Is the Prosperity of our Youth at Risk? The Creativity Crisis

A recent Psychology Today article by Peter Gray, Ph.D., Freedom to Learn: The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning, articulates well the crisis and opportunity before us with regard to the disconnect between our current education culture and what it takes to prosper in a networked, global economy.

This article also speaks to the fundamental reason why BeMoneySmartUSA was founded:  to help our youth think for themselves and apply their own creative leadership capacity as entrepreneurs.

Gray suggests that our education system, and to a large extent, our culture of child rearing, has slowly deteriorated into a state where we are suppressing the freedom our children require in order to be creative.  He sites a study by Kyung Hee Kim (The Creativity Crisis:  The decrease in creative thinking scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23, 285-295.) which points to the decline of creativity among youth as it relates to a measure called “Creative Elaboration”.

Creative Elaboration addresses the ability to take an idea and expand or elaborate on it in an interesting or novel way. And this creative capacity is important in the modern economy that requires relationship building, problem solving, and capitalizing on opportunities in a very dynamic, global environment.

The main explanation for the “creativity crisis” is that our education system emphasizes standardized testing (where there is only one right answer, and this is not true in the real world).

Gray also explains that free play time is very important, and has been systematically reduced as more and more children are hemmed in by tight schedules of activities defined by adults, for adults.

But we don’t need an article or a study to tell us this, do we?

From my personal experience as a mother, a teacher and an entrepreneur, I can say with certainty that our children are not being raised to think for themselves and apply their creative ideas and talent. Rather, our system of education trains them to follow directions and memorize details for a test that does not translate to real world situations.

I witness routinely in our BeMoneySmartUSA workshops teens that have been trained to parrot what they are told by their instructors. These are incredibly bright youth, who when asked to solve a problem or offer an approach to an opportunity, often offer a blank stare.  Eventually, when we do enough exercises, these same students are actively contributing and collaborating, but it was not their first inclination by a long stretch.

As parents and educators we need to ask ourselves:

• Do we allow our children to be bored or fail at something? Are they allowed to explore interests without a qualifier tied to some expected outcome (a trophy, a course credit, a ranking, another line item on the childhood resume)? 
• Is the amount of homework issued helping them to learn, or creating a burden robbing them of free play?
•  Is our instruction mostly teacher-led, rather than student-led?
•  Do we only offer one path to an “A”?
•  Are we looking for opportunities that inspire students to be creative?
•   Have we become task masters, stifling creativity?
•   Do we understand that intrinsic motivation involves opportunities to make money, be a part of something larger than themselves, and make a difference?

We need to think hard about these types of questions because they have real consequences for this generation and our future.  Prosperity requires individuals to apply their capacity to think and other talents in ways that add value, solve problems, or seize opportunities to change the world for the better. And by the same token, financial solvency and independence requires every individual to take responsibility for their relationship with the money earned, and with the people and organizations they trust with their money.

What do you think?