<p>I think that creativity is inate human behavior that as others have pointed out, often gets quashed whether by parents or school or other factors. For example, how many times do people yell at kids for daydreaming, arguing they should be ‘doing something useful’? How many times do you see a kid drawing, and a parent or adult telling them “no, no sweetheart, it should be like this”. Creativity gets quashed the minute someone insists there is only 1 right way to do things or where trying (and maybe failing) is a bad thing. Kids are told not to take classes that interest them but might be difficult…basically, we are coming to a point where everything is contained in neat little boxes, and everyone is afraid to allow a kid to try something and fall flat on their tail, because ‘a failure will ruin you’. </p>
<p>Want proof of that? In the corporate world, very, very little new every gets created, the finance guys and the rest that run management see anything not directly related to ‘product’ as a waste of time (not all companies, creative, innovative companies exist, like 3M, Bose and some others, where people are encouraged to dream and are given time to do it…but most of corporate America? Run by unimaginative bean counters whose only creativity seems to be in cooking the books).</p>
<p>I don’t think creativity can be taught, but I am pretty certain it can be caught. What do I mean? There is a commonly held truth that the attitude kids have is caught, not taught, and I think it is the same with creativity. If a kid has a parent who seems to do everything in the lines, seems to think the rules are rules, who insists the kids always toe the line, do you think that kid is going to learn what it means to be creative, at least easily? If a kid sees a parent who always does things one way, and if the kid suggests trying something a different way and the parent’s first reaction is ‘that will never work, forget it’, what does that show the kid? Richard Feynman, one of the most creative people this earth ever produced, writes a lot about his growing up (to be taken with a grain of salt, Feynman was also a master story creator) and he talks about how his parents in their own lives showed him it was okay to do things differently and so forth.</p>
<p>One of the more interesting things I have seen out there was something called Fermimath, the school my son went to participated in it. It was really cool, because the kids had to not only think, but extrapolate, an answer to the problem, rather then grinding through standard problems. For example, one year’s question was if every ship on every ocean was drydocked, how much would the world’s ocean levels fall? It required a methodology to extrapolate how many ships there are in the world, what their average displacement is, and then figure out how much the total displacement would affect the world’s oceans…there obviously is no right answer. Another year, they had students, from a picture, try and calculate the cubic volume of the olympic torch at the Torino winter olympics…and the teams had to present their assumptions, their logic, models they used, and so forth as part of the process. </p>
<p>My theory as a parent? If the kid wants to try something, let them, in a way they want to do it (assuming it is safe for life, limb, pets, houseplants, etc…:), let them work out their own path and only help them when asked, or by suggesting things but not telling them ‘do this’. I think a big part of it is realizing that often valuable things are not so apparently valuable, I can still remember a child where the kid asked if they could try a musical instrument, the parent said “no, because you will never be good at it”…first of all, how did she know that? And secondly, maybe, just maybe, exploring the instrument and maybe not being good at it still could have benefits…A classic case of this something that came out of an interview. The interviewer was talking to the father of Leonard Bernstein (composer/conductor/creator of the music for West Side story, music educator/pianist) and he asked the father why he refused to support his son’s efforts to study music. His response is telling “Who knew he would become Leonard Bernstein”…exactly, though the irony of the words were probably lost on the parent, that that is the reason TO support creativity, that you never know…</p>