Page 47 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

These dramatic decreases in the ability to be creative would be the opposite outcome of what any school or community would desire. What happened in those 10 years that caused such a dramatic decrease in creativity? Sir Ken Robinson70 presents the notion that schools are primarily responsible for this loss of creativity because of the way in which schools focus on learning by rote and the desire for everyone to come up with the one right answer. Schools are now beginning to realise the critical nature of creativity, especially now that innovation and ingenuity have become essential to the success of most of our lives, as well as in businesses and our economies. An outcome of this trend is that a far greater value is being placed on creativity and the arts, by society in general.
However, standardised testing is directly working against the creativity that most educators want to achieve in their schools. This contradiction in desired outcomes must be addressed by governments and we need to restructure the balance between these two competing forces.
A scientific model for creativity may provide educators with some keys to developing and maintaining the level of creativity we see in almost all five-year-olds. Despite many of our preconceptions that another species can be creative, this is not possible. Creativity is a capability that only humans can carry out and apply to be innovative and ingenious. Elephants painting pictures using their trunk to hold the paintbrush is not an example of creativity. They are not consciously applying conceptual understanding(s) to create their masterpieces. Creativity applied, via our imagination, can create new concepts resulting from us questioning our knowledge, ideas and concepts that we hold within our mind.
Our brain contains millions of knowledge elements, ideas and concepts that are reusable and can be linked to each other in billions of different possible combinations. Every knowledge element, idea and concept emits a brainwave pattern due to their electrochemical activity.
It is here that our imagination lurks, along with our brain’s capacity for creativity. Creativity exploits our imagination, leveraging it to create new knowledge, ideas and concepts. The amygdala and the hippocampus use brainwaves to test out different combinations of knowledge, ideas and concepts to see whether a specific combination of these will meet our needs. The result is often a completely new concept framework, idea or concept.
The amygdala is where the combinations of knowledge, ideas and concepts are assessed to decide whether they meet our ‘search criteria’. Once the amygdala recognises a possible solution, it consciously draws our attention to this combination via the release of hormones and the resulting ‘Aha!’ moment. We then decide whether that combination meets our criteria, by consciously asking a range of questions about the possible solution. Extraordinarily, this process of scanning and assessment takes just seconds.
Creativity does not happen in a linear fashion, but rather in a dynamic, complex and chaotic three-dimensional ‘washing machine’ of knowledge, ideas, concepts and/or concept frameworks, all interacting across our brain, courtesy of our brainwaves. In this model, brainwave activity is the active agent looking to link knowledge elements, ideas and concepts in new combinations that have value.
I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.71 Ken Robinson
70 Sir Ken Robinson. (2007) “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” TED Talks Jan 6 2007. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
71 ibid
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