Do schools and universities really kill creativity?
Misaligned incentives, approximate thinking, and conflicting goals, can explain why the education system is perceived to be a creativity killer.
Existing educational systems: misaligned incentives & creativity
First we have to remember what we mean by ‘educational system’. This is a complex concept, and such concepts are better dealt with by first understanding individual level components and incentives.
Classrooms typically include students of different intellectual levels and cognitive abilities. What schools/universities (educational institutions in general) try to achieve is push these students through the tube. Educators (teachers) try to finish a recipe of topics in a limited time, while ensuring a certain percentage passes some test or grade threshold.
For learners themselves, too frequently, going through school or university is perceived as a ‘means to an end’. The ‘end’ – unfortunately – too often being a shiny diploma, with a letter as close to ‘A’ as possible.
Structural, economic, social, cultural, and psychological factors shape the basis for the issue here. Only recently (tricky word) did we start emphasizing the importance of creativity in education. It is still not institutionalized enough.
How Schools and Universities Kill Creativity
Creativity is an ability to generate meaningful and unexpected solutions to problems. It is usually the outcome of the work of open-minded and experienced individuals who persevere and have higher levels of understanding, commitment, and motivation to improve certain fields.
Creative people, according to Csikszentmihalyi see the world differently, are individualistic and unique, and are open minded to new ideas.
Being too limited in thinking, too focused on repetition, or too driven by the need to ‘conform’ to social expectations, are all factors that lead to lower creativity. Repeat this over a long-enough period (12 years, or 4 years, for example), and non-creativity becomes a habit.
Do Schools and Universities cause this?
The Path to Losing Creativity in Schools and Universities
Schools and Universities are large institutions whose main function is sometimes considered to be ‘legitimacy’. Educational institutions give legitimacy to individuals in the society (in the form of a certificate or degree). Legitimacy implies adhering to certain ‘accepted norms’.
Schools and Universities have:
- Fixed / Rigid curricula and standardized testing
- Emphasis on specific skills that lead to success, with many people living in constant fear of failure and being (socially?) left behind
- Conventionally-oriented, over-burdened, and under-compensated educators
- Emphasis on certain (quantitative, easy to test, seemingly ‘practical’,..) topics while neglecting other (arts, humanities, hard to quantify,…) fields.
Imagine:
You are sitting in a class…
With someone who doesn’t understand you lecturing you on a topic you marginally (at best) care about…
With a specific amount of things you need to memorize (swallow?) before a (somehow predictable) test, that will determine the progress of your career (?) ..
Is this an environment conducive of creativity?
If you don’t practice enough, you won’t be creative. If you live in an iron cage for too long, you won’t tolerate stepping outside. Many classrooms are a distraction and an iron cage. Improving education is a wicked problem, and ‘approximate thinking‘ in this field tends to reduce education to the diploma, and whatever leads to it. Sometimes, the price is creativity.
Some educators are heroes. They try to bend the system to accommodate more creativity-related work. The problem is that you can’t always count on a hero to be there…
Possible Solutions to promote creativity in class
Many people argue that schools should teach more taxes and less humanities… But, ironically, one of the easiest ways to regulate a more creative approach would be to increase topic variety, adding focus on humanities, for those who care. I’d make the bold statement that no truly creative person shows no interest in art and beauty (challenge me on this). I understand this can be problematic: How easily we can evaluate the practical value of this inclusion.
Integration of work in education is crucial too. What can students actually create? Practical work with social value and economic outputs is great, but if not possible, can they even simulate that? Of course they need to solve problems in groups here.
The social structure of classes is important. What types of students are there in a class (interests-wise), and how are they sorted? What does the social group consider to be successful? (so social-prestige associated with education).
We can go back to one of the basic principles of creativity, which emphasizes the value of quantities and accumulation of work. How can we expose students to more challenges and experiences, so that they can discover their special areas of flow (again, check Csikszentmihalyi ), so that things remain challenging and interesting.
All this is too complex to do, and until system-wide change can be done… It remains up to the heroes!!!
A longer version of this discussion can be found in Audio : Here .
More :
- I’ve written about the problem of incentives in education before (Link), and about what education should aspire to be (Link).
- Fuzzy on the Dark Side is a book about approximate thinking, its creative potential, and its potential dangers in different areas including academia, work, and culture.
- The Atlas of Worldly Wisdom is a lifelong education course about practical intelligence, what to learn, and moving towards a state of creativeness and awareness – It assimilates the work of different thinkers on success, management, creativity, and habits.