Why Creative Thinking?

Watch this video of Sir Ken Robinson to get an introduction to creative thinking and its importance.

Robinson forcefully states that our educational system works to uniformly stifle creativity, so much so that the natural instinct present in all children, gradually withers away to nothingness. He decries--and I join him--the current wrong-headed efforts to reform by reinforcing what Robinson calls the "hierarchy of curriculum" formed from the concrete of linear models of thinking and teaching.

This rigid approach, whose tentacles extend back to the dawn of the Industrial Age, is contributing to the malaise of the profession, and by extension, to society as a whole. The effects are readily apparent from the top of the school hierarchy (baffled administrators, top-heavy bureaucracies, resistance to change) to the bottom (cyncial teachers and uninterested students). Robinson contends the entire model is stagnant and useless. He calls not for reform but for "transformation" required to brunt humanity's slide into a "economics not of success but of distress." If this does not occur, we stand to confront its by-products--"social disruption, social dislocation, and social unrest"--with ever exponentially rising frequency.

Robinson calls for a new pedagogy to meet the unprecedented challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He believes we must encourage the divergent thinking and capacity for creativity that is apparently inherent in us all as children, which is steadily worn away by outmoded educational models. What is needed is a pedagogy that makes connections between the disciplines, makes sense in our students lives, and utilizes a myriad of styles to teach and encourage learning. -Jacob Clark