The Creativity Crisis

I was going to write something longer and unrelated. But I found this excellent piece from Newsweek about America's creativity crises.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

That is, for obvious reasons, a very bad thing. What's fascinating is the example of the National Inventors Hall of Fame School in Akron, where they have been able to use creative problem solving to fulfill the curriculum by doing interesting and useful real world tasks. The article is a little unclear on how scaling up solutions like that would affect our creativity and its application into useful purposes but it's a great starting point that hopefully will kick off an important national discussion on how we can nurture creativity everywhere: in our schools, families and organizations. Allowing people's creativity to flourish into useful so lotions to public problems is an incredibly important goal. So. No long article from me today, just read that and the accompanying articles.