Could your preschooler be a genius?
I’m sitting here today, on school holidays, putting together a session for staff development for the first day back. To the students and parents, that’s a pupil-free day. To my husband (not a teacher), it’s coffee and cake day. As for the teachers, well, you’ll generally find a spectrum of attitudes to professional development days ranging from high enthusiasm to mortal dread.
The focus of my session is on Conceptual Programming. We’re in exciting times in many curriculum areas as we adapt our teaching and learning to the new Australian Curriculum. English, Maths, Science and History high school teachers all have new NSW Syllabus documents to plan from for 2014, and there are some exciting (did I say exciting again?) cross-curriculum priorities to integrate into our units of work – Aboriginal histories and culture, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Sustainability – my personal favourite – among other things.
The new curriculum offers us a chance to reflect, examine and evaluate what we do, and improve our practice. Building our programs conceptually allows us to create learning opportunities that develop our students’ ability to engage with big ideas, examine and explore key and problematic issues in society, to pose, and answer essential questions that have relevance to them. It’s exciting! (Yes, it really is.)
Partly as a form of procrastination, and partly as research, I’ve been surfing Youtube today (as you do), looking for an inspiring little snippet to get the staff thinking and engaged on that first (oft-loathed) day back at school, and I stumbled across a video that’s been around for a while. You might have seen it (if not it’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U). It’s an animation of a Ken Robinson talk about society’s need to make an educational paradigm shift, reinforcing the idea that school as an institution doesn’t cater to 21st century learners; that school, in fact, stifles creativity. Which, as one of my esteemed and learned colleagues just pointed out to me over another social media platform today, is not a new idea. As she also suggested, the video has been done to death with teachers, so I won’t be using it, but it did raise some interesting questions about where we’re at with our education system.
What has all of this got to do with preschool geniuses? I’m getting to it…
Robinson cites a 1968 study by George Land and Beth Jarman, published in their book Breakpoint and Beyond, which, although dated, outlines some interesting findings. Land and Jarman administered a divergent thinking test to 1600 people; divergent thinking being the capacity for creativity, the ability to determine multiple solutions to a problem. This is the type of test administered by NASA to select innovative engineers and scientists. The results in the sample group were astounding – 98% of the participants scored at the genius level for divergent thinking. The sample group? Five-year-olds.
In this longitudinal study, only 32% of 10-year-olds, and 12% of 15-year-olds reached the same level of creative thinking. Of 280 000 adults tested, only 2% reached genius level. Robinson used an example of divergent thinking in his talk: that divergent thinkers would be able to come up with 200 uses for a paper clip, whereas most of us could only come up with 10-15. A divergent thinker would think outside the box. Does the paper clip have to be in the form we know it? If there are no limitations, why not a 200-foot paper clip made of foam?
Preschoolers are geniuses in divergent thinking, according to this study. All those questions, which we often laugh at, the way that their logic seems to have not quite sorted itself out yet, is divergent thinking in action.
An example. Three-year-old Phoebe asked me a couple of months back if Aunty Mel needed some more trees at her house. It was a question out of the blue, and I didn’t understand it at first. We had been hanging out with my friend Mel. Last year Mel celebrated 15 years since a double lung transplant, but her transplanted lungs are deteriorating. She’s on oxygen and in a wheelchair most of the time. Even though she deserves a blog tribute of her own (to come – she is the most amazing person I know), I know Mel won’t mind me mentioning her here.
After a day out with Mel, the kids asked about Aunty Mel. They asked why she has tubes in her nose, and why she’s in a wheelchair, and we told them. I tried to tell them as accurately as possible, in language that three-year-olds would understand. I told them that our lungs take oxygen from the air that we breathe in, and that the oxygen is transferred to our blood, to make our muscles and our brain work. I told them that Aunty Mel can’t walk very well because her lungs can’t absorb enough oxygen, and she gets puffed out and tired very easily, like when they’ve been running around a lot. I told them that there are lots of people whose bodies don’t work properly, and that they are so very lucky that they are healthy kids.
When Phoebe asked about whether Aunty Mel needed more trees at her house, I must admit I was a little befuddled. Then it clicked. Phoebe likes to ask questions at bed time. One of her favourites is “What do trees do?” (so proud), so we go through a list of all the wonderful things trees do: offering homes for animals and birds, shade, making our backyard and much of the world beautiful, supplying wood for building, and paper… and providing oxygen for us to breathe. And there you have it: beautiful little Phoebe’s solution to Aunty Mel’s bad lungs – trees at her house to give her more oxygen. Divergent thinking in action. If only trees were the cure Mel needs.
