As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity | Psychology Today - Holt Think: Ed, Creativity, Tech, Administration

As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity | Psychology Today

Well it isn’t like we haven’t seen this coming for some time. This article tells us what the research is saying about the lack of creativity with our students. Perhaps more than anything you’ll read today this is an important thing that you need to be aware of: the more freedom we take away from students the less creative they become. The less creative they become, the less competitive the country becomes economically. so don’t be surprised in a few years when we have a whole bunch of people I can take standardized test, can fill-in multiple-choice answer sheets, but can’t figure out how to design a car, an airplane, or figure out the next big thing. We really have no one to blame but ourselves.—TBH

From the article:

If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity. “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country. We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity. In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset. In a recent IBM poll, 1,500 CEOs acknowledged this when they identified creativity as the best predictor of future success.[1]

and…

…Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today. In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world. But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes. We are also, as I documented in a previous essay, increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential….