EDUCATION 教育
The Creativity
Conundrum
By Nick Land
I
n the early 1970s, the world’s
most economically developed
countries began to understand
themselves as ‘post-industrial
societies’. This was a term
introduced into general
conversation by the American
sociologist Daniel Bell, who
popularized it through his
influential book The Coming of
Post-Industrial Society (1973). Bell’s
claim was based upon the declining
significance of the manufacturing
sector within the American
economy, eclipsed by the rise of the
services or ‘tertiary’ sector. He
argued that the class-structure,
politics, and culture that had been
developed by industrialization were
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being replaced by new social groups
and themes. In particular, the role of
knowledge as a factor of production
was being increasingly emphasized,
within an “information-based
economy” and “information
society.”
Even industrial technologies
reinforced these social trends. By the
late 20th century, the explosive
development of computerized
telecommunication systems was
propelling the word ‘information’ to
even greater prominence. The
future, it seemed, would swallow
not only society, but even nature
itself, in a supernova of information.
It was possible to imagine that
nothing else really mattered.
Yet, with the dawn of the new
millennium, there came a gradually
spreading realization that Bell’s
‘white-collar’ occupations would, in
many cases, be the most easily
substituted by the new information
technologies. After all, an
information processing job stands
in more-or-less direct competition
with an information processing
machine. Any ‘knowledge worker’
engaged in routine activity would
come to be directly threatened by
the prospect of technological
replacement, challenged to change,
and to produce something new.
From the perspective of any human
individual, group, or society trying
to find its way in the rising,
information drenched world, it was
novelty, rather than knowledge, that
mattered most. With that
realization, another word was
launched into dramatic ascent:
creativity.
‘Creativity’ is a concept of entirely
genuine and massive significance,
but it is also the most heavilytrafficked buzz-word of our age.
Especially in advanced
metropolitan centers, ‘creative’ can
appear as an indispensable
adjective, required – and even
sufficient – for the justification of
any social undertaking. A clamor of
‘creative solutions’ is announced by
‘creative businesses’ in ‘creative
industries’, perhaps based in
‘creative clusters’ or ‘creative hubs’
and serviced, of course (post-Bell),
by a ‘creative class’. The idea of the
creative class is associated above all
with Richard Florida, whose The
Rise of the Creative Class (2002) has
served as a manifesto for the
deliberate social promotion of
creativity in its economic
application, especially as a policy
tool for the vitalization of cities.
“Human creativity is the ultimate
economic resource,” Florida argues.
This striking formula epitomizes
the leading spirit of our age.
Florida’s work can be seen as
providing policy advice to
governments, principally at the
municipal level, on how to attract a
‘creative’ population to the urban
areas under their administration.
Drawing such people it is argued
(and widely accepted) is the key to
urban flourishing. Yet for
governments at a higher level, who
are often equally persuaded by the
creative agenda, magnetism is not
enough. Since there is no obvious
overall benefit to be gained from
redistributing a nation’s creative
class amongst its various urban
centers, the problem of creativity
changes shape. For national
governments the question becomes:
How can the total supply of creative
people be expanded? Posed in this
way, it resonates strongly with the
concerns of educators.
As the social demand for creativity
in education becomes increasingly
vociferous, aligning parents,
businesses, and governments in the
cause, the inherent complexities of
this demand – even its
contradictions – have become
starkly evident. Insofar as creativity
is a kind of learning, it is a peculiar
kind, one that seems to run counter
to the idea of being taught, of being
rigorously evaluated, and perhaps
“Human
creativity is
the ultimate
economic
resource”
even of being one. Furthermore, a
consistent theme running through
much of the research into education
and creativity is that creative
students, and creative behaviors, are
often perceived by teachers as
difficult, disruptive, and
undisciplined. The underlying
reasons for this are quite easy to
identify.
Richard Florida
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EDUCATION 教育
The Creative
Society
T
he upsurge of interest in
creativity as a general solution
to social ills corresponds to a type
of humility. It accompanies the
recognition, amongst administrators,
business people, educators, and
others, that something different
comes next, and that we really have
no idea what it will be. Rather than
seeking to program the future,
a welcome mat is laid out for it.
Creativity is invited in, along with the
unknown tomorrow it brings.
The appeal of Richard Florida’s work,
as exemplified by his books The Rise
of the Creative Class, and Cities and
the Creative Class, is that he makes
this invitation socially precise. The
unknowable ‘X’, the big new thing,
will emerge from an identifiable
group of people, he suggests, and
even if we cannot predict what these
people will do, we can at least predict
what they will like (and be like). This
means that they can be attracted.
