Planting seeds growing minds: Creativity vs School

We are born creative and geniuses, but the education system dumbs us down, according to NASA scientists:

Our natural creative genius is muted from the time we are born.

At TEDxTucson, Dr. George Land dropped a bombshell when he told his audience about the shocking results of a creative test developed for NASA but subsequently used to test school children

NASA had contacted Dr. George Land and Beth Jarman to develop a highly specialized test that would give them the means to effectively measure the creative potential of NASA’s rocket scientists and engineers. The test turned out to be very successful for NASA’s purposes, but the scientists were left with a few questions: where does creativity come from? Are some people born with it or is it learned? Or does it come from our experience?

The scientists then gave the test to 1,600 children between the ages of 4 and 5. What they found shocked them.

A full 98 percent!

It gets more interesting

But this is not the real story. The scientists were so astonished that they decided to make it a longitudinal study and tested the children again five years later when they were ten years old.

The result? Only 30 percent of children now fall into the genius category of imagination.

When the kids were tested 15 years ago, the figure had dropped to 12 percent!

What about us adults? How many of us are still in contact with our creative genius after years of schooling?

Sadly, only 2 percent.

And for those who question the consistency of these results — or think they may be isolated incidence — these results have been replicated more than a million times, reports Gavin Nascimento whose article first alerts me to this amazing study and its shocking implication: that the school system, our education, robs us of our creative genius.

“The reasoning for this is not too difficult to capture; school, as we plainly call it, is an institution that has historically been put in place to ultimately serve the wants of the ruling class, not the common people.

What now? Can we recover our creativity?

Land says we have the ability to be at 98 percent if we want to. From what they found from the studies with children and from how brains work, there are two kinds of thinking that take place in the brain. Both use different parts of the brain and it’s a totally different kind of example in the sense of how it forms something in our minds.

One is called divergent — that’s imagination, used for generating new possibilities. The other is called convergent — that’s when you’re making a judgment, you’re making a decision, you’re testing something, you’re criticizing, you’re evaluating.

So divergent thinking works like an accelerator and convergent thinking puts a brake on our best efforts.

“We found that what happens to these children, as we educate them, we teach them to do both kinds of thinking at the same time”, says Land.

When someone asks you to come up with new ideas, as you come up with them what you mostly learn at school is to immediately look and see: “We tried that before”, “That’s a dumb idea”, “It won’t work” and so onward.

This is the point and this is what we must stop doing:

“When we actually looking inside the brain we find that neurons are fighting each other and diminishing the power of the brain because we’re constantly judging, criticizing and censoring,” says Land.

“If we operate under fear we use a smaller part of the brain, but when we use creative thinking the brain just lights up.”