How Dull are Your Children?
Can an article – written by a professional journalist for a national news magazine – credibly claim that there’s a creativity crisis in America? Isn’t the act of writing the article itself creative? Doesn’t that mean something?
Well, no.
By way of Slashdot (here) I found a Newsweek article (here) that made the highly controversial claim that American children (6th grade and under) are less creative than previous generations and advocated project-based learning in the classroom as the “scientific” solution.
I really wish that people who write about science would try learning a little first.Really I do.
Let’s start with the setup: A longitudinal study by E. Paul Torrance (Wikipedia bio; obit; Books by Torrance on amazon) in which young children were tested for creativity, then followed for decades and their creative achievements recorded. The conclusion was that it was a good test, that people who scored high in creativity while very young, often went on to be highly creative adults. Longitudinal studies (Wikipedia definition here), by the way, are hard to do well but can lead to very rich data sets that can be useful for far more than originally intended.
So far we’re in “duh!” territory. The big take-away is that psychologists were thrilled and amazed to find out they could measure creativity. They may also have been wrong but we’ll get to that. Psychologists were also interested to find out that creativity and intelligence did not necessarily go together. Again, “Duh.” Anyone who’s ever seen an interview with Ozzy Osbourne (or any of a hundred others I could name – sorry Ozzy. You’re still great!) could have told you that. Of course, they are not mutually exclusive either. Frank Zappa proved that!
This test has been given lots and lots of times to students all over the world. A researcher, Kyung-Hee Kim (web page here) analyzed the data and determined that the test scores for American children have declined since about 1990. That’s kind of interesting but not, by itself, a crisis. I was disappointed when my grandson refused to wear the TV remote for a hat, even after I modeled it for him, but he’s still a good kid. He might even have some capacity for creativity. Just not in hats.
The Newsweek article, however, describes this decline in scores as a national crisis but, in fact, gives very short shrift to the question of how creative the kids are really or why their scores might be declining. It assumes without the slightest evidence that this is a permanent trend and that America has to do something right away. Then it goes on to describe the prescription: Project based learning in the classroom.
I’m not going to critique project-based learning. It sounds great when the advocates describe it. But the author’s agenda comes out, for example, in the use of the term “drill and kill” to describe rote memorization. “Drill and kill” is a pejorative term used by people who don’t like rote. The author accepts without question that it is bad. There is room for disagreement on this point.
Leaving aside issues of the relative merits of different teaching styles and the very contentious politics associated with them, I was struck by the implication that “science says” we have to start teaching American kids to be creative because they aren’t learning it and if we don’t change the schools to teach it to them, they’ll never learn it and the rest of the world will pass us by! The evidence to back this up just isn’t there.
One point that stood out to me was that the alleged decline in test scores (no reference is given to any validation of either the methodology or the conclusion, therefore I consider the point unproved) means there is also a decline in creativity among the very young. There is a vague mention of TV and video games as possibly suppressing creativity but no real explanation. But, if those things are really involved, how do we know that they aren’t causing children to express their creativity in a way the test isn’t very good at measuring? Would the test results change if the questions were given by bright cartoon characters on TV? What if the reason the kids are performing differently on the tests is because of increased education about “stranger danger?” Not trusting the tester will affect a lot of tests. Has anyone tested that?
What if creativity really is declining but TV and video games are not the cause? Ask any doctor how easy it is to cure a disease without a diagnosis. Treating the symptoms can buy you time but if you don’t have a good idea of the underlying cause, you may be completely helpless to keep the patient alive (Watch a couple episodes of House for a nice, if exaggerated, illustration of this. Most episodes have at least two attempts to cure the wrong problem, followed by the patient getting even worse, then House comes up with a miracle cure. Yes, it’s just TV. Take it with a grain or 12 of salt. I’m trying to make a point here, not prove a case in court!).
In this case, without any clear idea of a cause, we can’t even be sure there is a problem to cure. Psychological tests can be sensitive to cultural and, well, psychological factors that are not necessarily obvious to the researchers involved with them. And creativity, for all the research that’s been done, is still imperfectly understood. What if the (alleged) decline in creativity is due to changes in diet that change the balance of important brain chemicals? Or what if it’s just a passing thing, a statistical blip that will change in the next generation? This is why I get so annoyed with science “reporting” these days. Even a tiny bit of critical thinking would be better than what you get from most science related stories these days, especially any science related article with the word “crisis” in the headline!
I have nothing against project-based learning (though building an entire curriculum around it seems a bit much) and I’m certainly willing to believe that it’s a good thing to teach children to be creative. If nothing else, it makes for a fun childhood. But I don’t see a crisis and absolutely don’t see a basis in this for educational policy. I see opportunities for more research and for developing our understanding of creativity in childhood and even beyond. Let’s try that.
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