School Kills Creativity

But we can overcome the damage and regain what is inherently human.

I have just finished weaving a piece tentatively entitled “Calm” (pictured below). It was done freehand, without a pattern or photograph to follow; instead, I relied on my sense of colour and design, allied with a germ of an idea regarding the finished piece. Weaving that piece was a lovely experience: calming and meditative during these tumultuous times. It was also an experience that felt a bit risky because I’m still finding my way in the realm of creativity.

Creativity is a topic in which I’ve long been interested. Mostly, I’ve explored how it relates to children’s learning while forming a broad-based definition of the term, understanding what makes some people live their lives more creatively than others, and discovering what conditions and traits optimize creativity and how to spark or revive it in myself. Long ago, I decided that, although the “creative personality” is a complex one and some people have innate talent in certain fields, everyone has the capacity to be creative, or at least to think creatively.

My list of aspects of creativity includes what we might call personality traits. These are such things as being comfortable breaking rules and taking risks; harnessing our imagination and sense of wonder; curiosity and willingness to explore, ask questions, and seek new challenges; determination to create one’s own life on one’s own terms; ability to focus; being comfortable with solitude; not being afraid to be wrong or make “mistakes;” and bravery (which includes stubbornness in the face of criticism, failure, or shaming). There are more and I welcome your ideas in the comments, but these will suffice for now.

However, I believe that these “traits” are not actually quirks of personality. They are, in varying degrees, inherent to being human. While present at birth, they can be lost along the way as we are brought up and schooled. Educationalist, author, and public speaker Sir Ken Robinson puts it this way: “We are educating people out of their creative capacities… I believe...that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”

That certainly happened to me. Many years and much life experience had to happen before I began to regain a sense of and trust in the expression of my creativity. As a child in school and church choir, I was often told to mouth the words rather than use my sometimes off-key singing voice. In school, I also learned that I couldn’t draw or paint, but if I would just follow the rules and colour between the lines I could get a passing grade in art class. While I excelled at English grammar and achieved top marks in that subject, I was encouraged to use that skill to become a teacher rather than a writer. I left teaching after four months and became a journalist, which is supposedly the antithesis of a creative writer. And I hid my poems until my husband found them and gathered some of them into a chapbook, much to my initial, self-doubt-fuelled embarrassment.

On my quest to understand creativity and learning, I’ve long enjoyed and been inspired by Julia Cameron’s bestselling Artist’s Way books. I also like Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He studied 91 creative and influential people, including novelists, playwrights, composers, musicians, scientists, actors, economists, and philosophers. And he concluded that creativity in any realm involves the same skill set: dedication, hard work, actively seeking new challenges, persistence, and boldness. Maybe I like this book so much because Csikszentmihalyi agrees with my thesis! “Each person has,” he says, “...all the psychic energy he or she needs to live a creative life.”

In the 54 years since I quit teaching, I have observed large numbers of kids who have learned without attending school or being exposed to its rigid hierarchy of subjects and required outcomes. And I have noticed that they haven’t been robbed of that energy referred to by Csikszentmihalyi. Nor have they lost those contributors to creativity that I listed above. Their self-directed lives are simply more conducive to nurturing creativity than those whose days are spent passively being told what to do, think, and learn.

They are also masters of play, which is, after all, children’s creative work. Play, like learning, requires presence and engagement. When one is fully and creatively engaged in a project, as I was with my weaving over the past few weeks, we don’t worry about the outcome or how others might judge it. That pleasurable experience is what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. I’ve realized lately that it’s why, for me, the process of weaving is more important than the final result.

Caught up in our results-oriented world, many adults consider play non-productive. We get so focused on getting things done and on doing them well that we rarely enjoy ourselves in the process. And yet, in that exploratory, creative, playful process, we are stretching ourselves and, as the life coaches put it, actualizing our potential. I’ve found that when the process is most satisfying and fun, the final outcome is also the most successful and pleasing.

Jean Piaget once said, while speaking to a group of adults: “If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.” However, as I have discovered during my five-year weaving adventure, it’s never too late to regain the losses of childhood.