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.
