Batgung

Hi MrB;

I'm finally getting together my wildly scattered thoughts on creativity!

First off, let me say that I think the Monty Python take on creativity is useful and rings true. I started thinking about it, and trying to apply it to situations in which I believe I might have succeeded in being ‘creative’ in my own work or projects, and I think it works. But I wonder if the transitions between the open and closed modes really are so facile – and, even if you do achieve the ‘open’ mode, whether something creative is going to happen just because you’re in that mode. In other words (and this subject is hard to write about, isn’t it?) just because I’m open to new ideas/ways of thinking doesn’t mean that I’m going to come up with something creative myself.

When I do think creativity takes place (at least for me) is when I’ve been in closed mode for a long time, accumulating information and wrestling with it and twisting it around as I try to get it straight. Then, I agree there’s often a kind of relaxing when I’m distracted (e.g. by laughter, indeed, but also sometimes just by sheer passage of time and exhaustion and other factors, too), and suddenly associations appear that I didn’t see before.

This fits in pretty well with what I’ve read from Daniel Willingham, for example. He’s an education researcher I’ve cited before (the link goes to the comments thread for my 'Education as salvation?' article; this thread is pretty long, so links to individual comments aren't reliable); his basic view is that most learning, deep down, is really committing knowledge to memory, because that’s simply the way our brains work best. ‘Creativity’, in his view, cannot be taught independent from content knowledge: no tyro painter is going to sit down one day and create the Mona Lisa, because he doesn’t just have the content knowledge or the hard-earned skills built into his brain. That hard work has to come first.

In other words, even the most ‘creative’ artists have to have some mastery of established conventions to work against, if you see what I mean. I think this applies in most creative fields.

For example, I recently read an exceptionally good book on architecture called How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand, who’s quite well-known for also having written The Whole Earth Catalog. Here’s what he had to say about creativity in architecture/building:

The fact is that obsolete buildings are fun to convert and a delight to use once they’re converted. Wouldn’t you rather go to school in a former firehouse, have dinner in a converted brick kiln, do your office work in a restored mansion? I don’t have to look far for an example: my wife and I live in a 65-foot 1912 tugboat that turned out to be easy to turn into a home. Originality is unavoidable. A building being reconfigured for a foreign new use is filled with novel opportunities and impossible-seeming problems. Both encourage creativity, and you can’t brute-force design solutions on an implacably existing building: you have to finesse them. Invention becomes a habit as you proceed.

This is the formal answer to the question, ‘Why are old buildings more freeing?’ They free you by constraining you. Since you don’t have to address the appalling vacuum of a blank site, you can put all of your effort and ingenuity into the manageable task of rearranging the relatively small part of the building’s mass that people deal with every day – the Services, Space plan, and Stuff. Instead of having to imagine with plans, you can visualize directly in the existing space. (p. 105)

How well do kids handle the ‘appalling vacuum of a blank site’, e.g. having a blank piece of paper in front of them and then being told to ‘draw something creative’?

Some other questions that occur to me:

• Can you really teach creativity? Can you ‘make it happen’ in the classroom?
• Does real creativity more easily occur in noisy, ‘collaborative’ environments, or in the quiet of individual struggle – i.e. are some kids more creative on their own, while others get creative working with others? I also worry about the ‘teaching’ of creativity on the grounds that genuine creativity is so easily misunderstood. I’ve got the greatest respect for teachers, but I also have stood in front of classrooms myself, and I know how hard it is to recognize what is potentially unique about the kids in front of you. If something a kid produces is truly creative, it’s by definition strange and unanticipated; this can spook teachers, who may have their own expectations for what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ creativity – witness the poor boys in the USA who get hauled out of class and subjected to reeducation for drawing pictures of guns and bombers.

Whew! I think that’s enough, other than to say that my bottom line is that yes, of course I don’t want Daughter Tall to be told that she must reproduce the teacher’s drawing line for line, but that I have no problem with her being taught quite formal – even ‘constraining’—techniques and skills, whether it’s in drawing, music, writing, whatever. I think creativity, if it happens at all, happens mostly outside school.

Thanks for the very thoughtful and reasonable reply, MrB, and also Bronney.

I agree that we're all mostly on common ground, and I think the main area of contention is what schools can really do to help foster/provoke/allow/encourage creativity on a day-by-day basis.

