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.

Where has all the Convergent Thinking gone?

This is a fascinating article that has me bubbling with exited. I will try really hard to contain myself and to only give you a few tantalizing tid-bits about the article without giving the whole story away.

The article “The Creative Crisis” talks about E. Paul Torrance a brilliant man who created the “Torrance Tasks of Creative Thinking.” Now this is where it starts to get exciting, in the 60’s Torrance administered his tests to a large group of children and then followed them through their lives. The results showed that children who had a higher level of creativity went on to become very successful individuals becoming inventors, authors, diplomats, and software developers (to name a few examples).  The article notes that people studying his results today notice that the CQ scores (creativity quotient) of America’s children are rapidly dropping while the rest of the world’s CQ scores are steadily increasing.

Behavioral scientists believe our school systems are slowly cutting creativity out of the classroom due to a priority standardized testing and rote memorization. The writers note that this is a problem because creativity is critical in our rapidly changing world and without it our society cannot compete.  One amazing part of the article that touch me greatly was about a middle school in Ohio where the teachers help their students excel by letting them be creative and use problem solving to master the required curriculum. It was beautiful to read about students excited to learn and explore new options. With a little work on the part of the school system the kids were mastering the required standardized curriculum while exploring their own creativity.

A quote from the article said: “Creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom.” I think that this could be stated differently as “Creativity should be included in the homeroom and the art room.” The article mentioned that creativity is the production of something original and useful and they note that to be more creative you need to practice it.  They talked about how teachers can encourage their students to use more convergent and divergent thinking in accomplishing all subjects and how creativity would always be needed not just in art and entertainment but also for solving the world’s great problems.

I feel that this subject would be wonderful for the class research topic because 1) it is really exciting when you start to get into it; 2) it is really important to the future of our country and the world; and 3) it is big enough to provide many different directions for research. Our class could study creativity in the educational system, creativity in the global economy or even the physiology and psychology of creativity because the article touched on all of these subjects. I think that this topic would challenge us and be a refreshing change from any subject or topic we have studied before. I could really see all of us getting something out of it and we all might even learn something about ourselves that we didn’t know before. We might find ourselves changed for the better when we are finished.  The article is long but I encourage you to read it all the way through.  You will be surprised how important creativity is to our future.

I have already found some supporting articles in case everyone says yes. But for this assignment I am only using the one.