Educational Leadership - September 2009

plined process that requires skill, knowledge, and control. Obviously, it also requires imagination and inspiration. But it’s not simply a question of venting: It’s a disciplined path of daily education. If you look at some of the people we most respect for their creative achievements, it’s because of the extraordinary insights, breakthroughs, and discipline they have brought to their work.

financial institutions, on health care, on education, there really isn’t a time in history where you could look back and say, “Well, of course, this is the same thing all over again.” It isn’t. This is really new, and we’re going to need every ounce of ingenuity, imagination, and creativity to confront these problems.

Also, we’re living in times of massive unpredictability. The kids who are starting school this September will be retiring— if they ever do—around 2070. Nobody has a clue what the world’s going to look like in five years, or even next year actually, and yet it’s the job of education to help kids make sense of the world they’re going to live in.

You know, for my generation—I was born in 1950—we were told that if you worked hard, went to college, and got a regular academic degree, you’d be set for life. Well, nobody thinks that’s true anymore, and yet we keep running our school systems as though it were. So many people have degrees now that an individual degree isn’t worth a fraction of what it used to be worth. So being creative is essential to us;

it’s essential for our economy.

I work a lot with Fortune 500 companies, and they’re always saying, “We need people who can be innovative, who can think differently.” If you look at the mortality rate among companies, it’s massive. America is now facing the biggest challenge it’s ever faced—to maintain it’s position in the world economies. All these things demand high levels of innovation, creativity, and ingenuity. At the moment, instead of promoting creativity, I think we’re systematically educating it out of our kids.

Is creativity at odds with a culture of standardized testing?
Why do you think creativity is especially important
right now?

The challenges we currently face are without precedent. More people live on this planet now than at any other time in history. The world’s population has doubled in the past 30 years. We’re facing an increasing strain on the world’s natural resources. Technology is advancing at a headlong rate of speed. It’s transforming how people work, think, and connect. It’s transforming our cultural values.

If you look at the resulting strains on our political and

We have a major problem with our education systems, not just in America, but in many of the old, industrialized countries. If you have a system as in the United States where there’s a 30 percent high school dropout rate—in the African American/Latino communities it’s over 50 percent, and in some of the Native American communities it’s nearly 80 percent—you can’t just blame the kids for it. With that amount of waste, there’s something wrong with the system— with impersonal forms of education, with people sitting in rows and not discovering the things that impassion them or invigorate them or turn them on.