I dunno if I agree with all of this, but the speaker is very good and it's worth listening to for the jokes alone.
Do schools kill creativity?
[Preserving this one for the comments, which is classic case of the kind of thoughtful, protracted discussion that Google Plus was good for.]
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity
Haven’t listened yet, but just based on the title I’ll say “no.” I’ve come 180 on the issue of creativity in society, and I no longer believe that it’s worthwhile to “tweak” educational institutions to make kids more creative. Kids need their intellect built and their ability to think strengthened. Way, way, way more important that the nebulous “creativity” factor. Creativity will emerge from a mind seeded with the right primordial elements: knowledge, cognitive skills, and curiosity. You cant just “make” creativity. It precipitates out of a nimble and robust mind.
ReplyDeleteChristopher Butler creativity without knowledge is nothing. Just take as example Silicon Valley the latest most creative idea: public transport. They are geniuses, but maybe they should just travel with backpack, somewhere in ordinary world?
ReplyDeleteWhether our abilities are innate, learned, or a combination of the two is something I was thinking about a lot about lately for my Plato series (http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iic.html), so I'll present some speculations.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of the first part of this depressing, excellent post : http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.cz/2013/05/depression-part-two.html
Pretty much all children possess an imaginative capacity that is somehow different from adults. Maybe it's quantitative, maybe it's qualitative, maybe it's both. Dunno which, but a difference there most certainly is.
The speaker in the OP believes, as probably most of us do, that this sort of childhood creativity and imagination is natural to all children, and it's hard to disagree with that. But he also holds that it's the school system itself that's largely responsible for ending this kind of thought* - a ruthless determination to turn everyone into university professors. While I wouldn't dispute that there's an enormous scope for improvement in all education systems, with people's innate abilities not being correctly fostered and exploited either by schooling or society, I'm not so sure that this loss of creativity is a result of any particular system. Sure, failure to maximally exploit the most creative/intelligent people might be, but I'll suggest that this ubiquitous mode of childhood thought might decline entirely naturally.
* Note that he doesn't suggest creativity is something you can or need to manufacture. He says people naturally have it, but it can be suppressed by the system.
Czech schoolteachers, I'm told, think that this happens because of puberty - it might a natural process of the physiological development of the brain. Another possibility is that it's an inevitable result of accumulation of knowledge. What looks like creativity in children might sometimes produce the same result as adult creativity, but it could be due to a different process. Children don't know as much as adults, and what's more, they generally know they don't know as much. It's not so much that they're freer to speculate as that they can't do anything but speculate, because they have no walls of constraining knowledge.
These walls might be built by the school system, but they could be an inevitable consequence of learning itself. It's much harder to speculate about anything when you aren't even aware of what assumptions you're making about it. And children can't possibly maintain this state of uncertainty forever - if they did, the world would be brimming with unbearable lunatics. Perhaps there's a combination with the effects of accumulating knowledge and the process of puberty on the brain, with the brain setting, for the sake of sanity, its formerly malleable conclusions into something much firmer at that stage.
So maybe adult creativity is something different. I don't run around the house with little model Enterprises going pew! pew! pew! any more, at least not very often, but I still spend a lot of time thinking about stuff, writing and Blending and data analysis and whatnot. One form of creative pleasure has been replaced by another : the loss of the childhood delight in playing with toys isn't so lamentable (puberty doesn't end the elaborate mental scenarios constructed during childhood play, it just replaces them with stuff about sex).
The difference is that now I'm (somewhat) able to discern what assumptions I'm making and arbitrarily discard them without abandoning my actual beliefs. I had tremendous fun lately writing a long-winded rant about the underlying assumptions of science (
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2018/05/the-assumption.html). I didn't end up as a quivering wreck, unable to discern black from white, because I didn't actually stop believing anything - I just speculated about what the world would be like if I was wrong. Kids don't do that, because they don't have fixed assumptions or beliefs.
ReplyDeleteNow, if the loss of childhood creativity is a biological inevitability, then educational reform won't help. But it it's only partly due to biology, with mental energies and abilities being directed elsewhere rather than suppressed, then reform would make sense. I'll suggest that a greater emphasis on uncertainty would be helpful from a much younger age - not so much during early childhood because kids are uncertain anyway - but during adolescence, trying to preserve that sense of delight in varying, provisional conclusions. Perhaps creativity doesn't arise as a result of critical thinking, nor critical thinking arise from creativity, but both derive from a sense of curiosity. Curiosity doesn't begrudge strongly-held beliefs, but it does permit change. Does curiosity die during adolescence ? I don't think so, but the education system does seem pretty geared towards enforcing fixed conclusions - thus encouraging displeasure, rather than wonderment, when they're exposed as flawed.
Rant over, you may return to your homes and places of businesses.
ReplyDeleteI think the questions I have about this guy’s assumptions are 1) why is he assuming that what he’s describing is a “suppression” of something? (It seems safer and more reasonable to say its just a maturing) And 2) what are we really talking about when we talk about creativity?
Its possible that there’s a little bit of a romantic bias of “the beautiful imagination of childhood” that’s giving his ideas a sense that the changes in creativity through adolescence and into adulthood must be some kind of loss or suppression. It makes sense that an adult’s imagination is going to be more sophisticated in some ways.
