Re: [xmca] schools kill creativity?

[Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>]

So now I've watched Ken Robinson talk about education and creativity.  
A lot of what he said was not particularly new to me, but it did raise  
some interesting questions.

I think he was being a tad romanticist in saying that children are  
naturally creative. Creativity, I believe, is, like all else that is  
socially valued, a learned capacity. I doubt that all other cultures  
share our notion of creativity, though a lot of communities like  
something new and useful. (Not all.) I think we ought to ask how we do  
learn to be creative, or say, to develop our creativity. What are the  
tools and strategies? what are the dispositions and feelings, that  
support it?

Listening in those terms to Robinson, I noted three points. That we  
need a disposition that is tolerant of error or mistakes, we need to  
feel that it's not so terrible if we turn out to be wrong. We need to  
be willing to take some risks and try some strange things, and perhaps  
appear to be a bit strange to others.

I think that this point links to something very fundamental about  
social, indeed eco-social, systems: for long-term survival they (we)  
need some reserve plasticity, something that works against our  
becoming too perfectly adapted to the now, too perfectly self- 
regulating. We need some spanners (as the British say) built into the  
works and occasionally banging about and messing things up.  
Unpredictably. If you're a thorough Darwinian, you see this as random  
variation some of which gets selected for usefulness under unusual  
circumstances. I'm not that thorough a Darwinian, though that is part  
of the story. I believe that long-evolved complex eco-social systems  
have improved on this hit-and-miss approach and incorporate within  
themselves subsystems that are especially good at relevant,  
anticipatory, innovation. Creative people, or perhaps better, eco- 
social subsystems including people in ways that make them look  
creative when regarding in isolation, are important components.

A second point was about inter-disciplinarity. A topic that somehow  
didn't catch on a little while back here. Taken broadly, in the  
context of creativity, I think this means bringing together things  
that previously had not useful connections. Things a bit oblique to  
one another, or skew as 3D geometry has the metaphor. Maybe it  
includes dialectic, rubbing opposites until a spark produces something  
new. And serendipity: accidentally coming upon a way of connecting  
something else into the mix. I am guessing that unconscious or not-yet- 
verbalizable feelings-as-proto-meanings may guide us toward such  
fruitful accidents (and toward useless ones, too).

Finally, Robinson had a story about a dancer, and people who "need to  
move to think". The creativity literature (mainly anecdotal or  
interview based) abounds with stories of bodily feelings that were  
precursors to intellectual ideas. I know that most of my best  
thinking, maybe all of it, was accompanied by a compulsion to stand up  
and start walking or pacing the room. That's perhaps non-specific or  
symptomatic. Other cases are more particular. Robinson's point was  
that there are many modes of thinking/feeling (ala Gardner, it  
seemed), but I would say that ideas which are too new to already have  
a discourse with which to speak them, still need to have some semiotic  
medium of being (no Platonic Ideas for me, sorry!), and that medium is  
often bodily movements, tensions, and perhaps rhythms, melodies,  
visual images without nameable forms, etc.

What would education look like if we used such principles to help  
equip people to do differently? And how dangerous would it be?

JAY.

Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke





On Oct 1, 2009, at 5:30 PM, mike cole wrote:

> Perhaps of some interest.
> mike
>
> http://www.ted.com/talks/ 
> ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

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