Serendipitously, I just found a highly pertinent article on Arts and Letters Daily today. It's from New Scientist, and it's called 'Disorderly genius'. Its thesis is that our brains function on the verge of chaos as their normal state, and that this has pluses and minuses. On the upside, it means we're able to be creative -- our 'sandpiles' of accumulated knowledge can be rearranged in new and interesting ways:

Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - "avalanches" of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable.

It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems.

So which of our views does this support? I'm not sure, truth be told! Yes, schools have to allow for 'open' spaces in which creative sandpile avalanches can occur, but on the other hand, they also have to be prepared to deal with the unpredictable results.

It's this latter factor I find it hard to entrust to formal schooling. Mass education does not deal well with randomness.

Back to you!

Somehow I missed this good post during my vacation ...  I also get nervous about the way that 'creativity' is foisted on kids in classes and the createhk site gave me the heebie jeebies.

I think the way that I try to encourage creativity is by ensuring my children are exposed to other people's creative enterprises (through attending concerts, musicals, ballets, opera's, visiting historic sites, museums, art galleries, DVD's, even Da Fen art village) we then enter discussions due to their questions on what is on display.  At home we have the luxury of a playroom where one section is a low table with chairs, underneath are supplies of paper and on the shelf next to it are plastic boxes of pens, scissors, glue, sticky things, cloth, paints, etc.  On the other side is a huge old trunk full of dress up stuff including old clothes, on the 3rd side are huge boxes of old lego I got cheap on an expat sale.

This morning while I was waking myself up, the kids went downstairs, made a staff out of an old piece of wood, used pieces of material to make cloaks and stuff from the crafts corner to make hats and came parading up the stairs as Mr. Bumble and Mr. Snodgrass from Oliver! which is a show they've been obsessing about since seeing the DVD during the holiday.

I think creativity primarily has to do do with the absence of interference from teachers and parents besides the access to materials and exposure to ideas.

After visiting DaFen with my daughter  we had huge ongoing discussions about what was original, what was copying what was idea theft, what was creativity, how you got your own unique ideas etc. etc.  It made such an impression on her that when-ever she's tempted to "copy" something she immediately is at pains to do something else with it to make it all her own.

My son on the other hand sees endless "inventing" and creating opportunities in everything he encounters in life.  His mind is obviously overflowing with ideas.

Gweipo, thanks for the reply - it was your 'we've got creativity ...' post that gave me the push to get on on and write the post above.

In one of my comments on this thread I said:

I also worry about the ‘teaching’ of creativity on the grounds that genuine creativity is so easily misunderstood.

I came across a good blog post on just this theme. It's from the economics/social sciences site Chicago Boyz (the name refers to the Milton Friedman-led school of economic thought which had its stronghold at the University of Chicago).

David Foster, the Chicago Boy who wrote the post, begins by noting a comment from the Dean of the Kansas University School of Journalism, Ann Brill, who when asked why women dominate the ranks of J-school students these days, is quoted as saying:

Men tend to be drawn to more analytical majors such as engineering or business, whereas women enjoy the creativity that journalism allows for.

Foster responds:

I frequently see an attempt by writers/journalists/academics to associate “creativity” exclusively with people in certain fields–artists, musicians, advertising people, writers, certain types of professors, interior designers, even hairdressers–while denying it to businesspeople, engineers, manufacturers, and many other kinds of people.

Just so! This is one reason I get itchy when I hear about schools, especially primary schools, trying to 'teach creativity'. Are they open to the full range of what I think are creative pursuits, or do they hold a narrow, potentially self-congratulatory view like the dean of that journalisim school?

The comments to the blog post are also pretty good, especially this one, which notes:

A myth has grown up in our culture that truly creative people spend a lot of time gazing dreamily at the sky and then, WHAM!, a brilliant idea strikes! It’s not surprising why this idea is so attractive. It is an easy rationalization for, essentially, sitting around on your duff and pretending that you are being “creative.” I admit to using it to rationalize my own laziness at times.

Again, my experience in the music world taught me that the “geniuses” were almost uniformly people who spent the whole day WORKING. Composers wrote constantly. Excellent instrumentalists practiced constantly. Any breakthroughs I had in my own work invariably came during long sessions of work or just afterwards, when I would be thinking about the work I had just done.

David Foster also references a telling little anecdote he quoted on his own website:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

So if you want your kid to be creative, as Gweipo says: get her the raw materials, and let 'er rip!