Ignition for Education

Educators cherish the goal of helping students to be creative, but what that means can be hard to pin down. So many activities can be classed as creative, and, sometimes, acts that look creative are in fact exercises in rote repetition. In The Cult of Creativity, Samuel W. Franklin, a cultural historian, shows that the term was barely used until the late-1940’s/1950’s. Then the word took off, and, with it, the idea of creativity as a single human trait that accounts for all invention, originality, or even thinking outside the box, and that is at the service of everyone.

Franklin shows how “creativity” came from and flourished in the worlds of advertising and business. It promised to be the antidote to ailments that the age saw in itself—the well-paid but soulless jobs, the increasingly comfortable but increasingly conformist standard of living. Creativity promised to make Americans individual and innovative, to teach them to problem solve their way to technological advancement, business success, economic growth, and victory in the Cold War. But its hold on American culture outlasted the Soviet nemesis.

Franklin concludes that the concept of creativity is “unstable” (205), partly because it does not describe a unitary phenomenon. In fact, “creativity in one area depends on one set of traits or behaviors, and on another more or less distinct set in the next” (159).

No doubt it does, but, when Franklin waxes self-depreciating, saying that he is still “sort of attached” to a unitary concept of creativity, he writes about, “that feeling of making something, of having an idea and then making it happen, of seeing something take shape in your hands” (206). That’s not a feeling; that’s an excellent unitary definition of creativity: ideation plus realization through making (with the proviso that not everything made is tangible).

For sure, there are borderline cases in which one might debate whether someone has truly been creative. And the creativity of a painter may well work differently, including on a neurological level, to the creativity of an engineer. But creativity is still a definable and a valid concept. The fact that it was birthed by the self-perceived needs of “Cold War capitalism” (205) does not invalidate it, because that’s how language grows. People and communities, including business, political, or scholarly communities, generate new words because they need them to express things they haven’t expressed before, because they haven’t needed to before, because the world was different before.

Creativity has always existed, even if the term is new, and it’s been responsible for every way in which the human species has moved forward and enriched itself. If Cold War capitalism gave us its name, we can be grateful.