What If?: The Creativity Crisis.

What If?: The Creativity Crisis.

A class of kindergartners is sitting at a table playing with play doh.  One kid might come up with a huge elaborate design, or another might just roll it into a ball and throw it at his peer.  What these kids are doing with the play doh shows a lot of how creative they are going to be later on in life.  What happens if kindergarten classes stop playing with play doh, or other fun activities? The creativity might just come to a stop.  What if our education was based on creativity?

Remember when on the first day of third grade everyone rushes into to class to see who the teacher is and who there classmates will be for the entire year.  Also, how everyone is assigned a desk and supplies with certain colors or each subject, and all the same pens and pencils. What if everyone got to decorate their desk, or pick their favorite colors for their folders.  Instead of sitting down at a desk and learning how to multiply four by six on a piece of paper, they got skittles or blocks that they could use to help them. The way kids learn at that early of an age can effect the way they think for the rest of their lives.

Every year the IQ scores increase and the creativity scores decrease, is there a problem in our education(Bronson, Po)? Yes we seem to be nailing ACT scores but what will that test on paper really do for us later in life? All teens think it's an accomplishment to get a perfect score, yes thats incredible, but what about those teens who aren't the best at test taking.  A score on a test doesn't necessarily prove how successful one is going to be later on in life.  The Chinese seem to always be a step ahead of everyone else because in their education they really focus on creativity. Our country would develop much more creative thinkers if there our education was based more on innovative thinking.

What if not everyone had to take the ACT to get into college, and instead there was a test where one had to problem solve using something creative. Based on that test one would be scored, and thats how teens would get into college.  Would that not be amazing? Our country is currently having some major problems, yes we have brainiacs graduating from Harvard and Yale, but we need people in our country to problem solve with creative ideas.  Just imagine how much more successful and powerful our country would be if we had more creative thinkers.

Our country focuses way too much on standardized curriculum and memorization, we need to step it up! With educating kids at young ages to be innovative yet brilliant thinkers our country would be unstoppable.  What if we eventually reached China's model and beat them out.  All of this is totally possible, we just can't let all our creativeness go and we should encourage it in schools.  With creative thinkers the US might just become even more powerful than it already is, so China better watch out.