When I first started to learn about what passes for the ‘science of learning’ in some educational discourse, I was particularly confused by what I read about creativity.
Thanks for sharing this article. I work with children running community workshops and also home educate my children, and can confirm that children are endless innovative and creative. This partly comes from a willingness to make mistakes. Unfortunately, I often see this creativity and willingness to make mistakes disappear as children progress through mainstream education, which penalises mistakes and experimentation. What you describe as big-C creativity wouldn't be possible without little-c creativity. However, this type of little-c creative exploration is not only not prioritised, but activity discouraged throughout mainstream schooling. Both forms of creativity requires a willingness to make 'mistakes'. If you spend years filling children with all the knowledge, judging, grading and penalising them for getting it wrong, when they come out the other end and you deem them ready to be creative, they will have no idea how to think for themselves and fulfill that promised big-C creativity.
I agree, there is the kind of creativity that leads to learning and the kind of creativity that can be taught. As a big-C creativity teacher (a lecturer in creative writing), I find first years have to do a lot of unlearning. What is foundational to their knowledge about creativity is child’s play, and often the ways they read and write and use language in their down time. This is because big-C creativity is all about making a mess, small stakes experimenting, willingness to iterate and develop, to manipulate tools. Yes they need to read and learn about literature in all its forms (if only to resist what’s come before). But also they need to learn to see the literary potential in gossip, game play, and daily life. Most of my students won’t be published authors, but instead they’ll use little c creativity in their daily work. I’ve seen them use comics to talk about customer journeys, or their understanding of character to be more compassionate lawyers, or their knowledge of the ‘felt gaps’ in the unsaid of poetry or impressionist fiction to listen to silences in the clinical space. But some do go on to be novelists and poets, to win awards. Mostly with the students who come to me with a great intellectual appetite and an innate ability the most important part of my job is inputs - what to read, watch, listen to, play. And how to create a space of nonjudgmental curiosity about what emerges in the creative act. I feel like it’s the same people who’ve been taught big-c creativity before they’ve accomplished open ended play who might turn to chat-gpt to write their stories for them. The challenge is to teach and value process (including honouring and appreciating mistakes and mess) over product.
I just listened to a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Katharine Birbalsingh in which she says this exact thing - that creativity cannot happen without lots of facts and information and knowledge and wisdom being downloaded into children's brains first. The distinction between big-C/little-C creativity is helpful, and defends children against the idea that they're blank computers needing data input instead of whole persons from the start.
Two absolutely awful people, both of them very hard working, very successful in their fields, both highly intelligent by any number of standar societal measures, both very successful in their evangelism for hierarchy. What I think connects them is that they are both profoundly lacking in imagination. I think they killed it long ago in their ruthless quest to become a serious grown up. Hence I don't think they value it as a quality in others, either.
I also don't get any impression whatsoever that Birbalsingh actually likes children as children. She likes to mould them into success boxes, but I've never heard or read anything from her that delights in anything that children themselves offer, aside from their roles as students.
Also, she uncritically repeated as fact the absolutely ludicrous stuff about children being given litter boxes in schools because they identify as cats. Really toxic stuff from a woman with her profile. Many educators absolutely love her though because her school does achieve exceptional exam results.
This is interesting to think about. I am just starting a self-directed education path for my neurodivergent child and am blown away by the creativity of his learning. As someone for whom school performance was always very important, I have done my most intense learning in the last few years as my kids have required me to get back to that little-c creative energy to embrace that there is more than one way to do something and efficiency need not always be the goal.
Profound observation. "Play" in developmental psych, a.k.a. "creativity", is the catalyst to learning. It is how conjecture on the fabric of space-time came to be. "Creativity" is E=mc², or the ability to define and communicate knowledge gained from "creativity". At least as I look at it.
If we don't pass on to the next generation what we have learned and accumulated, each generation has to start from scratch. While rote memorization is not exactly what is needed, my former students in the HVAC industry would not be in the positions many of them are now as heads of companies etc. if they had not been able to take up where previous generations had left off. Creativity must be encouraged by encouraging students to build on what has already been established. I pushed my students to investigate and learn what was going on at the present in preparation for the future.
By the same standard I taught a 3 yr old to 2nd graders Church School class by using exploration and imagining what the individuals in the stories might have felt and thought. They were always very creative.
We have to pass it on to them, whether they want it or not? In what way does our future happiness as a species depend more on progressing our sum total of human knowledge, especially when compared to goals our literal survival depends on - namely living sustainably on our one, shared Earth? In terms of me as an individual, how does it make me happy if I fail to advance human knowledge, as most of us do? How does it boost my happiness or fulfillment I'm any way if some scientist somewhere discovers yet another form of plastic?
I do see your point, don't get me wrong. I'm not against technological progress or specialist knowledge. Just based on your post it feels like there are some underlying subtexts that I'd like to challenge. We weren't put here on this Earth in order to compete with our ancestors in order to out do them. There's nothing inherently good about adding more knowledge to the knowledge we already have, least of all if that knowledge is used on the service of systems that harm individuals, harm society and harm our living planet (weaponry, for example).
Through the education phases and system we've set up, we might be smothering creativity, as art prof Betty Edwards has also conjectured in her celebrated drawing books.
