can analyze something all day long and never find anything truly new; someone will likely have analyzed it before and found the same thing.  Creativity works differently, though.  It requires one to think of something that no one else has thought of before.  Robots are a good example: robotic craft sent to other planets in our solar system analyze materials and objects found there, but it requires the ingenuity of a live person to understand it and do something with it.  As Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda Motor Company, said, “It is when man starts thinking of ideas that the difference between man and machine emerges.”

 

            Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, famous for both his work in the study of creativity and his incredibly difficult-to-pronounce name, separates creativity into two separate categories.  “Big C” creativity is described as “paradigm-shifting” and encompasses events that are generally out of a person’s control.  “Little c” creativity is commonly experienced, usually in everyday life (Mihalyi 30).  Tina Sue Fletcher, who referenced Mihayli as a reference in her Creative Thinking in Schools article, further explains, “A person may not be able to change his world in a big way, but in the spirit of building a better mousetrap, he can come up with new ideas, explorations, and solutions that are both stimulating and satisfying.” (Fletcher)  It can certainly be difficult for a single human being to change the world, even with a creative mind, but it is this mindset that allows technology and culture to advance.

            The best place to start cultivating creative thinking skills is with early education.  Obviously, some parts of the education system are fixed for certain schools; financial resources and learning environments generally remain the same over a particular child’s school career.  However, the teaching techniques and curricula can be altered to nurture the creative thinking skills that will help children become highly active and intelligent members of society (Fletcher).

Positive motivations have been known to encourage greater productivity that negative motivations, such as times constraints.  Giving children opportunities to foster their own creativity by themselves is a great way to avoid these problems, Fletcher suggests.  Short creativity exercises, less busy work and more free time, encourage risk-taking and preserve integrity even when the children’s efforts may fail are excellent methods to nurture creativity for young children.  The same methods can be applied to more mature groups in middle or even high schools; some changes would have to be made for conflicting interests, but the main ideas of encouragement and integrity would remain.

            According to Sir Ken Robinson, a well-known author, public speaker, and advisor on education, the current environment for teaching children makes them frightened of being “wrong.”  Robinson says “[…] if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”  The stigma that we as human beings place on making mistakes frightens children and even grown adults into remaining commonplace.  Children are known for their innate curiosity and their ability to say and do anything that comes immediately to mind (TED.com).  School systems tend to look down upon this behavior, particularly in talented children who may seem non-conformist and hard to deal with (Fletcher).  By the time the children are adults, Robinson says, the innate curiosity and creativity has been mostly washed away.

            Phineas and Ferb, a popular cartoon show on Disney Channel, provides a good humorous and satirical example of what Sir Robinson is saying.  Phineas and Ferb are two young boys with enormous amounts of imagination and creativity; they spend every day of their summer vacation (which seems to never end despite the series broadcasting a special Christmas episode) building huge constructs like roller coasters, proving accepted ideas of history and science wrong, and even crafting a working airplane out of paper-mache.  In one episode the boys get caught by their parents, who were previously unaware of the boy’s creations and adventures.  They are sent to a reform school because of their dangerous “overly-creative” behavior.  Through a series of punishments and warnings, Phineas and Ferb eventually become brainwashed drones that speak in dull tones and refuse to even touch a screwdriver.

            Even though the cartoon is based on humor and this particular episode involves a lot of humor and satire, it provides a good example of what schools and parents may resort to in order to squash creative tendencies.  Obviously schools, parents and even reform schools never take their actions to this extreme, but it does serve as a sort of warning for what can happen if society were to ever place such an extreme stigma on creative thinking.

            In order to build the original mousetrap, someone had to first analyze the initial problem and come up with a creative solution.  After that, someone else designed a new model that worked better.  This process of build and redesign happens all over the world, combining thoughts from great creative minds from over thousands of years.  If school systems stifle those creative juices in children today, it is unlikely that they will be able to build upon the ideas of the current generation much like we have in recent years.  Even if no one person can dream big enough to change the entire world, it only takes one idea to make a difference.

Works Cited

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi.  Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery           and invention.  New York: HarperCollins, 1996.  Print.
Fletcher, Tina Sue. “Creative Thinking in Schools: Finding the “Just Right”           Challenge for Students.” Gifted Child Today Vol. 34 Issue 2 (2011):           37-42. Web. 25 July 2011.
"Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity | Video on TED.com." TED: Ideas           worth Spreading. June 2006. Web. 28 July 2011.
          <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng
          /ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html>.

(Images used from http://beamazinglearning.wordpress.com/tag/creativity/, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx2mGZ52WSM, and http://www.flickr.com/photos/23486066@N04/2242941795/)