Conventional Education and the Creativity Crisis
A warm hello to my students, clients and readers!
Welcome to my latest blog. I’m glad you’re here.
Part I: Words from My Students
They have a lot to say
Frozen forms gleam
in sunlight, trickle.
In mountains, tourists
flock to ski.
Glaciers form
the common drink.
Droplets rush, waterfalls
to their destination.
- Poem by anonymous high schooler
Part II: A Reflection
Let’s get deep
Today, we’re going to continue working through my thoughts on this comment from one of my high schoolers: “If you give a child a strict schedule for his formative years and then abandon him to the world, he becomes prey to people offering structure and order.”
What did my student mean by this? Let’s begin by outlining a few key arguments. I’ve already discussed how most schools deny students the right to decide almost anything about their educations except 1) whether or not they complete the assignments handed down to them by their teachers, and 2) how much effort they spend doing so. You’ll also remember me pointing out that because they’re allowed so little agency from the start, few students learn to view themselves as active participants in (much less managers of) their own educations.
Now, this makes for a problematic situation: on the one hand, schools deny students the right to determine what their education will look like at all but the broadest conceptual levels (i.e., what sort of institution they attend, whether or not they take AP classes, etc.), with the extent of their freedom of choice generally mirroring that of their economic privilege. But on the other hand, schools take it for granted that students owe time and labor to the education system, despite their exclusion from setting expectations around how much or what type of labor they give.
To complicate things even further, students who don’t complete the assignments handed down to them sans input are penalized, with enough of these penalties resulting (sometimes theoretically, sometimes actually) in decreased opportunities for future employment. In reality, grades have little bearing on students’ diverse capacities and skills; however, common messaging frames them as having irreversible consequences on students’ lives. For this reason, the stakes of failure seem depressingly high in present-day classrooms, increasing both risk aversion and intolerance for ambiguity among young learners.
And there are other psychological consequences: by encouraging students to fixate on grades instead of cultivating their own internal drives to learn and create, schools encourage them to develop a crippling reliance on external motivation. Students become passive receivers of information and instructions, rather than proactive seekers after knowledge and generators of questions. They come to associate “productivity” with completing impersonal tasks assigned by other people. Freedom, initiative, creativity, interest – these become opposites of intellectual achievement.
A literature review published by Stetson University psychologists back in April 2000 sums it up nicely: “Public evaluation of performance, frequent use of grades, and high levels of competition all reduce intrinsic motivation for learning…So do supervising homework too closely, imposing performance standards on children without their involvement, and threatening children with punishment for academic failure.”
Undoubtedly, there is a place for external motivation in education, but that place is not at the core of the enterprise. Internal motivation is a much stronger driver of individual fulfillment, as well as social progress. It is also a psychological resource that has to be built up over time. Failing to encourage its development in our youngest, most impressionable students – or worse, forcing teachers to suppress its manifestations to avoid disrupting classroom schedules – results in intellectual atrophy. When we train students to mask their boredom, we train them to ignore calls-to-action from the part of their mind with the most academic potential: the part that actually wants to learn.
Alright – time for a quick recap of my arguments so far. My main point is that students are expected to put tons of time and energy into a system that claims to benefit them, but they have no way to influence that system when it doesn’t. In fact, they experience serious consequences when it doesn’t, both psychological (in the form of status anxiety and shame) and material (in the form of diminished opportunities for success). Worse, they are discouraged from pointing out, and even from recognizing, when the system is doing them harm.
Now let’s return to my student’s comment from above: “If you give a child a strict schedule for his formative years and then abandon him to the world, he becomes prey to people offering structure and order.” As it turns out, the real issue here is not the strict schedule per se, but the student’s inability to determine nearly anything about it, including the structure, content, methods, or pacing of their educational experience. The systematic undermining of their sense of agency weakens our students’ internal motivations for learning, which leads to poor academic outcomes, and so on.