Is my kid a genius? Well, it’s certainly an interesting study. If we do lose our ability to think creatively, why is that? School could be a culprit. As Robinson suggests, formal education is focused on right and wrong answers from an early age. Or perhaps we just grow up and logic takes over and we realise there are no 200-foot foam paper clips. Why bother hypothesising about them? Although, it’s clear that the people who do innovate in our society are the ones who can see the all of the applications of 200-foot foam paper clips.
For parents of preschoolers, the possibility that our child/ren may very well be creative geniuses is certainly eye-opening. I wonder if it’s possible to somehow retain the capacity for creativity of a five-year-old, even after they start school…?
How can we foster divergent thinking? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect, as in all good education, that it lies in requiring kids to think. To think in different ways, to think creatively and critically. Rather than trying to give children the ‘right’ answer when they ask ‘why’ or ‘how’, maybe we should direct it back to them first, and hear what they have to say. I find myself often providing detailed answers to their questions. How is thunder made? (Long and possibly inaccurate explanation of lightning and thunder). Why do bats come out at night? (Explanation of the habits of nocturnal animals). Why don’t some people have houses? (Long explanation of social inequalities and material differences). Maybe what we really need to do is just listen, and let them get creative, and explore, before telling them how it “really” is.
I end where my journey began: conceptual programming in secondary school. Despite our students’ apparent loss of creativity, for whatever the reason, teachers still need to provide opportunities for adolescents (like preschoolers) to think creatively, to philosphise, to ask why, and to connect to, and build upon, what is already known, to examine and explore, to create and construct, to analyse and apply, and to reflect and evaluate.
THAT will be the crux of my presentation for staff development day, when I get around to putting it together. Maybe tomorrow…
Study Shows We are Born Creative Geniuses but the “Education” System Dumbs Us Down
Most of us have watched Sir Ken Robinson’s 2007 TED Talk “Do schools kill creativity”. There’s a reason that it’s one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time. This wasn’t the first time that Robinson had talked about the negative effect that education has on creativity, and he’s also not the only one to have noticed this trend.
When you are thinking of organizations that have been looking towards the future of work, NASA should have been near the top of your list in 1992. They were already looking for a way to “effectively measure the creative potential of their rocket scientists and engineers” and they had Dr. George Land and Dr. Beth Jarman develop a test designed to identify the capacity for divergent thinking and creativity.
“They wanted to explore and try to understand the true source of creativity better.”
– Study Shows We Are Born Creative Geniuses But The ‘Education’ System Dumbs Us Down
Land and Jarman were curious to see what test results would look like if they tested a more diverse group of people, and a younger group of people. So they went and found 1,600 children between 4-5 years old and tested them.
“98% of them scored at genius level”
– Study Shows We Are Born Creative Geniuses But The ‘Education’ System Dumbs Us Down
98% of pre-schoolers were considered creative geniuses. This was a surprisingly high number, so they started testing the same group of children as they grew up. By grade school, only 30% of the children were considered creative geniuses. By high school, it was only 12%. This was not a good sign.
They conducted the same test on a group of adults, and the results were STILL trending down. Less than 2% of the adults tested in studies were creative geniuses.
Less than 2%.
So Ken Robinson had a really good observation. By the time we finish school, we’re probably much less creative than we were going in. The really bad news is that creativity is one of the most in-demand 21st Century skills. We know that in order to keep up with the future of work, we all need to be able to come up with new solutions to new problems, and we can’t do that if we don’t have creative geniuses leading the charge.
Educating for the future of work means that we can’t do things the way that they have always been done.
NASA’s Study on children: How Traditional Schooling Reduces Creative Spark George Land’s eye-opening findings in a study commissioned by NASA highlight a concerning decline in creative genius from childhood to adulthood.
