Creativity Useful or Not?

Creativity is a beautiful concept. But what does it really mean? When I think of creativity vivid images come to mind of artist, sculptors, pretty colors, little children building a fort out of pillows and blankets, children running wild in some made up world all their own. But creativity is also defined as the production of something original and useful. Useful? Original yes but useful? I had never thought of the scribbling I did with my crayons as a child as ever being very useful. But the article “The Creative Crisis” talks about how creativity can be logical, deliberate and useful. In fact the article makes the point that America must explore ways to encourage creativity in education in order to survive in the future.




Sadly the reaction of most Americans these days is quite the opposite. We try to put creativity (this concept that is so limitless and so boundless) in a box labeled “Children only.” I will even go as far to say that we stereotype creativity as being chaotic and without logic. Our educational systems and life in general asks us to putting that box aside as we grow up and moved on to more “logical and productive” pursuits. The perception is that creativity is a nice thing to have if you are an artist but not necessary for those in other areas like engineering and business.



To define creativity as the production of something original and useful is hard for some people to wrap their heads around. Even putting creativity and useful in the same sentence is far stretch for most. But creativity should not be limited to only children or the art room because it is useful at any stage of life or in any classroom for any subject.



If you look around you will see creativity and logic going hand and hand. Just look at cathedrals around the world! Their beauty and complexity just screams creativity but that creativity is joined with the disciple of engineering. Look at video games or computer animated movies, they wouldn’t exist with out the logical mathematics and algorithms to give them form or the creative thought that inspired their creators. In addition to the article I mentioned earlier “The Creativity Crisis” I have also explored “Charting Creativity” an article from the New York Times about how scientists are studying the phenomenon of creativity and trying to determine how we can train people to engage the creativity centers of their brains.



Creativity can be disciplined and useful but people have to practice to achieve this level of logical creativity. I really feel that this could be an amazing subject for class research. My particular interest is how we humans could learn to use creativity deliberately and not just sporadically, as we imagine it now, to solve major problems in our world and better the lives of our fellow men. But as narrow as my interest is creativity itself is so broad that each member of the class could find their own focus. For instance some students might like to explore how creativity operates in politics and government or how it is used in sports business or in medical research. Someone might choose to explore how we teach creativity in the classroom or how families can train their children to use creativity in daily life. Finally someone else could easily study how creativity is critical to our future as a country in an increasingly competitive world.

I think if our class takes the time to read “The Creativity Crisis” in Newsweek or a follow on article like “Charting Creativity” in The New York Times or “Thinking Outside The Box” from Taiwan Today they will see how intriguing, diverse and useful this subject could be.