For a course in creativity that I am taking, I was able to read the classic article by JP Guilford that he presented to the American Psychological Association in 1950. In it he laments the paucity of research into creativity (which hasn’t changed too much), and outlines areas for future research. He also has some interesting statements about what he thinks the future of our schools and society will be like, and I think he nailed it on the head! He predicted in many ways the problems or opportunities that we are facing in our current society and educational systems. This made me laugh, and then despair to think that we’ve known about these things for 50 years and still haven’t made the adequate changes in our research and practice.
For example, I enjoyed this quote especially, from page 448 when Guilford worries about the consequences of "thinking machines" (computers) which would bring on a new "industrial revolution." About this, Guilford said,
"There are several implications in these possibilities that bear upon the importance of creative thinking. In the first place, it would be necessary to develop an economic order in which sufficient employment and wage earning would still be available. This would require creative thinking of an unusual order and speed. In the second place, eventually about the only economic value of brains left would be in the creative thinking of which they are capable" (p. 448).
This is a significantly profound statement to have come in 1950! Almost 60 years later, it seems we are only beginning to understand what it means to have ubiquitous computing in our society. As Guilford predicted, it has begun to establish a new economic order. Yes, jobs are still available, but as he described, the jobs have moved from areas of production to areas of creation. In fact, our age is being called the Information Age to distinguish it from the previous Industrial Age. In the Information Age, it is no longer critical to be a master of information and to "know" a lot of things because the information is freely available on the Internet. For example, real estate brokers and car salesmen used to make their profits from knowing more about the real value of cars and homes than consumers. But now, information on the true cost of cars and homes is easy to find on the Web.
Because of this trend, what is becoming valued in today’s society is often creativity and problem solving, or the creation of physical or conceptual artifacts that bear economic value. This modern emphasis on creativity—evidenced by a 68.3% increase in the level of patent applications from 1996-2001—has led our emerging society to be called the "creative economy" (Banahan, 2004). In fact, Ogunleye, 2006, explained that creative skills, according to the Construction Industry Training Board, are key requisite skills in the workplace and are critical to job and business success.
I think Guilford was exactly right. In some professions–not all of them yet–the economic value of the employees is in the creativity they have, because information and even skills are cheap and easy to find. If this is true, and I believe it is, it is a terrible misjustice that our schools still emphasize rote learning of information and practice of skills while so little time is spent learning how to be creative.
Another quote from Guilford’s 1950 article showed his keen foresight into future problems. On page 447, he wrote about the difficulty of objective, multiple-choice testing. He is not against this kind of testing in its rightful place, but he worries that it moves researchers and leaders away from some kinds of learning that are not easy to represent on such a test. In his article, he argues that "the quest for easily objectifiable testing and scoring has directed us away from the attempt to measure some of the most precious qualities of individuals and hence ignore those qualities." In his article, he is discussing how standardized tests ignore creative qualities, but his statement is true of many others of the most important kinds of learning. Now, nearly 60 years later, we are still gripped by the trap of standardized testing! I, like Guilford, appreciate testing for what it can do, but what Guilford said back in 1950 is very true: Our quest for objective, scientifically based evidence has led us to ignore the most important kinds of learning, such as creativity, problem solving, collaboration, social/emotional development, and higher order thinking.
This is my big worry for educational systems: That the push for accountability is leading us to teach and research less about the kinds of learning that we need most in our modern creative society. I DO support accountability, but we need to continue to search for effective ways of being accountable for our teaching and leading in ALL of the important areas of learning.
References
Banahan, E., & Playfoot, J. (2004). Socio-organisational challenges in the creative economy. In L. M. Camarinha-Matos & H. Afsarmanesh (Eds.), Collaborative networked organizations: A research agenda for emerging business models. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Guilford, J. P. (1950). Creativity research: Past, present, and future. American Psychologist, 5: 444-454. (The page numbers I quote in this article are approximate as I was using a scanned in reproduced copy of this article in a collection of some kind–a teacher handout).
Ogunleye, J. (2006). A review and analysis of assessment objectives of academic and vocational qualifications in English further education, with particular reference to creativity. Journal of Education & Work, 19(1), 95-104.
Tags: creativity, information age, creative society, psychology, education research, NCLB
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Rick, I love hearing your thoughts on this subject. I see the effects of what you are talking about every day in medical school. Firstly, there is NO fostering or support of creativity or problem solving. The material is presented in a way that lends itself to multiple choice tests, with very little cross integration or support for the fact that as doctors we need to be able to integrate our medical trivia and manipulate that base knowledge so actually solve problems and help patients. We work so hard to memorize facts, and spit them back out on multiple choice tests. Why do we bother? This is the information age – we can look up the majority of the information on our PDAs at the patient’s bedside. Even better, the new software allows us to input symptoms and lab values (bloodwork, urinalysis, etc.) and the computer makes an automatic diagnosis which is more accurate than those of most doctors. But skills involving creative problem solving or integration of knowledge are actively suppressed in medical school.
I am a creative person and a problem solver. Those have always been my strengths. However, med school only rewards those who have the ability to memorize and regurgitate. And thus I flounder in medical academia, forced to spend my time memorizing rather than learning. Regurgitation = better test scores, better test scores = a spot in the most difficult, presitigous and competitives medical residencies. Basically, the medical elite in whom we place the most respect and trust have not earned the right to be in those positions of responsibility which require creativity and problem solving abilities to truly excel and heal patients. Rather, they have simply proved that they can function as a computer, cold, linear and without creativity. The system is broken. As our society progresses deeper into ubiquitous computing, we will have less and less use for those doctors who have vast amounts of medical facts memorized, and perhaps at that point we will be forced to revamp the medical education system. Of course, before we are forced to confront that fact, how many thousands of people will die who might otherwise have been saved by a creative problem-solver who had integrated his medical knowledge into a useful synthesis, able to adapt to specific and unique medical situations? And of course, let us not forget that once we reach the realization that the educational system must change so we can select for those prospective doctors who can be creative problem solvers, it takes 7 – 11 years of medical training (4 years of med school, 3-5 years of residency depending on the specialty, and 1-2 years of focused fellowship specialty training) to make a new doctor, and how much longer for him or her to rise to a level of leadership and responsibility among their peers? I think this problem needs to be addressed much, much sooner if we want to truly be able to integrate the power of computing with the human element in order to do the most medical good for the world around us.
Tim, good to hear from ya! Very interesting perspective from the medical sector. I think you are absolutely right, and I think the current recession may not be the least of our worries in our great nation if we don’t figure out quick that our current model of education is not right for the 21st Century. We don’t need “knowledge experts” anymore because the info is readily available. We need “problem-solvers” like you point out so well. Of course you need SOME knowledge to be able to be a problem solver, but still, the creativity/problem solving aspect is terribly overlooked right now.
Since the system isn’t changing quickly enough, I wonder what I can do to at least prepare my own children and develop their creativity/problem solving skills? What can I do to prepare my children for 21st century jobs and lifestyles even though they attend 20th century schools?