Thanks for sharing this article. I work with children running community workshops and also home educate my children, and can confirm that children are endless innovative and creative. This partly comes from a willingness to make mistakes. Unfortunately, I often see this creativity and willingness to make mistakes disappear as children progress through mainstream education, which penalises mistakes and experimentation. What you describe as big-C creativity wouldn't be possible without little-c creativity. However, this type of little-c creative exploration is not only not prioritised, but activity discouraged throughout mainstream schooling. Both forms of creativity requires a willingness to make 'mistakes'. If you spend years filling children with all the knowledge, judging, grading and penalising them for getting it wrong, when they come out the other end and you deem them ready to be creative, they will have no idea how to think for themselves and fulfill that promised big-C creativity.
I agree, there is the kind of creativity that leads to learning and the kind of creativity that can be taught. As a big-C creativity teacher (a lecturer in creative writing), I find first years have to do a lot of unlearning. What is foundational to their knowledge about creativity is child’s play, and often the ways they read and write and use language in their down time. This is because big-C creativity is all about making a mess, small stakes experimenting, willingness to iterate and develop, to manipulate tools. Yes they need to read and learn about literature in all its forms (if only to resist what’s come before). But also they need to learn to see the literary potential in gossip, game play, and daily life. Most of my students won’t be published authors, but instead they’ll use little c creativity in their daily work. I’ve seen them use comics to talk about customer journeys, or their understanding of character to be more compassionate lawyers, or their knowledge of the ‘felt gaps’ in the unsaid of poetry or impressionist fiction to listen to silences in the clinical space. But some do go on to be novelists and poets, to win awards. Mostly with the students who come to me with a great intellectual appetite and an innate ability the most important part of my job is inputs - what to read, watch, listen to, play. And how to create a space of nonjudgmental curiosity about what emerges in the creative act. I feel like it’s the same people who’ve been taught big-c creativity before they’ve accomplished open ended play who might turn to chat-gpt to write their stories for them. The challenge is to teach and value process (including honouring and appreciating mistakes and mess) over product.
I just listened to a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Katharine Birbalsingh in which she says this exact thing - that creativity cannot happen without lots of facts and information and knowledge and wisdom being downloaded into children's brains first. The distinction between big-C/little-C creativity is helpful, and defends children against the idea that they're blank computers needing data input instead of whole persons from the start.
Two absolutely awful people, both of them very hard working, very successful in their fields, both highly intelligent by any number of standar societal measures, both very successful in their evangelism for hierarchy. What I think connects them is that they are both profoundly lacking in imagination. I think they killed it long ago in their ruthless quest to become a serious grown up. Hence I don't think they value it as a quality in others, either.
I also don't get any impression whatsoever that Birbalsingh actually likes children as children. She likes to mould them into success boxes, but I've never heard or read anything from her that delights in anything that children themselves offer, aside from their roles as students.
Also, she uncritically repeated as fact the absolutely ludicrous stuff about children being given litter boxes in schools because they identify as cats. Really toxic stuff from a woman with her profile. Many educators absolutely love her though because her school does achieve exceptional exam results.
This is interesting to think about. I am just starting a self-directed education path for my neurodivergent child and am blown away by the creativity of his learning. As someone for whom school performance was always very important, I have done my most intense learning in the last few years as my kids have required me to get back to that little-c creative energy to embrace that there is more than one way to do something and efficiency need not always be the goal.
Profound observation. "Play" in developmental psych, a.k.a. "creativity", is the catalyst to learning. It is how conjecture on the fabric of space-time came to be. "Creativity" is E=mc², or the ability to define and communicate knowledge gained from "creativity". At least as I look at it.
If we don't pass on to the next generation what we have learned and accumulated, each generation has to start from scratch. While rote memorization is not exactly what is needed, my former students in the HVAC industry would not be in the positions many of them are now as heads of companies etc. if they had not been able to take up where previous generations had left off. Creativity must be encouraged by encouraging students to build on what has already been established. I pushed my students to investigate and learn what was going on at the present in preparation for the future.
By the same standard I taught a 3 yr old to 2nd graders Church School class by using exploration and imagining what the individuals in the stories might have felt and thought. They were always very creative.
We have to pass it on to them, whether they want it or not? In what way does our future happiness as a species depend more on progressing our sum total of human knowledge, especially when compared to goals our literal survival depends on - namely living sustainably on our one, shared Earth? In terms of me as an individual, how does it make me happy if I fail to advance human knowledge, as most of us do? How does it boost my happiness or fulfillment I'm any way if some scientist somewhere discovers yet another form of plastic?
I do see your point, don't get me wrong. I'm not against technological progress or specialist knowledge. Just based on your post it feels like there are some underlying subtexts that I'd like to challenge. We weren't put here on this Earth in order to compete with our ancestors in order to out do them. There's nothing inherently good about adding more knowledge to the knowledge we already have, least of all if that knowledge is used on the service of systems that harm individuals, harm society and harm our living planet (weaponry, for example).
Through the education phases and system we've set up, we might be smothering creativity, as art prof Betty Edwards has also conjectured in her celebrated drawing books.