Ignition for Education

As I build towards a discussion of curriculum writing, I’ve examined what knowledge is, how it is structured, how we come by it, and the relationship between knowledge and opinion. I’ve also written about what skills are and how people acquire them. Before I can sensibly discuss the making of a curriculum, however, I also have to dissect creativity. What is it? How do people become good at it? Can it be taught, and, if so, how?

When people attribute “creativity” to a person or their actions, they mean one of two things:

1. The ability to make or the act of making something. This definition associates creativity with artistic and craft pursuits, and with design and engineering, above other kinds of human endeavor.
2. The ability to do or the act of doing something original or in an original way. This definition is neutral between different kinds of endeavor.

A couple of examples will illustrate the difference. If I bake a cake by following a recipe, I am being creative in the first sense but not in the second. However, if I come up with my own (good) recipe, I meet both definitions.

If an accountant comes up with a new (and effective) way of managing accounts, she meets the second definition. However, she does not meet the first one. She’s in the wrong field for that.

A small child drawing her family and home in the simple fashion of small children is creative by the first definition, but not the second. If she continues to study art, she will become more and more effective in meeting the first definition. She may also, at some point, begin to meet the second. That is to say, she may become an original artist as well as a technically skilled one.

The second definition, the one that hinges on originality, is far more important for our purpose as educators. Not that there aren’t big advantages to a student practicing arts and crafts on a level too elementary to admit of originality. She develops her neuromuscular skills, her grasp of detail, her understanding of the relationship between representation and reality, her vocal articulation, her musical ear. That really is just the beginning of the list of benefits, and we could compile an equally valid one for design and engineering pursuits.

However, we should think of learning experiences of this kind as valuable because they develop skills, not because they develop true creativity, which is a synonym for originality.

Can we teach students to be original, to be innovators, to be truly creative? To answer this, we must first ask how people come to be original. Perhaps the most important part of the answer is that they develop field-specific knowledge and skills first. A middle school student in a science class is unlikely to make an original contribution to science, but she can gain a deeper knowledge and understanding of science—both as a body of established knowledge and as methods for increasing that body. In time, depending on her opportunities and choices, she may reach the stage at which she can make an original contribution.

A high school student writing a persuasive speech or essay is unlikely to come up with an original argument. But she will develop skills that are relevant to doing so. She’ll learn to find information, evaluate the worth of a source, understand different perspectives, evaluate an argument and the evidence in favor of it, and so on. In time, she may become skilled enough to make an original argument concerning a subject of which she is knowledgeable.

Originality, then, is grounded in field-specific knowledge and skills¹. What makes one skilled and knowledgeable person more original than another? Is it some sort of innate ability or personality trait? Is it mostly about opportunity? Or personal choices and priorities? Does it have something to do with courage, and what does that mean?

In case you hadn’t guessed, I do not have the answers to these questions. But I do have some ideas about how educators should proceed. Firstly, we must prioritize the acquisition of knowledge and skills in each of the domains of our curriculum. “Making it engaging” or “making it approachable” are not a substitute for this. Students should not be producing posters, skits, or Tik-Tok style videos unless their teacher has planned this as a route to knowledge and skill acquisition.

Second, students should study the methods by which original contributions are made. In science class, they should practice the scientific method by doing labs on a regular basis, even though they, at their stage of development, will be rediscovering what science already knows.

Third, students should study the best original work. They may not be ready to write poetry in an original way, but they should study the work of those who have done so. And they should discuss, and write about, what makes that poetry both original and worthwhile.

Finally, as I have argued elsewhere, they should have opportunities, alongside the core curriculum, to develop interests that they chose themselves. Because it is there, with the great internal motivator that is enjoyment, that they are most likely to grow towards originality.

1. For an excellent discussion, see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Sean Pratt, et al. Creativity: the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. 1996. ↩︎