There’s a lot of variables that we’d need to puzzle out to even understand if we’re suppressing innate creativity. I mean, is it even possible to construct any models on how the imagination of children in the last 30 years or so compares to the last hundred years? That would be some neat information. I’ll bet we are screwy-er, now, but maybe not because of schools suppressing imagination.
Funny that you’d mention curiosity, though. Curiosity, from what I gather from meagre reading on cognitive development, is a big one. If I remember reading correctly (please fact check me), curiosity as a personality trait ranks very high as a predictor of success.
Just sitting here thinking now, I wonder if you could measure childhood imagination, creativity, and curiosity against adults on psychedelic drugs. I bet if you could define some metrics and compare the results of psychedelic drug use in an adult to the imaginative/creative capacity of an adolescent you’d see some overlap. Childhood is such an intense, compressed period of “full blast” learning and adapting (languages, figuring out how to deal with people, etc), you could describe it as a psychedelic experience. A kid’s brain is constantly getting knocked around and stretched out of whack…makes sense that their imagination would need to be in high gear so their mind can model all the weird new experiences as quickly and with as much flexibility as possible. The older we get, the more we’ve developed cognitive habits to keep the familiar stuff on autopilot…and the more stuff is familiar so the less ‘psychedelic flexibility’ is needed day to day. That also describes how people with higher curiosity seem to be more engaged when it comes to new experiences. They’re tripping on life. :D Seriously though….interesting idea.
It's a common assumption that plays well with a (TED) crowd : all kids are special, work hard, get the right education, and you can do anything (except maybe grow antlers). All kids are amazing, we're just preventing them from achieving their full potential. They're all natural born scientists, engineers and artists. It's undeniably very inspirational stuff... and lets the speaker assume that they, too, could have become another Einstein if they'd be taught right. It shifts the blame to somebody else.
ReplyDeleteAlso, more charitably, this isn't entirely devoid of merit. Kids do all start off with (at least apparently) much more active imaginations than adults.
But it's much more rare to see someone advocating the opposite possibility : that kids are little shits and becoming a mid-level manager should be the limit of their ambition, or that without the current education system they'd live out their lives scraping the dung off the walls of mud huts. That someone isn't born as an artist or a scientist but only becomes so. No-one wants to say, "I'm a mid-level accountant, but with a better education I could perhaps have become a slightly better mid-level accountant".
Reality will be somewhere in between these two extremes, though perhaps more toward one than the other, and there will be a few exceptional individuals that buck the main trends. Surely the way people develop is both because of the system they inhabit as well as their own personal natures.
The way I see it, behaviour is determined by beliefs and abilities. You can make anyone believe pretty nearly anything, given the right techniques - and this is far easier with children. You can also simply control behaviour directly to a degree (via laws, for instance). And in some sense abilities too can be altered and depend on nurture rather than nature : even Mozart started out pooping his pants instead of as a virtuoso pianist. But these kinds of superficial skills are dependent on even more fundamental abilities : manual dexterity, memory, hand-eye coordination, pattern recognition, etc. Some of these can definitely be altered, and some circumvented with clever techniques, but others I'm far less sure about : they may be entirely down to nature.
Example : I am absolutely certain that no amount of practise could ever make me a decent musician. I don't have the knack for reading music and rapidly connecting that information to what I'm supposed to do with my hands - my brain simply doesn't do that. Nor could I ever become any good at team sports, I'm simply incapable of understanding the group dynamic that quickly. Now, maybe it would be possible to teach me to use some different mental tricks to accomplish the tasks that everyone else does by different methods, but the point is that some people are better at doing these mental gymnastics than others.
The question then becomes : is curiosity a learnable skill, or is it one of those deeper abilities that are largely dictated by nature ? Maybe the maturation process will proceed in the same way regardless of how we educate people - some ending up curious, others not. Children are all curious perhaps in part because with so little knowledge they can't possibly be anything else, whereas with adults, it's different. They're fighting their own knowledge to entertain different ideas, and the brain does not like fighting itself. Is there a mental trick that some people learn to do this without causing neurological problems ? Or is is just due to how their brain is made ?
I think a study comparing childish creativity versus adults on drugs would be really interesting. It sounds at least plausible to me that in the latter case, the walls of internal knowledge are temporarily broken down so that the adult is once again thinking like a child. Don't have any experience around drug users, but certainly drunk people are somewhat child-like.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've come across anything about curiosity being a prediction of success but I've heard it's a better indicator of rational judgement than pure intelligence. See :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/Ft1ay9wpxTA
... and particularly the Yale link at the end, but I though the rest was worth referencing here too. :)
Lastly, I'd say that none of the different attributes : critical thinking, creativity, curiosity, intelligence, etc. are by themselves magic bullets for making people more productive, happier, or wiser. I can think of quite a few highly intelligence scientists who are sometimes very pleasant but also sometimes just bullies. Which is why I get quite irked when people say we should this or that one special thing more, or in a better way, to improve children. First, humans are so complex that they can be incredibly good at critical thinking in some areas and lousy in others. Second, even the wisest, most rational, benevolent individuals are products not just of their own attributes, but also the systems they inhabit throughout their entire life, not just education at any one stage.
Right, that's my rant over for the day, back to deconvolving HI data... :)
I have been in the room with him twice. If I'm forced to do it again, I'll go up and slap him till he quits talking. Not entertaining. Funny, but ultimately not helpful. Why people keep feeding him money is a mystery.
ReplyDelete