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The world needs more and more compassionate creativity to solve difficult problems confronting us. Creative people do not have answers, but they habitually question the status quo and think about alternatives and improvements. They discover and invent possible answers. They habitually ask better questions. They have optimism. When combined with empathy and compassion, creativity is bound to be a force for good.
Teaching creativity to everyone is vitally important if we desire a good life for all. Creativity is typically seen as an inherited disposition. Many teachers and parents are not convinced that creativity can be taught. They tell me that kids either have it or they don't. I disagree. I see creativity in all kids with healthy brains. I think of teaching creativity beginning with the day of birth or even sooner. Infants have natural ways to attract attention when they have needs. They learn what works to satisfy hunger, thirst, comfort, affection, entertainment, and so on. If we actively engage with an infant with baby talk and other forms of interplay, the child is motivated to seek more engagement and enjoyment. The child begins to feel more empowered and is more apt to adapt to seek new experiments and learning experiences.
In many cultures some families and most schools use a lot of negative behavior management. If children grow up in a highly controlled environment with too many prohibitions, only a small percentage of them manage to persistent and retain their natural creativity. Most of their neurons and thinking habits that would have developed to make a creative mind have been pruned. Their natural tendencies to be adventuresome, experimental, and creative become suppressed. There may always be a very few highly creative who can resist the drill and kill educational methods and the excessive prohibitions of controlling parents. Tragically, the majority of children give up and accommodate. They abandon their imaginative and creative curiosity about life in favor of more secure, but imposed and programmed kind of thinking habits. They accept answers from their instructors as correct (without enought thought). When this happens many good ideas are missed. We risk injustice by manipulation. History is full of examples of leaders who have gained followings and supporters based on very defective ideas. When the masses are both educated and creative, mass tragedy based on false fundamental beliefs systems is less likely to take hold. Classrooms that insist on total conformity without asking for independent ideas are likely to produce citizens who are best suited to cooperation with those who seek to control in order to subjugate them. When only a few are creative, they are able to impose too much control on those with learned helplessness.
I write as an art teacher for many years. While being a successful visual artist today assumes a high level of creativity, I think parents as well as teachers in every area need to reflect on what they are doing that tends to foster or hinder the creative critical thinking. Anything as crucial as creativity needs to be taught in every learning domain. Creative readers, whatever they teach, coach, or nurture, will recognize their own lessons and projects in what I describe. In the development of the human mind, the ability to imagine and test our scenarios is among the most advanced of all human traits. Why would any teacher want to ignore or even squelch the imagination and ways to discover truth, goodness, and beauty?
