I wasn’t aware, until reading this article in Newsweek just now, that we had an accepted scientific way in which to evaluate and measure creativity. I also didn’t know that, since the 1990’s, the creativity scores of American students have been steadily inching downward. I’m not surprised, of course, given the trend in education toward increased testing, and the subsequent elimination of open-ended, discovery-driven programs, but it’s painful to see evidence of it in black and white, on a spreadsheet. I’m embarrassed to confess that I don’t know who our current Secretary of Education is, but I would hope that he or she is taking this seriously. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that decreased creativity is more of a threat to our nation than terrorism. It’s what has defined our nation from its inception. And we cannot allow our politicians to destroy it as they deliberately go about the dismantling of the American public school system… Anyway, that’s enough ranting for now – here’s a clip from the article:

…Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance 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”…

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”…

I don’t have the time or energy for a sustained rant right now, but having 30 or more students being taught by one teacher is criminal, and it shouldn’t be happening in a country as wealthy and as supposedly advanced as our own. And they sure as hell shouldn’t be forced to read lesson plans from a book, forcing kids to memorize useless bullshit, in hopes that the kids will fill out their scantron cards correctly, thereby validating the worth of their school district. Teachers should have smaller classes, and they should be free to teach kids more than a predetermined list of facts and numbers. Eduction should be about collaborative open-ended exploration, intensive questioning, and hands-on discovery. Anyone can force kids to learn facts – we need our teachers to encourage them to test their boundaries, learn how to explore new subjects, and, above all else, acquire a love of learning. And I know teachers are doing that now, in the minutes they can steal here and there, but it’s not enough. We need to give them more time, and smaller classrooms. Nothing less that the future of our country is at stake.