Municipal leaders have eagerly seized
upon Florida’s recommendations to
transform their cities into the tolerant,
stimulating, ‘hip’ and ‘happening’
places that the creative class find
magnetic. Of course, as should be
expected of any class theory, heated
controversy swirls around the analysis,
ignited by its aura of bohemian elitism.
In any case, the question of creativity
looks set to overspill the boundary of
the ‘creative class’ as disconcerting
change becomes an ever more
comprehensive social condition. Cathy
Davidson, author of Now You See It:
How Technology and Brain Science Will
Transform Schools and Business for the
21st Century, predicts that two-thirds
of grade school students will work in
jobs that don’t yet exist. An inflexible
or excessively conservative education
could easily equip its students
with an obsolescent system of
expectations. Propelled into a future
whose shape we cannot see, but one
that impresses us forcibly with its
strangeness, creativity can no longer
be dismissed as an extravagance or
indulgence. It is something much
closer to a matter of sheer survival.
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Yet being able to measure
creativity does not imply
an ability to teach or
engender it, whether at
the level of the individual
educator, the school, or
the wider society
Although definitions of creativity
can be elaborate, often exceedingly
so, a simple distinction between
‘convergent’ and ‘divergent’
thinking suffices to capture many of
the essentials. Convergent thinking
tends towards a single, correct
solution. Beginning from a
confusion of distracting
possibilities, it proceeds through
systematic elimination until
arriving at the sole acceptable
conclusion. By doing so, it supports
agreement between students, with
teachers, and in accordance with the
consolidated knowledge of the
wider society. Understanding that
‘2+2’ can only equal ‘4’ is a modest
step towards social and cultural
integration. It is also, conveniently,
precisely examinable, and thus
measurable. Whether a lesson in
convergence of this type has been
successfully taught is perfectly clear.
Divergent thinking, in sharp
contrast, throws teaching and
examination into perplexity.
Consider what would be involved if,
rather than asking: “What does two
plus two equal?” the question was
turned around, to become: “What
equals four?” Rather than restricting
possibilities, and requiring
convergence upon the correct
answer, the question now stimulates
divergence, and the multiplication of
possibilities. The answer “2+2”
remains correct, of course, as does
“1+3” and “0+4”, but also “5+ -1”,
half of 8, the square root of 16, or the
first compound number. Possibilities
multiply into the infinite, even
before extending beyond pure
arithmetic, through geometry, and
outwards to encompass examples
such as the legs of a quadruped, or
the letters of the tetragrammaton.
There is no limit to the range and
number of answers, and as thinking
diverges through the ramification of
possibilities, it departs ever more
markedly from uniformity, becomes
ever more original, and ceases to
represent anything that could have
been straightforwardly taught. It is
no wonder that education systems,
and educators, find such situations
comparatively problematic. What
does it even mean to get such
thinking right?
Measuring creativity, or
quantitatively assessing it according
to uniform standards, might seem
to be a hopelessly paradoxical – and
thus simply hopeless – undertaking.
Such despair is unwarranted,
however. Whatever the difficulties
involved in measuring divergent or
creative thinking, the task cannot be
blithely dismissed as
straightforwardly impossible. The
evidence for that was provided by
psychometric researcher Ellis Paul
Torrance, as early as the mid-1960s,
through the persuasive
demonstration of a test that
convincingly captures the basic
features of such thought.
The Torrance Test of Creative
Thinking (Torrance, 1966), or
TTCT, has undergone a number of
revisions over the decades, but even
its original formulation set out clear
principles for the measurement of
creativity. It divides creativity (or
‘divergent thinking production’)
into four quantifiable components:
the number of relevant ideas
generated, or fluency; the range of
variation between the ideas, or
flexibility; the (statistical)
unexpectedness of the ideas, or
originality; and the development of
the ideas, or elaboration. The
quantitative definition of each
component allows it to be
objectively (i.e. ‘convergently!)
measured. By making creativity
rigorously testable, and thus
tractable to scientific evaluation, the
TTCT provided not only an
academic research tool, but also a
method of educational appraisal. As
with all educational testing, this
method is potentially double-sided;
examining the creative competence
of individuals on the one hand, and
the success of educational processes
on the other. Since the mid-1960s,
therefore, at least in theory, the
fostering of creativity had become a
measurable educational goal.
A New Approach
C
ommenting on the
educational legacy
inherited from the 19th
century, Ken Robinson
argues:
So the hierarchy is rooted
on two ideas: Number one,
that the most useful subjects
for work are at the top. So
you were probably steered
benignly away from things
at school when you were a
kid, things you liked, on the
grounds that you would
never get a job doing that. Is
that right? Don’t do music,
you’re not going to be a
musician; don’t do art,
you’re not going to be an
artist. Benign advice —
now, profoundly mistaken.
The whole world is engulfed
in a revolution.
