Bird’s-Eye: Few characteristics are so universally approved of as creativity in childhood, which makes it even more curious that our schools continue to so discourage it, at least according to Henry Giroux. But first we look at some of what we know about creativity in children, and at some depressingly convincing evidence that there’s less of it around.

* Childish Creativity The Frontal Cortex

Pablo Picasso once declared that “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

The solution to Picasso’s problem is startlingly simple, at least according to the psychologists Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson of North Dakota State University: We just need to think like a little kid. In their recent paper, “Child’s play: Facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation,” the scientists took a large group of undergraduates and randomly assigned them to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions:

“You are 7 years old. School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?”

The second group was given the exact same instructions, except the first sentence was deleted. As a result, these students didn’t imagine themselves as 7 year olds. They were stuck in their adolescent present….

* The Creativity Crisis Newsweek

What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

…American creativity scores are falling. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

* “Democracy Has Taken a Major Hit” Henry Giroux Truthout (Thanks, Kyla!)

there is a thoughtlessness in education that has emerged with this emphasis on testing and stripped-down pedagogy and teacher-proof curriculum,” Giroux lashed. “It’s an assault on everything that is decent and basic about education. It’s an assault on creativity. It’s an assault on kids. And that method may be good for measuring the heights of trees, but it has nothing to do with education. Nothing!”