On the whole, Robinson was right. Individuals’ creative thinking skills decline as they spend more time in schools, and the average performance in creative thinking tests has declined in the United States over that last two decades.
This is what Dr. Kyung Hee Kim, an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at The College of William and Mary, concluded in a study ominously titled “The Creativity Crisis.” She analyzed almost 300,000 scores of children and adults since 1974 on Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), which were developed by Paul Torrance in 1966 and the most widely used to assess creativity.
Kim found creativity scores rise with age until around 5th grade and then they remain static or decline during high school. Measures of “originality” and “resistance to premature closure” (being open-minded) followed a similar path (p.288).
Creativity scores at the aggregate level had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently declined across all ages but especially in kindergarten through third grade (p.289).
People of all ages have been losing their ability to elaborate upon ideas and now they are less motivated to be creative than people of their age were 20 years ago (p.292).The decline is persistent from 1990 to the present and ranges across the various components tested by the TTCT. The decline begins in young children, thereby stunting abilities that are supposed to mature over a lifetime (293).
Kim argues that among upper grade elementary school children, the decline in creative thinking might arise from the increased emphasis on standardized testing, which has shifted the emphasis in schools toward drill exercises and rote learning, and away from critical, creative thinking.
The high-stakes testing environment has led to the elimination of content areas such as the arts and playtime, which leaves little room for imagination and creative thinking.
In addition, the increasing standardization of curriculum and instruction has been reported to significantly constrain teachers’ autonomy and creativity. Instead of supporting children’s creative capacities, teachers must focus on making sure all students do well on standardized tests.
I would argue that formal education does not necessarily lead to declines in creativity. Rather, it is the kind of approaches that are dominant in schools and that inform school practices that can have an adverse effect on learners’ creative thinking skills.
Robert J. Stenberg of Oklahoma State University reviewed a number of studies that examined the relationship between certain kinds of instruction and creative thinking skills. He wanted to see if schools systematically discriminated against children with creative strengths by strongly favoring children with strong memory and analytical abilities.
These studies used the so-called Stenberg Triarchic Abilities Test (STAT) to measure creative thinking, a test that can significantly improve the SAT’s predictive value of first-year college students’ grades.
In one study of 326 gifted children who were admitted to a summer program at Yale University, Stenberg categorized students according to their strengths in STAT scores: analytical, creative, practical, and balanced. When they arrived, they all took the same course, but they were placed in discussion groups emphasizing different instructional styles (memory, analytical creative or practical instruction).
The study found an “aptitude treatment interaction whereby students who were placed in instructional conditions that better matched their pattern of abilities outperformed students who were mismatched” (Stenberg, 2006: 94). In other words, when students were taught in a way that fit how they think, they did better in the program. Children with creative aptitudes, who are almost never taught or assessed in a way that matches their abilities, may be at a disadvantage in course after course, year after year.
Brian Rosenberg astutely points out in an op-ed in the Huffington Post that the impact of the bias Robinson describes is not evenly distributed (2012). The negative effects of the educational system are felt most powerfully by those who are most economically disadvantaged. Children who attend private schools or well-funded public schools in affluent neighborhoods may not be utterly free of socially-imposed stifling, but they do in fact get the opportunity to develop their creative capacities.
Julian Vasquez Heilig, Heather Cole, and Angelica Aguilar at the University of Texas at Austin tracked the evolution and devolution of visual arts education from Dewey’s progressive era to the accountability movement (2010). They report that “an increasing focus on core subject areas of reading, writing, and mathematics at the expense of arts education.”
For instance, they cite studies that show that in lower performing schools, which are usually populated by low-income students and students of color, an even greater amount of time is devoted to test taking strategies, teachers tend to drill students daily in reading, writing, and mathematics (essentially teaching only to the tests), and certain classes of students are systematically denied exposure to subjects not covered by the tests.
It’s clear, therefore, that the education system’s focus on standardization has had and will continue to have adverse effects on students’ creative capacities. Innovators in the US might accomplish high levels of creativity not because of schools but in spite of them.