I see lots of articles presenting ways to allow students to be more creative in classrooms, and I see a lot of arguments using these methods to counter the ‘old school’ notion that the sheer heavy lifting which IQ tests measure miss something important. I tend to agree, but then again, I still haven’t heard of a way to quantify or to assess how creative someone is…
I suspect that our school systems don’t either…
I have some links and quotes which present some pieces of this complicated picture. Bill Gates finds that creativity is a talent which schools can’t really repress (nor really add to), we can see that while creativity is held in high regard in the workplace in theory, a more practical assessment of how we do things as a society (maybe as humans) suggests that only like the results…
If You Are Creative, Are You Also Intelligent?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201104/if-you-are-creative-are-you-also-intelligent
Let’s consider another perspective, that of Bill Gates. In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman writes:
"When I asked Bill Gates about the supposed American educational advantage-an education that stresses creativity, not rote learning-he was utterly dismissive. In his view, those who think that the more rote learning systems of China and Japan can’t turn out innovators who can compete with Americans are sadly mistaken."
Said Gates: “I have never met the guy who doesn’t know how to multiply who created software…Who has the most creative video games in the world? Japan! I never met these ‘rote people’…Some of my best software developers are Japanese."
So it appears that Gates thinks that China and Japan have educational systems that are working quite well in producing creative innovators with high IQ’s, because as I quoted Gates saying in my article America’s Got Talent, "Software is an IQ business."
Talent tidbit: a small case study into why creativity can be so rare
http://blogs.nature.com/ericwubbo/2011/03/31/talent-tidbit-a-small-case-study-into-why-creativity-can-be-so-rare?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatNetNews
Why is creativity so rare in our best and brightest?
http://virginiahammon.com/2009/04/12/why-is-creativity-so-rare-in-our-best-and-brightest
Is it a problem of handing kids calculators and failing to teach them the math concepts behind their magic? Are we teaching shallow tool use, without building an understanding of how things work?
Our education system is in deep, fundamental, trouble, when a simple thinking skill is so rare that we must bring in fresh talent from overseas.
A NYT article today on H-1 Immigration Visas, talks about the talent of an Indian engineer that “used a rare combination of creativity, analysis, engineering and an understanding of graphics to find a solution that eluded” the rest of his team at Google.
But back in late 2006, maps produced by the service [Google] were taking too long to download and appear on phones. As customers waited for the maps to form they racked up huge bills from cell phone providers, which at the time were charging for every minute or every byte of data transferred.
Enter Mr. Mavinkurve, who floated an alternative: cut the number of colors in each map section to 20 or 40 from around 256. The user would not see the difference, but the load times would be reduced 20 percent.
Mr. Mavinkurve used a rare combination of creativity, analysis, engineering, and an understanding of graphics to find a solution that had eluded the rest of the team, said Mark Crady, a manager in the maps group.
Creativity and Leadership: why innovation is so rare
http://www.coreideas.com.au/:2011/03/creativity-and-leadership-why-innovation-is-rare
In a survey of 1,500 CEOs by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, creativity was viewed as the single most important attribute needed to lead a large corporation. So companies are aware that, at least hypothetically, they need leaders who are creative. But how do people react when faced with someone who actually expresses creative ideas?
Not well, it turns out. Jennifer Mueller, a professor at Wharton, Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell, and Dishan Kamdar of the Indian School of Business conducted a series of experiments to find out how creative people were viewed by their colleagues. Individuals who expressed creative ideas were viewed as having less leadership potential than individuals whose ideas were less creative. “It is not easy to select creative leaders,” says Mueller. “It takes more time and effort… than we might previously have thought.”
Finally, you may have noticed that the title was not whether we can use creativity, or how well we foster it, but why is it so rare… An answer to this question may be simpler than you would think… This natural talent is sometimes societally repressed, is rarely fostered (we don’t really know how…), and while it is held in esteem, on a personal level we have problems with truly creative types…
This question and most of the quotes subtly imply that the real question is whether we really want or have use for creativity at all…other than some of the results…