The traditional educational setup emerges as a potential culprit, sparking discussions on fostering divergent thinking to revive innate creativity
In the late 1960s, NASA was keen on hiring innovative minds. To achieve this, they sought to understand the nature of creative genius and commissioned a study led by George Land. The focus was on young children, aged 3 to 5, as they embarked on a journey to decipher creativity. A group of 1,600 kids enrolled in a Head Start program were subjected to a creativity test initially crafted for NASA recruits. The results were startling; 98% of these youngsters were labeled as creative geniuses. However, a follow-up revealed a concerning trend. The genius tag dropped to 30% at age 10 and further down to 12% at age 15. When compared to adults, only a dismal 2% maintained this level of creative genius. George Land didn’t stop there. He took to a TEDxTucson stage to share these findings. He identified two forms of thinking; divergent, linked to imagination and new ideas, and convergent, related to judgement and evaluation. Land noted a troubling scenario in the educational realm; both thinking forms were being forced to coexist, leading to a cognitive clash that suppressed creativity. He argued that this educational model, promoting simultaneous divergent and convergent thinking, was a major culprit in the decline of creative genius as children transitioned through school. Land’s study, dubbed as one of the longest experiments in history, portrayed a glaring issue. The traditional educational setup seemed to be stifling the natural creative prowess of children, morphing them into less creative adults. This longitudinal exploration by Land and his team revealed a pressing need; a call for an educational overhaul to nurture rather than suppress the inherent creativity within individuals. Land’s narrative hints at a potential goldmine of creativity, waiting to be tapped, if only the educational paradigms are shifted to favor divergent thinking. His work remains a seminal discourse, urging a rekindling of the creative genius within by revisiting the educational structures in place. Through his eyes, the journey of nurturing creative genius is akin to rediscovering the boundless imaginative vistas once traversed with ease during the tender ages of 5.
We are born creative geniuses and the education system dumbs us down, according to NASA scientists
Our natural creative genius is stifled from the time we are born.
At TEDxTucson, Dr. George Land dropped a bombshell when he told his audience about the shocking result of a creativity test developed for NASA but subsequently used to test school children (see the full video below).
NASA had contacted Dr George Land and Beth Jarman to develop a highly specialized test that would give them the means to effectively measure the creative potential of NASA’s rocket scientists and engineers. The test turned out to be very successful for NASA’s purposes, but the scientists were left with a few questions: where does creativity come from? Are some people born with it or is it learned? Or does it come from our experience?
The scientists then gave the test to 1,600 children between the ages of 4 and 5. What they found shocked them.
This is a test that looks at the ability to come up with new, different and innovative ideas to problems. What percentage of those children do you think fell in the genius category of imagination?
A full 98 percent!
It gets more interesting
But this is not the real story. The scientists were so astonished that they decided to make it a longitudinal study and tested the children again five years later when they were ten years old.
The result? Only 30 percent of the children now fell in the genius category of imagination.
When the kids were tested at 15 years the figure had dropped to 12 percent!
What about us adults? How many of us are still in contact with our creative genius after years of schooling?
Sadly, only 2 percent.
And for those who question the consistency of these results — or think they may be isolated incidences — these results have actually been replicated more than a million times, reports Gavin Nascimento whose article first alerted me to this amazing study and its shocking implication: that the school system, our education, robs us of our creative genius.
“The reasoning for this is not too difficult to apprehend; school, as we plainly call it, is an institution that has historically been put in place to ultimately serve the wants of the ruling class, not the common people.”
“In order for the so-called elite to maintain their lavish life styles of overt luxury — where they contribute the least but enjoy the most — they understand that children must be dumbed down and brainwashed to accept (and even serve) their rapacious system of artificial scarcity, unending exploitation, and incessant war,” writes Nascimento.
What now? Can we recuperate our creativity?
Land says we have the ability to be at 98 percent if we want to. From what they found from the studies with children and from how brains work, there are two kinds of thinking that take place in the brain. Both use different parts of the brain and it’s a totally different kind of paradigm in the sense of how it forms something in our minds.
One is called divergent — that’s imagination, used for generating new possibilities. The other is called convergent — that’s when you’re making a judgement, you’re making a decision, you’re testing something, you’re criticizing, you’re evaluating.
So divergent thinking works like an accelerator and convergent thinking puts a brake on our best efforts.
“We found that what happens to these children, as we educate them, we teach them to do both kinds of thinking at the same time”, says Land.
When someone asks you to come up with new ideas, as you come up with them what you mostly learn at school is to immediately look and see: “We tried that before”, “That’s dumb idea”, “It won’t work” and so forth.
This is the point and this is what we must stop doing:
“When we actually looking inside the brain we find that neurons are fighting each other and actually diminishing the power of the brain because we’re constantly judging, criticising and censoring,” says Land.
