Is Creativity Endangered By Cecilia Conrad

In this video Ken Robinson touches on three main points. His first point he was talking about the education system and one's creativity. He gave two anecdotes about kids that showed that they are willing to take a chance and be creative. If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. He believes that the education system institutionalizes people, and that people lose the creativity they had.

Are we underestimating the importance of creativity? Many times children are not encouraged at home to be creative, either because their parents restrict their ideas, fill their decisions with pessimism, or simply do not pay attention to this matter. However, creativity is a skill that makes the human being flexible and resourceful as well as helping them see problems differently and identify solutions more easily. Many times education will directly contradict creativity. It destroys the innovation of ideas, and stifles the imagination, while claiming it is “teaching.” Sometimes entering a classroom becomes the closest thing to entering a time machine since our teaching methods differ very little from those of ancient Rome over 2000 years ago. In Ted Talk “How Schools Kills Creativity” by Ken Robinson and the article “Let Teenagers Try Adulthood” by Leon Botstein, two different opinions about the current educational system are presented. While Robinson believes that the schooling system should work to promote creativity, Botstein says that the concept of a high and middle school is useless and should be abolished. However they both agree on reform. As a parent, I have always been concerned about my daughters’ education, and have always believed, like Robinson and Botstein, that our educational system needs a change.

At that age and time, students do not understand what it means to be innovative and creative. In the novel, Brave New World, a director raises and conditions human embryos to not be creative and to only follow the rules. In real life, students need a figure of authority, or a teacher, to guide them in certain directions and the only place where they can be taught how to use creativity to their favor is at school. In Brave New World, their figure of authority guided them into the direction of not being creative and as a result millions of humans were boring and felt no desire or need to be different. One of the characters in Brave New World explains that without art, science, and religion, human life is not worth living. If students take the class in creativity they learn that from those three components grows gift of creativity. Without the desire to be different and creative, which would be taught in the class, society would unfortunately decline to a point where trivial culture becomes the most important thing and civilization would result in an abundance of passivity and

Creativity drives today’s world, with new technology arriving daily and science conducting itself further. We need creative and imaginative people in today’s atmosphere to bring the world to the next step forward. “Standardized college admissions tests assess only analytical skills, as well as the knowledge base on which they act, and completely ignore creative and practical skills (Sternberg 7)”. Without creative people in this world, where do you think we would be? Not very far. We need practical skills to go throughout everyday life. The standardized tests don’t test for that knowledge base, they test how much short term memory a

Creativity or the lack of encouraging creativity can be seen declining as you get lower in the class level in Anyons research. She states “Work tasks do not usually request creativity” and “Creativity is not often requested in social studies and Science projects”. In an article entitled “The Impact of Creativity on the Brain” by Judy Willis M.D; M.E.D posted on the website Radtech.com. “Neuroscience and cognitive science research are increasingly providing information that correlates creativity with intelligence; academic, social, and emotional success; and the development of skill sets and the highest information processing (Executive functions)”. This basically states that if creativity is encouraged then the upper intelligence functions of students are developed which includes social and emotional success. Which shows that if you stifle creativity you basically limit the

In the novel "What the Best College Students Do" by Ken Bain he states that learning is not only discovering new abilities, it is putting a creative twist into it (p. 4). He places Paul Baker (a professor that taught Integration of Abilities) in this story because he emphasizes what Bain is trying to convey (pp. 2-3). Baker states that "This is a class in discovering your own creative ability and all you will have to help you with your discovery is yourself and getting acquainted with the way you work" (p. 4). Everybody has different viewpoints because everyone has different backgrounds, therefore, creativity is not only a want it is a necessity. To deeply learn something, students needs to have a

Kaufman and Beghetto (2014) further suggest that creativity can be fostered in children to a certain extent by providing them with opportunities to express their own unique ideas.

The beauty of creativity is that it is abstract, yet ubiquitous: in art, music or how one decides to compose an essay. However, creativity has recently been declining among the human population. According to an article, named, “The Creativity Crisis,” by Newsweek.com in July 2010, authors, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, state, “the Torrance Test … indicates that the public’s “creativity quotient” has steadily crept downward since 1990” (Prompt 1). Bronson and Merryman report that the test, which evaluates one’s creativity, had been dispensed to myriads of people across the globe, and have concluded that creativity has been slowly diminishing. Kyung Hee Kim, professor at the College of William and Mary, also comments that this is most prevalent and grave among students from kindergarten through sixth grade (Prompt 1). Consequently, society, or in this case, the world fears that current students and future generations will not be nourished with the creativity required to thrive as individuals, affecting the world as a whole. Ultimately, this poses the question whether a creative thinking class, which solely focuses on the education of creativity, should be taught in the school. This school should impose a creative thinking class, due to the fact creativity is a vital element for the future and is the solution to the creative crisis.