But what about graduates falling “prey to people offering structure and order”? Sounds a bit sinister. But what did my student mean by it? I suspect he was referring to how America’s “high-achieving” kids tend to become overworked professionals who sacrifice their rights to leisure and community life in exchange for status and financial stability. As my student pointed out, it’s no wonder we end up with so many adults either unwilling or unable to set boundaries at work, even at the highest levels of privilege. Our society makes it difficult to honor both sets of our human needs – the psychological and the material – and schools condition us from a young age to accept the institutional misappropriation of our agency as normal.
So why do America’s schools prioritize external motivation and undermine initiative to the detriment of students? There are many plausible answers to that question. Citing Dr. Melissa Roderick of UChicago’s Consortium on School Research, education writer Paul Tough takes a historical approach: “When the current high-school system was developed…the primary goal was to train students not for college but for the workplace, where at the time ‘critical thinking and problem-solving abilities were not highly valued.’…The traditional American high school was never intended to be a place where students would learn how to think deeply or develop internal motivation…”(How Children Succeed, 2012, pg. 161, Kindle Edition).
What we have, then, is a factory model of education, designed to prepare children for narrowly defined, deferential work in rigidly organized pre-internet businesses. However, as we move beyond the Industrial Revolution and into the Digital Age, the nature of American work is changing. More importantly, our inner lives are changing. We interact with information at a rate unthinkable to previous generations. We require different mental skills, and face different obstacles to learning, than people did in the twentieth century. (These obstacles include worsening rhetorical skills; declining focus; incompetence at assimilating, sorting, and applying the information we regularly access; and an inability to consciously direct our own use of the internet.)
American schooling, sad to say, has not kept pace with these changes. It’s not that our students aren’t learning; in fact, national IQ scores have been increasing steadily by about 3 points per decade since we started keeping track of them. But that’s probably because schools overvalue the type of intelligence measured on IQ tests. Every decade, more people attend school for longer, so over time our population has improved at thinking in one specific way. Standardized testing scores have risen, etc. – you know the drill. The problem is that other, equally important ways of thinking have been neglected.
IQ tests measure a type of reasoning called “convergent thinking.” Convergent thinking is a function of analytical intelligence; we use it to converge on the single best answer to a well-defined problem while eliminating incorrect alternatives. But there’s another, more open, type of reasoning. It’s called “divergent thinking.” A function of creative intelligence, divergent thinking generates multiple potential solutions to a problem that may be either ambiguous or well-defined. We use this kind of thinking to explore new possibilities by casting our mind in various directions.
Divergent thinking is measured by Torrance tests, which produce estimates of creative ability called “creative quotients” (CQs). These are about as useful – and as controversial – as the more traditional “intelligence quotients.” In fact, by some measures, CQs appear to be stronger predictors of future success than IQs (see paragraph 4 in this sentence’s first link), as they correlate more directly with specific kinds of lifetime achievement.
Since the dot com boom and the entrance of millennials into the workplace, creativity seems to have become an increasingly valued asset in the US economy (think buzzwords like “innovation,” “blue-sky research,” “disruption,” etc.). But for some reason, Americans’ divergent thinking scores have been declining since the time of the internet’s appearance. Between 1966 and 1990, our CQs improved at roughly the same rate as our IQs. Then, something shifted: average IQ continued to rise while CQ began to dip, with the greatest decline taking place between 2008 and 2017. Concerningly, this effect has been most pronounced in children between kindergarten and third grade.
There are plenty of strong explanations for what’s causing this downward trend in creativity, but really, no one knows why it’s happening. Multiple factors are clearly involved, though of the ones we’ve identified so far, none has been singled out as the most important – at least, not in any conclusive way. I’d like to make two arguments in light of this uncertainty:
that whether or not education is the most important factor in America’s creative decline, it is the one we can most easily influence; and
that education actually is the most important factor.
In the future, I hope to write more specifically about why I believe school is behind our “creativity crisis,” diving into the question of exactly how standardized learning can change the way an entire generation thinks. When, you ask, will I dive into this topic? I’m not sure. I make no promises.
Well, if you’ve gotten this far, thanks a million for reading! I hope this post has meant something to you, or changed your perspective in some positive way.
Sincerely,
Your tutor
