The Creativity Crisis

infoneer-pulse:

roomthily:

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

via Newsweek

(Emphasis mine)

This is an important point, and related to the title of this blog (Restriction is Expression)

Creativity and problem-solving are largely synonymous. The better trained and resourceful the mind is, the faster & better it can solve constraints, whether the constraints are the laws of the universe, or the properties of a physical medium.

It’s a copout to think creativity is best developed in the art-room; every discipline can be taught in such a way to foster “better thinking”. If not, why are we teaching it at all?