

The Creativity Crisis - thaumaturgy
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

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hooande
This part of the article jumped out at me:

"When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his
son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital - why not San Francisco or
Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up
with as many explanations as he could think of."

This seems like a great way to teach children to be creative, and just
generally intelligent.

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thaumaturgy
It's a tactic that goes back as far as Socrates at least ("Socratic
dialogue"), and it's very effective. Unfortunately it also requires a great
depth of knowledge and patience on the part of the teacher, so it would be
hard to get this to take off in U.S. schools at the moment.

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wdewind
So I went to a high school which claimed to practice the "Socratic Method."
Now I'm not saying it can't be used correctly, but in 90% of the cases it was
used it was sticking us in a lab, showing us an experiment and asking us what
happened, THEN having us do the reading. It makes NO sense and was a HUGE
waste of time.

As a tool in your arsenal it's great, as the cornerpiece of your education
system it's really not. People need to be shown what to do ultimately.

Finally, America is becoming "less creative" based purely on the judgment of
two scientists (literally they look at the drawings and say "I give this one a
15/18"). Seems a little melodramatic/farfetched. I'd be the first to believe
the hypothesis but what a stupid experiment.

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thaumaturgy
Socratic dialogue is completely different from the Socratic method (which I
hadn't heard of before). Socratic dialogue is a way of getting a student to
consider and answer their own questions during a conversation, where the
teacher responds to the student by asking leading questions.

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ThomPete
You want to teach children to be creative, you teach them to _be the active
builders of their own intellectual structure_ to quote Piagat and Seymoure
Papert.

Papert is the inventor of Logo and his book _Mindstorms: Children, Computers,
and Powerful Ideas_ inspired the name of Lego Mindstorms.

That book shows how education should be taught.

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lkozma
"The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and
Innovation" ...

I wouldn't be too worried about this.

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joelhaus
Worth the read. I usually (wrongly) associate creativity with the arts, but
this article frames it as a crucial skill for effective problem solving. Is
there a more fulfilling way to learn a subject than solving a real world
problem that requires you to understand it?

It was especially encouraging to hear how schools can fulfill the standardized
curriculum requirements without turning the kids into zombies:

 _[...] they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum
"from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of
persuasive writing. "You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I
don’t need to learn it,’" says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec.
"Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’"_

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jimbokun
This is kind of like how Mr. Miyagi teaches Karate. They didn't even realize
they were mastering the standardized curriculum, until they had already done
it.

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madair
This is why Feynmann disliked the social sciences, seriously, the Torrance
tests is a perfect application of all of the problems with highly
interpretative "tests".

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kiba
Can you give us a detailed explanation of why Torrance tests are problematic?

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lucidguppy
Hey look everyone! A new educational crisis! Quick, get the money canon.

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ilkhd2
Again the reason why creativity goes down - nowhere to apply it. There is no
industry left in USA - the only way you can apply your creativity is by
creating something, but your creations are not going to be competitive -
chinese workforce cheaper, small shops you can sell through your staff all
gone and replaced by targets/best buys/evilmarts and so on. Only things that
are produced in USA is food and lo-tech wooden/metalwork.

~~~
chipsy
I have two responses to this.

First of all, it is getting absurdly easy to find useful feedback. For every
topic you might discuss, for every skill you might learn, there's at least one
discussion forum, and in each of those forums there are intense, even
competitive practitioners of the involved art who will tear you apart if you
aren't working up to standard. Sometimes this is done in bad faith, but on the
whole, that part of the "creative loop" is the best it's ever been. The main
factor that holds people back from any creative endeavor is motivation. When
hanging out with friends the motivation problem becomes a major factor; our
likelihood of engagement and satisfaction is a lot higher when we get together
to _create_ rather than to _consume_. But we have to get ourselves pumped up
to do something creative, and engagement is difficult because everyone
involved has to pierce through the BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary
activities into "hard work" or "way over my head."

My second point is that by losing the work environments in the "heavy"
industries, the USA will be deprived of creatives in those fields - but that
doesn't necessarily mean we lose out on creatives. Look at Richard Florida's
books on the "Creative Class" - one of the points he argues is that our major
cities are getting increasingly "peaky" as the creative people in each
industry pool together more and more closely. We already have some creative
powerhouses(NY, LA, SV to name a few), and there is no reason for them to
decline anytime soon. Where we still have industries involving physical goods
and high capital requirements, intense pressure exists to take a high-tech
approach and automate everything rather than battle to get cheap labor. For
example, think of what Amazon is doing with shipping. That stuff requires a
lot of creative know-how, and in the coming years we're probably going to see
similar approaches taken in a lot of industries that are traditionally "people
services."

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thaumaturgy
> _But we have to get ourselves pumped up to do something creative, and
> engagement is difficult because everyone involved has to pierce through the
> BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary activities into "hard work" or
> "way over my head."_

...and plain ol' laziness. I wrestle with this _all the time_ \-- it's quite
hard to force myself to work on a project, or read a book, or pick up a pencil
and try drawing again for the first time in decades, when I can instead pick
up my laptop and browse HN for a while.

This problem is compounded by living vicariously: I can read about other
people being creative, and that's fun.

Eventually I get to a point -- usually at the end of the day -- where I feel
compelled to make, fix, or build something, but I should have been doing that
all day anyway (and waiting until the end of the day is not optimal).

I've not yet figured out how to fix this.

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lvecsey
Actually it's tied to the crisis at NASA, and to a larger extent the country.
I don't know why people are afraid of confronting an issue like this. It's as
if by ignoring it and saying our institutions are ok, things will work
themselves out on their own. No.

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ilkhd2
Absolutely agree. Excessive patriotism and pride is not serving the country.