“If we operate under fear we use a smaller part of the brain, but when we use creative thinking the brain just lights up.”
What’s the solution?
We need to find that five-year old again. That capability that we as a five-year-old possessed, never goes away.
“That is something you exercise every day when you’re dreaming,” Land reminds us.
How do you go about finding that five-year-old?
Land challenges us all: Tomorrow, you take a table fork, turn your five-year-old on and come up with 25 or 30 ideas on how to improve on the table fork.
We are born creative thinkers
98% OF 5 YEAR OLDS ARE CREATIVE GENIUSES AND YOU CAN BE TOO
There lies a common misconception that creativity is intrinsic. That creative geniuses are simply born with an astounding predisposition for a heightened creative output. However, modern research has failed to prove that creativity is genetic and many creative geniuses, across industries, attribute their creative achievements not to a natural born gift, but rather to hard-work and resilience.
Although creativity remains elusive and difficult to measure, Dr. George Land and Dr. Beth Jarman successfully developed a test meant to measure the test takers’ creative potential and capacity for divergent thinking, a free flowing, ‘non-linear’ thought process that promotes idea creation and problem solving. Originally developed in order to help NASA find the most innovative scientists and engineers, the test was later repurposed and given to children over a span of a decade.
The children of this study were first tested at the ages of 5, then again at 10, and 15 years old. Beginning at the age of 5, the results of Land and Jarman’s creativity test suggested that 98% of 5-year old children were creative geniuses capable of divergent thinking that is free of judgement. However, by the age of 10, only 30% retested at a creative genius level and by 15, only 12% qualified to be creative geniuses. A fourth test was then administered to random adults above the age of 25 which resulted in only 2% of them testing in a creative genius score range.
Land and Jarman’s study focused in on divergent thinking and convergent thinking, a thought process that uses critical thinking and logic to solve a problem. The study established that these two types of creative thinking are necessary for innovation, and further proved that children around the age of 5 consistently meet the requirements of a creative genius. The results of this test made it possible to understand that creativity is a skill that must be strengthened and honed over time, instead of inherited. Everyone is born with the capacity and potential of being a creative genius. The problem arises as we begin to age and lose access to this potential.
However, Land and Jarman’s creativity test failed to reveal any correlation as to why creativity is seemingly decreasing with age. While defaulting to an aging brain might be the simplest solution, Land instead wrote, “What we have concluded is that non-creative behavior is learned.”
While the capacity for being a creative genius may be within us all, creativity has continually been devalued not just by the education system but by society as a whole. Within the school system, the creative curriculum budget is often the first cut when budget cuts must be made. Artistic pursuits, in terms of career, are often looked down upon because of a lack of opportunity and economic stability.
The education system has not adapted to the 21st century. The current functioning of the American education system fails to emphasize both styles of creative thinking needed for innovation. The modern education system, developed in the early 1900’s, and mostly unchanged in the last 100 years, was initially focused on training children to enter the workforce of the industrial age. In this way, the education system focused on convergent thinking in order to highlight direction-following, fact memorizations, and task completion. The education system discourages curiosity and wrong answers, instead promoting perfectionism and blind recitation of facts which severely discredits any creative itch or pursuit. The education system’s emphasis on convergent thinking, and the ability to produce the one and only correct answer, forces children to lose access to their ability to think divergently and judgement free.
Still, we do not simply lose our capacity to think creatively, rather we fall out of touch with these skills the less and less they are used. In order to regain access to your inner creative genius, the skills associated with divergent thinking must be built up and strengthened like a muscle. While a myriad of exercises exists to help one enter creative flow, a state of hyper-divergent thinking, cannabis, in smaller doses, can also help reconnect yourself with your inner-creative genius as it can help people escape from their typical thought process and gain access to new perspectives.
Although the education system continues to focus on nurturing convergent thinking, one’s capacity for divergent thinking is not lost or gone, just weakened. The ability to think divergently is within everyone, it is just a matter if whether you are ready to strengthen those skillsets and apply them to your everyday life.
Everyone has quite literally been taught to think in a more linear, non-creative manner, but reintegrating creativity into your life begins by connecting with yourself and re-wiring everyday thinking habits. By connecting with yourself, and developing a non-judgmental way of thought, the creative genius and divergent thinker within us can be reawakened and strengthened.