Creativity, one of man's highest qualities, is one of the least
understood. It is not sheer volume of work or novelty of expression; it
is not always virtuous. Creativity is what Feodor Dostoevsky had: a
tremendous capacity for sustained, self-motivated work—despite an
untidy outer life that included epilepsy, compulsive gambling and
enough hardships to stun Job. But few teachers can recognize creativity
in children or tolerate it when they do. The child who paints pretty
pictures or whizzes through the IQ test is called “gifted.” The one who
plants an ingenious stink bomb in the teachers' smoking room is a case
for the cops.Or is he? Last week, at 9,000-ft.-high Alta in Utah's Wasatch Mountains, 26
psychologists, educators, industrialists and military men gathered in a
National Science Foundation-sponsored meeting to consider creativity.
With surprising unanimity, they concluded that 1> success in the
scientific age is not simply a matter of intellect; 2> U.S. education
is distressingly geared to uncovering the “bright boy” who can
dutifully find the one right answer to a problem; 3> schools ignore the
rebellious “inner-directed” child who scores low on IQ tests because
they bore him; 4> teachers not only make no effort to nurture the
creative rebel but usually dislike him. More than 70% of the “most
creative,” reported Educational Psychologist Jacob W. Getzels of the”
University of Chicago in a startling guesstimate, are never recognized,
and so never have their talents developed.How can they be recognized? In a joint study, Professors Getzels and
Philip W. Jackson traced the traits of “creative” high school students
by comparing their likes and dislikes with those of “high-IQ” students.
The creative valued humor first; their opposite numbers ranked
“character” first and humor last. What supposedly governs adult
success, the researchers decided, is what high-IQ adolescents most
value. But creative kids enjoy “the risk and uncertainty of the unknown
. . . tend to diverge from stereotyped meanings, to perceive personal
success by unconventional standards, to seek out careers that do not
conform to what is expected of them.” Concluded Getzels and Jackson:
“It is no less than a tragedy that in American education at all levels
we fail to distinguish between our convergent and divergent
talents—or, even worse, that we try to convert our divergent students
into convergent students.”
