KH Kim, educational psychologist writes this insightful book based in research in the decline of creativity in America since the 1990s. Bellow are notes from the book.
America’s relationship with Creativity.
America became a beacon for freedom and opportunity. She calls founding innovators people like: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, John and Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren. All these innovators set the foundation of entrepeneurial legal systems that minimized corruption while protecting intellectual property. Early education in the US from parents and teachers reflected values important to American creativity, intelectual diversity, curiosity, risk taking and nonconformity. Entrepeneurship culture emerged and encouraged exponential innovation and economic growth.
Competition for Creativity
Russia launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, America humiliated, education and scientists came under scrutiny. As a result of this competition America boosted their spending on R&D to the highest level in history. During the 1960s, the education system followed suit investing heavily in Science and engineering, children wanted to learn these subjects, not simply get good grades, but to create something unique. To conquer space.
Causes for Decline
- America’s insecurity. Mid 1980s there was such a desire for financial security and maintaining the status quo, instead of continuing to evolve. Fear of global economic competition have caused creativity to decline according to KH KIM.
- Domestic Insecurity. Achieving financial security has become so hard, so parents encouraged their kids to pursue a more secure, safer career. 64% of Americans see “getting rich” as the single most important goal in life.
- R&D funds has been reduced and this has affected the number of patents in the US patent office. (from 57 to 49 percent) from 1996 to 2014. China has become the number one Patent holder. “US federal spending on R&D declined (15.4 percent) from 2010 to 2015- spending in defense R&D has declined the most (24.1 percent.)
- The decline in college and university and research funds over the last two decades is another indication of creativity decline.
- Budget cuts from NIH force half of the research proposals to be rejected, the more creative your proposal the more likely it will be rejected. agencies want to take lower risks.
- While the US has decreased funding, China has increased it.
Education
Asian students 15 years and older consistently attain higher grades in reading, math and science that US students the same age. Asian success has made Americans reevaluate their education system. They decided to take action to try to fix this. Bill Clinton called for a national education standard in 1997, George W Bush announced No child left behind (NCLB) and Barack Obama announced the Common Core State Standards with a grant to a program called Race to the Top as a continuation of NCLB. It’s goal is that all students receive higher education, closing achievement gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. “The schools are rewarded or punished through federal funds, and NCLB has become the most controlling and intrusive federal educational policy in American History.” It has become a test centric society.
There are state mandated standardiwed tests and they don”t measure things like creativity, so this becomes unimportant in the classroom. Teachers need their kids to get good grades so they can continue having their funding so they teach to the test. The test does not measure innovation or creativity so they don’t teach that.
This leaves disadvantaged kids further behind. They have no time for creativity and cannot participate in enriched programs, they are not allowed since they do not get the grades in the common core subjects.
If education only focuses in tests it ignores developing the whole child, it inhibits teachers from incorporating multiple intelligences (music-smart, body-smart, picture- smart, people – smart, etc).
All this takes on more problems such as depending on federal funding makes everything more bureaucratic, which limits schools autonomy and makes them less responsive to their students needs and more about complying with requirements from the government.
What to do….
According to KH KIM we need to create a creative culture, called a CAT (climate, attitude and thinking skills) to achieve innovation.
KH Kim finds that high intelligence isn’t necessary to win a Nobel prize but you do need creativity. High intelligence and creativity are not the same.
The challenges she encounters with teaching creativity is the belief of what children and adults believe is creativity. Only a flash of brilliance from gods or geniuses, if they believe only artists are creative, they might not even try to explore their own creative potential.
She developed a science to teach creativity:
1. Cultivate Creative Climates.
2. Nurture Creative Attitudes.
3. Develop Creative – Thinking Skills.
Climates
Creative Climates are controlled by parents and teachers. Climates include both physical and psychological surroundings.
- Soil: exposure to all kinds of diversity and views.
- Sun: introduces encouragement and excitement introducing PLAYFULNESS.
- Storm: provides high expectations and challenges, through both positive and negative feedback.
- Free Space: freedom to be alone and unique.
Attitudes
Attitudes are the ways individuals react to the climates.
- Open Minded attitude involves considering other people’s views, different from one owns.
- Bicultural Attitude means embracing new cultures, while maintaining your own identity.
- Mentored attitude describes individuals that trust others and are teachable.
- Complexity seeking attitude embraces equivocal and conflicting views. It allows us to resolve complex situations.
- Resourceful attitude means finding and using all kinds of resources/opportunities effectively.
The Six Sun Attitudes. For curious optimists, which enable creative thinking.
- Optimistic attitude means seeing the positive outcomes regardless of criticism.
- big Picture thinking attitude comes from being inspired by others words, deeds or values. Curiosity towards the big world.
- Curious Attitude means thinking in a childlike manner and always seeking more information.
- Spontaneous attitude means being flexible and acting on new ideas and opportunities in a timely manner.
- Playful Attitude means approaching situations in exploratory ways and seeing the lighter side of things.
- Energetic Attitude comes from being motivated from within.
Eight Storm Attitudes. These help you become resilient hard workers.
- Independent Attitude. Acting freely from others influence and support.
- Self Disciplined. Comes from individuals motivating and controlling themselves to accomplish goals.
- Diligent Attitude means committing to building skills to achieve your goals.
- Self Efficacious attitude comes from being confident to perform well on a specific task.
- Resilient Attitude comes from recovering after challenges and failures.
- Risk Taking attitude means leaving secure situations in pursuit of uncertain rewards.
- Persistent Attitude consists on continuously striving for your goals regardless of the immediate rewards.
- Uncertainty accepting attitude means acting without complete information regardless of potential outcomes.
The Eight Space Attitudes. These you become defiant dreamers.
- Emotional. Recognising, understanding and expressing your own feelings.
- Compassionate. Internally empathizing with others and externalizing by helping them in meaningful ways.
- Having a self reflective attitude. Enjoying solitude to understand the essence of your and others experience and views. Connect with nature.
- Autonomous. Being independently motivated to pursue goals.
- Daydreaming. Sustaining unrealistic goals but goal oriented thoughts while awake.
- Nonconfoming attitude. Choosing to be different from the mainstream patterns of thought and behaviour. Being comfortable being an outsider.
- Gender-bias-free attitude. Rejecting stereotypes based on gender. Using views and strengths from different genders.
- Defiant. Courageously rejecting or changing existing norms, values, traditions, hierarchies, authorities in order to pursue goals.
Thinking Skills. ION thinking skills – inbox, outbox and newbox.
Inbox (narrow and deep) includes traditional ways of thinking. To gain or evaluate knowledge and skills. It is essential for developing expertise- mastering a subject by understanding and applying knowledge and skills. Requires memorisation, comprehension, application, critical thinking.
Outbox Thinking (quick and broad). It is when we imagine diverse possibilities. Is divergent or outside the box thinking that seeks non conforming ideas. It generates fluent, flexible and novel ideas.
Newbox Thinking combines elements of previous thinking and transforms them into a new creation. It uses zoom and wide angle lenses to uniquely combine unrelated ideas and transform them into a creation. It ensures both uniqueness and usefulness so it can be recogniced as an innovation by others.
The 4S Chart
If parents and educators learn to cultivate the 4S climates that nurture children’s 4S attitudes at home and in school- rather than fostering un-creative climates that minimise children’s creative potential- they can greatly increase future innovation.
“Creativity has to power to transform the good to the best, and history has sown that all it takes is a few parents and educators to make striking advances.”
Kim, K.-H. (2016). The creativity challenge : how we can recapture American innovation. Prometheus Books.