Creativity Needs Cultivating

08/08/2019

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'
Toni Morrison

“It sounds like the complaint of a jaded adult:” writes Rachael Rettner in an article on the LiveScience.com website. “Kids these days are narrow-minded and just not as creative as they used to be. But researchers say they are finding exactly that. In a 2010 study of about 300,000 creativity tests going back to the 1970s, Kyung Hee Kim, a creativity researcher at the College of William and Mary, found creativity has decreased among American children in recent years. Since 1990, children have become less able to produce unique and unusual ideas. They are also less humorous, less imaginative and less able to elaborate on ideas, Kim said.

‘It’s not that creativity can necessarily disappear,’ said Ron Beghetto, an education psychologist at the University of Oregon, 'But it can be suppressed in particular contexts.' The current focus on testing in schools, and the idea that there is only one right answer to a question, may be hampering development of creativity among kids, Beghetto said…Experts agree changes can be made in the classroom to cultivate creativity.”

The imaginative book, Cup, deals well with the subject of cultivating children’s creativity as two educators embarked on a long exploration, with children, about the multitudes of innovative projects that could be built around simple plastic cups. “The story of the children, the families, and the cups embodies the conviction that education both requires and nurtures imagination, determination, vision, humility, experimentation, relationships, and listening,” write Ann Pelo and Margie Carter in the foreword to the book.

Source: “Are Today’s Youth Less Creative and Imaginative?” by Rachael Rettner, LiveScience.com, August 12, 2011

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