And the second is, academic
ability, which has really
come to dominate our view
of intelligence because the
universities designed the
system in their image. If
you think of it, the whole
system of public education
Yet being able to measure creativity
does not imply an ability to teach or
engender it, whether at the level of
the individual educator, the school,
or the wider society. Still less does it
suggest an acceptance of ‘creative
education’ as a desirable – or even
clearly imaginable – objective.
When introduced rhetorically, and
abstractly, ‘creativity’ sounds like a
good thing to have, but when the
practicalities of a ‘creative approach’
to education are investigated in
detail, passive obstacles and active
objections rapidly accumulate.
Creativity is inherently
troublesome, especially for
institutions that have, as a notinsignificant part of their traditional
around the world is a
protracted process of
university entrance. And
the consequence is that
many highly talented,
brilliant, creative people
think they’re not, because
the thing they were good at
at school wasn’t valued, or
was actually stigmatized.
And I think we can’t afford
to go on that way.
The full transcript of this
TED talk can be found at:
tedconfblog.wordpress.
com/2006/06/sir_ken_robinso/
mandate, a responsibility to
maintain order. The problems it
poses are numerous, and perhaps
even numberless.
One dimension of difficulty can be
illustrated by school science
teaching, whose ‘experiments’ are
often wildly comical in retrospect.
In most cases the results are so
thoroughly pre-programmed that
the language of experimentation
becomes ridiculous in itself, with
pupils surreptitiously whispering to
each other about what the correct
outcome is supposed to be. Since
science, as taught, is a cognitively
convergent, analytical discipline, it
goes without saying that each child
is expected to ‘discover’ the same
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EDUCATION 教育
Creativity
meets
Confucius
T
he ‘creative agenda’ can
pose special challenges for
Confucian societies, in which
authoritative educational
traditions are rooted to
unique depths, investing
examinations – in particular –
with an intensity of meaning
that approaches religious
veneration. The legacy of China’s
Imperial Examination System,
when combined with a writing
system that makes extreme
demands for memorization, has
produced an educational culture
that strongly emphasizes rotelearning, relentless testing, a
reverence for literary precedent,
and a minimum of critical
distancing. These features can
encourage the development of
academic habits that – when
observed by other cultures –
appear to venture dangerously
close to sheer plagiarism. The
stigmatization of ‘copying’ that
seems so natural in the West
finds little native support in
the Confucian world. Did not
Confucius even recommend
copying? How else is a model
to be properly respected, or a
lesson learnt?
A demand for creativity,
however, arises spontaneously
in any dynamic society, and
China’s depths of tradition are
matched only by the speed
of its recent development. As
elsewhere in the world, the
country has been thoroughly
infected by the creativity bug,
from top to bottom, even as
parents maintain a stubborn
practical attachment to timetested methods of pedagogy
and examination. Everyone
agrees that education needs to
become more ‘creative’ these
days, at least in principle –
and as long as the required
innovations pose no threat to
the Gaokao performance of their
children.
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Ken Robinson
In its most basic form,
the teacher-pupil
relationship rests upon the
assumption – mutually
acknowledged – that the
teacher knows something
that the pupil doesn’t.
thing. On occasions, however, a
truly unknown element is
introduced by exploding test-tubes,
toppling Bunsen burners, and other
minor calamities. These
experiments, by attaining the
unexpected, have gone dramatically
wrong. The open secret, of course,
is that school science cannot in any
credible way be experimental at all,
but aims instead primarily at
damage limitation, whilst seeking to
provide some vague intuition of
what a real experiment is like.
Science cannot be done in schools,
but only described there, and school
science ‘experiments’ are in fact
precarious little pieces of theatrical
pretence – hence the comedy.
Creativity, however, is strictly
indissociable from experimentation,
its path profusely littered with
mistakes. Ken Robinson describes
the problem with his characteristic
clarity:
What we do know is, if you’re not
prepared to be wrong, you’ll never
come up with anything original. ...
And by the time they get to be
adults, most kids have lost that
capacity. They have become
frightened of being wrong.… [W]
e’re now running national education
systems where mistakes are the worst
thing you can make. And the result
is, we are educating people out of
their creative capacities.
Since creativity tends naturally
towards that which nobody yet
knows, each step it takes is an
implicit challenge to the foundational
principles of educational authority.
In its most basic form, the teacherpupil relationship rests upon the
assumption – mutually
acknowledged – that the teacher
knows something that the pupil
doesn’t. That ‘something’ provides
the substance of the educational
exchange, as the object of learning,
and once the pupil has fully absorbed
it, the relationship is naturally
dissolved. Creativity does not fit
easily into this structure, however
great the willingness to
accommodate it. In this respect,
schools offer an enhanced reflection
of society’s wider creativity
conundrum.
