Out of our minds: learning to be creative

 

Last flowers of Iceberg, dreading winter to come

 

"Out of our minds" is the title of a very interesting book I've stayed up half the night reading. It's by Ken Robinson (now Sir Ken), and it's about creativity in the broad sense of the word, and why we as humans need it, and why our education system is lagging behind in delivering the kinds of creativity we need.
    It's not about finding the artist within or why to take up watercolour painting. The book deals with a huge range of subjects, which the author manages to make interesting. The history of education, for example, which is pretty dry. He speeds through this, but looks at the big picture, showing education as a product and a producer of the paradigms of the time. (Paradigm is my new word; now I know what it means).
    Among a huge range of issues, Robinson believes that our education system is desperately out of joint with the advances in technology that we have experienced in the last 50 years. We are still educating for the Industrial Revolution; education is like an industrial process, the child goes in at one end and through a variety of operations, comes out the other end as a fully educated, useful member of society. Education is linear and hierarchical, taught by people who have a kind of priest-like vocation in an enclosed silo called a school. And he looks at our paradigm of intelligence; why do we believe that measures of intelligence are so important, and why do we believe that maths is more worth doing than art history? No one ever gets told "don't do maths, you're never going to make it as a mathematician" but people are frequently told "don't do art history, you'll never make a living as an art historian".
     His point is that we need creativity. The planet and our abuse of it, and our disregard for creativity, have led to a number of Big Problems that only creativity can get us out of. He quotes many astonishing statistics. One that stuck with me is that in 2010, 1 in every 31 adults in the US was in the justice system, either in jail, or on probation or home detention or under supervision. In 2008, the figure was 1 in 77. The State of California spent twice as much money punishing people as it did on the whole education budget. There's a problem that needs creativity to solve.
  Read this book. And this article about how a young cafe owner used creativity to finance and run her business:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-rebuild/8588949/Nervous-start-for-cafes-young-owner