Creativity: The Most Forgotten Art

Creativity: The Most Forgotten Art

Creativity is the action of expressing so we feel no fear or judgement of others just like a child.

“I heard a great story recently of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, “They will in a minute.’” (Robinson)

Bob McKim was a creativity researcher in the 1960’s and 1970’s along with teaching at Stanford University. One of the exercises that he would do with his students would be to have them very quickly draw their neighbor. Tim Brown experimented with this exercise during a lecture and found the same results that McKim stumbled upon; after the thirty seconds were up, the adults would go though a process where they would laugh, show embarrassment, and then say sorry.

If you try this same experiment with children, they have no embarrassment at all. They will show their masterpieces off to anyone who will look , but as they learn to become adults, they become more sensitive to the opinions of others and replace the freedom of creativity with embarrassment. (Brown)

McKim believed that the findings related to how the adult students would act showed that we fear the judgement of our peers. This fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. In a talk about creativity with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, she stated that “You cannot get rid of fear, but do remember that fear is boring.” (Gilbert)

Besides fear and embarrassment, why are we as adults stopping the creative process from happening?

I believe that we are stopping the creative process from happening because we have lost our imagination. “One of the things we tend to do as adults is we edit things. We stop ourselves from doing things. We self-edit as we are having ideas. In some cases, our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. That actually is not necessarily really playful. So that ability just to go for it and explore lots of things, even if they do not seem that different from each other, is actually something that children do well, and it is a form of play.” (Brown)

Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, believes that it is the educational system that is hindering children’s creativity. Robinson states that, “Kids will take a chance. If they do not know, they will have a go. They are not frightened of being wrong. I do not mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. The result is that we are educating people out of their creative incapacitates.” 

Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. Around the world, there were no public systems of education before the 19^th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism in a two tiered academic hierarchy: the most useful subjects for work are at the top and academic ability. The consequence is that many highly-talented, creative people think they are intelligent, because the thing that they were good at at school was not valued, or was actually stigmatized.  Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. (Robinson)

When we do this to children we are taking away imagination and replacing it with serious thoughts. Take a small child at Christmas into consideration. It is not uncommon for a small child to be more interested in the box that the toy came in than the actual toy itself. From an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense because you can do quite a bit more with boxes than you can do with a toy. (Brown) Actually, the oldest, cheapest, and most diversely used toy is the stick. It can be anything from a magic wand to a sword. ("National Toy Hall of Fame: Stick.")

We need to harness this creativity that children have with a stick back into our daily adult lives, but the question is how do we do this? I have no definite answer for anyone. I know that currently as a current creative student, I live within the boundary lines of grades, and as a creative adult, I will live within the boundary lines of costs of my project ideas. Though my research of re-finding creativity, I found that there is not one path to relearning creativity. It is a personal believe that if we are to re-find our creative nature, we need to look into the eyes of a child and see how they are to handle a situation. Children are our keys to eliminating fear and embarrassment and relearning creativity.

Works Cited

Brown, Tim. “Tales of Creativity and Play.” TED. May 2008. Lecture

Gilbert, Elizabeth. "Fear Is Boring, and Other Tips for Living a Creative Life." Ideastedcom. TED Talks, 24 Sept. 2015. Web. 1 Nov. 2015.

"National Toy Hall of Fame: Stick." National Museum of Play. The Strong, 2008. Web. 1 Nov. 2015.

Robinson, Ken. “Do Schools Kill Creativity.” TED Febuary 2006. Lecture