My dad used to look at some modern art, growl and emit a few expletives, the essence of which was ‘That’s not real art!’ He would tut disapprovingly at the wall with a brick nailed to it, the empty room art installation (wasn’t an empty white room a runner-up in a Turner Prize a few years ago?) and the canvas painted entirely plain black. To my dad, that kind of art wasn’t ‘real’ art; he liked representational art and, most of all, he liked art that gave him the sense of many hours of deliberate practice invested in its creation.
In fact, my dad liked Picasso, but there are probably people who would say that Picasso, and certainly some of the other artists who produce abstract art, can’t really paint; if you Google Picasso’s ‘Le chien’, you will see a drawing that some would say could have been made by a child in a few minutes.
This brings me to the subject of this blog: creativity. Sir Ken Robinson gave a famous Ted Talk in 2006 entitled, ‘Do schools kill creativity?’, that has been viewed, to date, over 72 million times. Many of the things Sir Ken said resonated with people then and they still do now, such as: ‘If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original’ and ‘Creativity is the process of having original ideas which have value’. But his headline point, that schools are apt to kill creativity, feels unfair to me, because it can be interpreted as implying that school staff stifle the ‘natural’ creativity of children and young people through what they typically do or fail to do. In my experience, staff in schools are delighted by the huge creativity that children and young people display daily, and they are at pains to both encourage and celebrate it.
Was Sir Ken suggesting that schools should teach creativity, when he said in the TedTalk, ‘Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status’? I don’t know the answer to this question, but the reference to high ‘status’ suggests a call for a dedicated slice of curriculum time. Creativity is crucial for the development of the world in all sorts of ways: innovation often involves creativity. However, if the suggestion is that we should teach creativity discretely in schools, I don’t think so. For me, discrete ‘Creativity’ lessons within the school curriculum belong in the same category as discrete ‘learning to learn’ lessons or discrete lessons about so-called ‘21st Century Skills’. Creativity, learning to learn and the development of key skills should be tied to the teaching of the specific domains that make up the curriculum; their development is a product of the curriculum and its implementation. As Kevin Ashton says in his book, ‘How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery’ (2015), ‘Creation is a result, a place thinking may lead us’.
Creativity is domain-specific because it depends on knowledge that is tied to the specific domains that make up the curriculum Science, Geography, Art etc… And it doesn’t cross over from one domain to another – being a super-creative engineer is not going to make you a super-creative poet or artist or netball player. Thomas Edison’s celebrated 10,000 attempts to produce a working light-bulb depended on his extensive knowledge in that domain; Newton’s scientific creativity depended on his extensive scientific knowledge; and Picasso could experiment and push boundaries in art precisely because of the foundational knowledge he had accrued in that domain, over years. Almost nothing is impossible, granted, but by and large creativity depends on a good stock of domain-specific knowledge and skills developed over time; Picasso could really paint.
