The Importance of Why and Cardboard Submarines

"Why is red red and blue blue?" Lucy asked me this week, looking out the window at a stop sign as we were driving home from the grocery store. I told her that the color of light that is reflected from an object is the color we see. Then I rushed home and looked it up and was astonished that I was actually right. I couldn't have gone much beyond that, but still. They often ask questions that I have no clue how to answer. Usually, I love that they are thinking about the world and enjoy learning something new along with them. Sometimes, when they've already asked numerous questions and I've had a long day or have listened to the Glee CD on full volume 3,000 times already, I just want to reply, "No more questions! No more talking! Just let me think!" But, if I didn't think that was a bad idea already, a recent article in Newsweek has me worrying that they should be asking me more questions.

The article, titled The Creativity Crisis (click here to read it in full), explains that:

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

The article lays out the disturbing facts about creativity in our children and its steep decline:

....after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance [creativity test] scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

A "most serious" decline in creativity does not just mean that kids are missing out on a few years of finger painting. A generation with declining creativity is a serious problem for our society, as "the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ." What is this going to mean if we are raising a society of non-creative thinkers? Especially when they will be facing problems and issues we can't even imagine - ones that desperately need creative solutions.

We are not currently suffering a creativity crisis in our household. As I write this, the girls are busy stringing pipe cleaners across their room; I can barely walk across the basement floor due to the cardboard submarine they built earlier this week; and we just got back from a friend's house, where they spent the afternoon making and selling lemonade. But they are only three-, six- and eight-years-old now and I have a real fear that they will lose this ability, that it will be squashed and reshaped into something more form fitting, that they will learn to color within the lines.

I feel fortunate we live in a neighborhood with good public schools. Evie's teacher this year worked hard to encourage creativity and individual projects in her classroom, despite the pressure that she must have felt for her students to achieve certain scores on standardized tests. But the bottom line is that public schools are overcrowded, teachers are overloaded with paperwork, and it is a lot easier for them to simply hand out worksheets than to teach an inspiring lesson.

And graded worksheets, where kids are asked to come up with one correct answer and fill it in the blank, could be exactly what kids don't need. According to Ken Robinson, whose video on Ted Talks explains why we need to rethink the education system we have now (click here to view.), "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. And by the time they've come to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity."

He goes on to say that "all kids have tremendous creative talents. And we squander them. Pretty ruthlessly." Robinson believes that "our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology. One in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way we have strip mined the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future it won't serve us."

As parents, we can be our kids' advocates at school, volunteer in the classrooms, and vote for leaders who prioritize creativity in education. But I realized from reading the Newsweek article that the first step for me is to make sure that I encourage their creativity, always. That means taking a deep breath and letting the basement get messy, which isn't always easy to do. It also means taking a deep breath and answering questions. A lot of them.

In the summer, it's easier for me to encourage creativity in our house. We have more time to start and finish a project, and maybe even clean it up, without having to worry about rushing off to school or piano or soccer. And because of that, I also have more patience to answer questions and encourage projects and experiments. But I hope that the lessons from this article stay with me after this summer. And I hope that, as a country, we can start thinking creatively and asking some more questions ourselves. Like, why is this happening to our kids? And what can we do to fix it?