Any society that comes to
recognize, and embrace, its own
historical dynamism, cannot long
resist the lure of creativity.
Everything that it finds most
admirable about itself is
concentrated in creativity,
understood broadly and nontechnically as the production of
valuable novelty. Whilst the
qualification ‘valuable’ might seem
to cast this definition into a morass
of subjectivity and disagreement, in
modern, diverse, highlycommercial societies, ‘value’
typically acquires an economic
form, and thus a basis for objective
assessment. Irrespective of private
tastes, ‘valuable’ innovation can be
recognized as a social fact when it
receives endorsement in the
marketplace, and the surging vogue
for creativity is largely dependent
upon this link to economic success.
When Ken Robinson tells the story
of a ‘problem child’ who became a
successful dance pioneer, he does
not fail to mention that, in doing so,
she became a multi-millionaire.
The question as to whether
creativity is desirable, therefore, is
no conundrum at all, at least in any
society that is not positively
committed to a state of maximum
stasis. Even those with
comparatively little direct concern
for creativity, or perhaps a degree of
aversion to it, want other things, for
which creativity is increasingly seen
as an indispensable requirement,
such as social prosperity, problem
solving capability, and prestige. Of
course we want creativity, and
thanks to disciplined psychometric
research, we even have reasonably
satisfactory tools with which to
measure it. Somewhat less
confidently, we can even set out to
attract – or poach – it. What we do
not know how to do, with any truly
justifiable confidence whatsoever, is
create it.
It should be noted that this last
claim is at least mildly controversial.
There has been no shortage of
suggestions on how to foster
creativity within an educational
context. Numerous institutions and
periodicals base themselves on this
mission. The most common
recommendations fall into three
broad categories:
1. Syllabus revision, in favor of
traditional or even exotic Arts
subjects, in which convergence
upon a single correct solution
has a comparatively low
pedagogical priority.
2. A transformation of teaching
methods, away from
information transfer models,
and towards an ‘inquirydiscovery’ or problem-solving
approach.
3. An acceleration of the
replacement of ‘industrial’
patterns of schooling, which
emphasize punctuality,
obedience, uniformity, and
the toleration of boredom,
with ‘freer’ educational styles
(child-centered, informal, and
experimental).
From the perspective of the school,
and the teacher, all of these
recommendations involve a
voluntary surrender of authority
and control. As we have seen, this is
not remotely accidental. It is related
to another integrating theme: the
usually tacit suggestion that
creativity is something educators
can – in the best cases – allow to
happen, rather than something that
can be strictly inculcated. When a
municipal government encourages
the emergence of a ‘creative cluster’,
as a space in which creativity is
invited to flourish, exactly the same
general truth is in evidence.
Creativity cannot be constructed or
introduced, but only tolerated or
released. For every institution tasked
with its promotion, creativity presents a
single, supremely frustrating problem:
it seems only to come from outside, and
elsewhere.
Within an educational context, parents
often betray a remarkable sensitivity to
this predicament, even if their
understanding is necessarily formulated
in vague and intuitive terms. When
observing educational practices that
have been shifted in a ‘creative’
direction, they not uncommonly
perceive schools as trying to do desirable
things that they might not be able to do,
at the expense of other
things, perhaps less
Online Creativity
desirable, that they
Resources
nevertheless have clearly
demonstrated
competence at. On a
Daniel Fasko, Jr.,
whole range of topics,
Education and Creativity,
from child-centered
an excellent overview of
learning, syllabus
creativity research with
weighting,
select bibliography
examinations, and
deved.org/library/
home-work, to general
sites/default/files/
disciplinary policy,
library/education_and_
parental influences are
creativity.pdf
likely to be
Richard Florida, website,
comparatively
including articles and
conservative, in part due
discussions
to nebulous but insistent
concerns that creativity
www.creativeclass.com/
exceeds the scope of
richard_florida
realistic educational
Wayne Morris, Creativity
goals. Whilst teaching
in Education, a short
trigonometry might
introduction to the topic
ultimately be no more
that places it in a policy
important than teaching
context
creativity, we know that
effective schools can
www.jpb.com/creative/
Creativity_in_Education.
teach trigonometry, and
pdf
then ensure that the
achievement is
Yong Zhao, blog, with
recognized in
insights from an expert
examination results. Can
in the field
they also teach
zhaolearning.com
creativity? The answer
is, at the very least, far
foggier.
That is the conundrum, an inherently
stimulating puzzle that provokes
creativity in the institutions which
grapple with it. For adventurous
educational practitioners, however, the
difficulty is often a narrower one: even
when parents are fully persuaded on the
importance of creativity, they are rarely
enthusiastic about experimenting with
their children.
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