A Crisis in Creativity
by Gabi Krieger
This one’s gonna blow your minds, so buckle your seatbelt…your lap belt and your overhead bar.
I was asked to present at our local networking meeting last month, so I started diving into an article that I had found while doing some research a few month’s back, because the article name peaked my interest…”The Creativity Crisis,” making a strong case that creativity is in sharp decline across America.
Dr. KH Kim is the Professor of Educational Psychology at William & Mary and is the International Representative of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association, and interviewed with Nick Skillicorn about her findings.
She published a study in 2011 called "The Creativity Crisis" where she analyzed creativity results in American students from the 1990s onward, after the US introduced testing in schools as Asia had as a metric of success, and how students have been impacted by those changes.
The findings were so monumental that her work was published in Newsweek magazine. Here's a glimpse into Torrance creativity index, the metric used:
"What's shocking is how incredibly well Torrance's creativity index predicted those kids' creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance's tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance's data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ."
Here are some of the findings, taken from “Creativity Crisis Getting Worse”, a follow up to her initial findings:
LESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR INGENUITY
"Schools have decreased or eliminated instruction time on non-tested subjects such as social studies, science, physical education, arts, and foreign languages. This contraction not only narrows students’ minds but gives them few opportunities for finding or expressing their individuality and cross-pollination across different subjects or fields."
LOST IMAGINATION/DEEP THOUGHT
"With pressure to cover large amounts of tested material, teachers overfeed students with information, leaving students little time to think or explore concepts in depth."
AVOIDING RISK TAKING
"High-stakes testing teaches students to avoid taking risks for fear of being wrong. The willingness to accept failure is essential for creativity."
In my classroom, I am constantly encouraging students to be wrong, but it’s clear that the fear of error is crippling an entire generation of individuals.
LOST CURIOSITIES/PASSIONS
“Because of the incentives or sanctions on schools and teachers based on students’ test scores, schools have turned to rote lecturing to teach all tested material and spent time teaching specific test-taking skills. Students memorize information without opportunities for application. This approach stifles natural curiosities, the joy of learning, and exploring topics that might lead to their passions.”
NARROWING VISIONS
“Making test scores as the measure of success fosters students’ competition and narrows their goals.... “
“However, the greatest innovators in history were inspired by big visions such as changing the world; their big visions helped their minds transcend the concrete constraints or limitations and recognize patterns or relationships among the unrelated.”
DECLINE IN CRITICAL THINKING
“The significant declines in newbox thinking skills (elaboration and simplicity) indicate that Americans think less in depth, with less focus, and they think less critically and in more black-and-white terms than those in preceding decades (Figure 2).”
Source: The Creativity Crisis: It’s Getting Worse - Idea to Value
Of course, I am of firm belief that you, the reader, have many a reason for you or your child being involved in music lessons to begin with, but digging into the stats on educational improvement has staggering finds:
“Beginners who took piano lessons for one hour a week over the course of 11 weeks showed improvements in audio and visual processing. Additionally, musical training helped to boost mood and reduce symptoms of stress and anxiety.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221202124841.html
“In a study of first graders who were behind the control group on reading and math skills, after participating in special music classes, they caught up to the control group after only seven months of training.”
https://www.colburnschool.edu/six-benefits-of-music-lessons
“Research has shown that as little as 6 months of piano lessons can boost the brain's ability to encode, consolidate, and recall verbal information.
Compared to non-musicians, piano players demonstrated 10% superior memory capacity - an upgrade that persisted long after lessons had ceased. Experts believe that techniques used in musical memory, such as chunking larger passages into meaningful sequences, underpin this benefit.”
https://danhon.substack.com/p/piano-benefits-brain-wellbeing
“For all of the constructs, we found that parents of children who participated in music lessons for over one year perceived statistically significant higher levels of all of the behaviors compared to parents whose children participated in lessons for less than a year. This difference was substantial for all of the constructs that we measured and persisted across socioeconomic, race/ethnicity, and gender groups.”