S. I. Hayakawa wrote and published an article named "What lt Means to Be Creative". This article challenged how a creative person could be defined and identified. In Hayakawa’s essay he presents several points of view an individual could be characterized as being creative. His writing forces you to contemplate on how a person’s aptitudes are categorized. Hayakawa tests your ability to be opened minded and makes you visualize how a person could be described as a creative individual but may discredited themselves due to society’s standard of this word. After reading his writing, I believe I can summarize his analogy.

In this age of high-stakes standardized testing the idea of creativity in the classroom has become less and less popular. Susan W. Cress and Daniel T. Holm present a compelling case study for keeping creativity in the classroom in “Creative Endeavors: Inspiring Creativity in a First Grade Classroom” published online April 1, 2015 in the Early Childhood Education Journal.

To begin, people are not as ambitious in their thought as they have been in years past. Hanna Rosin claims that “There are measures, for example, of creativity which have gone down in this generation, and creativity...is being able to think in ways that are different…[being able] to be an independent thinker, essentially.” Rosin presents this as a result of extra protective measures taken by parents and

For the entirety of the fall semester, I took on a project to create a three-page layout for a fictional campaign in National Geographic magazine about endangered species. The goal was to create different content for my portfolio, challenging my skills in photography and photo-manipulation. I transformed people into animals and used gel lighting and Photoshop to create my artwork (see Appendix A figure 1 & 2). At the end of the semester, I reviewed my completed pieces and two theorists best fit my creative process, Julie Burstein, and Teresa Amabile. Julie Burstein discusses the best way to foster creativity is by ‘letting go’ she outlines this in four lessons (Campbell and Dubois, “Artist Best practices” 25). These lessons include experiences, challenges, limitations and loss (Campbell and Dubois, “Artist Best practices” 25). While Teresa Amabile discusses how the theory of creativity is fostered through her componential model of creativity (Campbell and Dubois, “On theories of” 14). These include domain-relevant skills, creative thinking skills and motivation (Campbell and Dubois, “On theories of” 14). Both of these theorists go hand in hand providing me with the framework for my best work. This essay will discuss how Amabile’s theory for intrinsic motivation and Burstein’s lesson of experience and loss, align in my creative process to be conducive to my work.

In Baker’s article "The Consequences of Conforming In Today’s Society”, it discusses how conformity can cause a loss of self value. Baker includes that being a follower is simple, it is easy to complain and be fearful, than to be an optimist and courageous. The second internal consequence Baker adds is the loss of creativity. When people decide to conform, they lose creativity. Conforming to society doesn’t allow you that creative freedom, to even explore and develop your creative talents.

Creativity is equally as important as literacy, and we need to start treating it that way in schools around the world. According to Ken Robinson’s claim in his, “How Schools Kill Creativity” speech, he believes this to be exceptionally true. All children are creative and talented, however, we have grown up in a world where we believe that it’s wrong to exemplify our creativity. Robinson uses both, pathos, and ethos to help make his claim. He arises emotion in you; he causes you to really think, to trust him, and to question ultimately, how things are being done in the educational system. We as a world have become so consumed with the idea of putting each child into a category of what they’re going to be successful in, regardless of their creativity or passions. You’re either good at math, science, or English; everything is based on your academic ability. What happens then to the people who aren’t academically smart, but are more creative? They are then made to feel that what they have to offer the world simply isn’t good enough, but the truth is, it is good enough. Over time however, we are taught out of our creativity. Schools around the world kill creativity by instilling a sense of fear in the child that what they are doing, and how they feel is wrong, this ultimately discourages them, and they fall victim to the industrialized educational system that we have present day. Robinson believes now more than

Creativity is the ability to produce work that is original yet appropriate-something that others have not thought of but that is useful in some way (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007; Sternberg, 2003b). The significance of creativity for children’s development is very high. Creativity helps children develop the overall areas of development; physical, social, emotional, language and cognitive. A child learns to innovate as well as invent while doing creative activities. Through creative practices child finds multiple methods of looking at various situations, assessing these situations and finding new solutions. Children often desire to be able to express themselves without any