Creativity and Education

Hugh Lytton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415675499
• eBook ISBN: 9781136669682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The author gives a lucid account of creativity and its educational context. He discusses the creative process, the character of different kinds of creativity, creative people, developing creativity, and the creative child at school, to give his readers an understanding of the issues that home or school have to face in fostering a creative, non-habit-bound child.

The book should be particularly welcome to all concerned with education in view of the present stress on child-centred education and on the development of individual children's abilities, especially their powers of original thought and search to the full.

1

The creative process

‘The Creator’ par excellence is God and whenever we create some new thing we feel we are God-like and achieving immortality. The Greeks were aware of the awesomeness, the double-edged nature of creating, for Prometheus who discovered fire was venerated as a benefactor of mankind, raised to the Pantheon, but also, having aroused the envy of the Gods, punished cruelly for his pains. In its most basic sense (to ‘pro-create’) creating denotes sexuality—of beast as well as man—and hence is charged with all the emotion, the complexes and inhibitions, and the mysteries surrounding our deepest biological urges. Small wonder then that ‘creativity’ (a word of American coinage, not found in the Oxford English Dictionary) is a word of power, prestige and prodigiousness that we all wish to appropriate. Creativeness confers power and distinction. To quote Bruner (1962):

It is implied, I think, that the act of one creating is the act of a whole man, that it is this rather than the product that makes it good and worthy. So whoever seeks to proclaim his wholeness turns to the new slogan. There is creative advertising, creative engineering, creative problem-solving—all lively entries in the struggle for dignity in our time.

It seems best to start with a working definition of what we mean by a ‘creative act’. Whilst later I shall examine in greater detail the nature and conditions of the creative act we can take as our starting point a simple, but all-embracing characteristic of the creative process that allows us to place it roughly in our universe, and no wording, I think, defines its most pervasive characteristic better than Bruner's ‘effective surprise’:

What is curious about effective surprise is that it need not be rare or infrequent or bizarre and is often none of these things. Effective surprises … seem rather to have the quality of obviousness to them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition, following which there is no longer astonishment. (Bruner, 1962)

There are two implications arising from this characterization of the creative act: firstly, creative quality can reside in any kind of human activity. Men can be creative not only in painting, writing poetry or discovering scientific theories, but also in cooking, carpentering, playing football or making love. Secondly, it is not only the genius who produces creative acts, but this quality can be present in many minor acts at many different levels of ability or intelligence. We should here recognize a distinction between an objectively and a subjectively creative act. The product of objective creativity must meet certain criteria so that ‘effective surprise’ is felt by the beholder. The first and most important is perhaps appropriateness: the product must make sense in the light of the demands of the situation and the specifications of the producer. It should call forth satisfaction, because it fits its context—it is not only right, but just right. (This is another way of expressing ‘effective surprise’.) The second criterion is novelty: the product should be unusual as judged by appropriate norms, or should lead to an uncommon way of experiencing the world. Thirdly—and this is the highest standard—we may judge a creative product by its power to transform the traditional constraints of reality and to yield a radically new perspective. Some original thoughts bring about a radical shift in our approach to a whole field of knowledge. (Cf. Jackson and Messick, 1968, for a detailed discussion of these points.)

Subjective creativity is judged by different canons: it can occur when a person combines things in ways that are individual to him, when he does not simply imitate, but regroups given stimuli or data by means of his own thoughts or actions, irrespective of the effect his creation has on others. We cannot, for instance, deny the epithet ‘creative’ to the five year-old who with all his might and enthusiasm has given us an image of the world as he sees it, littered with square cows and peopled with round-bellied, neckless mums and dads. When he has, out of his own powers, made this vision of the world his own he has been—subjectively—creative, even if thousands of others have acted similarly.

A well-known story tells how a class was given the problem of adding the series: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10. Everybody was working away, laboriously adding the ten separate figures, but one six-year-old boy, after only a few seconds’ thought, announced the answer, 55, to the astonished teacher. He had discovered that there was a logical structure to the series, which could be looked on as consisting of five pairs of numbers, 1 and 10, 2 and 9 etc., each adding up to 11. This boy, who was to be the mathematician Gauss, had by himself discovered a property of a series and thus shown considerable creativeness, as far as his subjective mental processes were concerned, even though the rule was known to most adults before him.

If we call ‘effective surprise’ the hallmark of the creative act, we are in effect setting up a psychological state as the criterion of creativity. And indeed creative acts, or at least the finishing of them, are always marked by states of relief, exhilaration, thrill for the creator so that the act makes a psychological impact on the doer and, in most cases, also on the beholder. While this is a corollary of creativity, it is, of course, not a distinguishing mark exclusive to it.

Imagination and intuition

Before we look at the creative process more closely we must discuss some other concepts that are often mentioned in connection with it: imagination and intuition. Imagination has a number of different meanings. Thus, we can say ‘I can imagine what this house will look like, when it is finished’ or ‘Imagine the Roman soldiers standing guard on Hadrian's wall!’, and in these cases by imagining we mean calling up before the mind's eye images of things that are not actually present, that are to be in the future or that existed in the distant past. This meaning is codified by the dictionary as ‘Power of forming mental concepts or images of things not experienced’. We do, of course, conjure up before the mind's eye not only possible things, but also things or events that are completely divorced from reality, that are simply ‘figments of our imagination’. In the midst of winter, sitting shivering in front of a small fire, we might for instance imagine ourselves being wafted away to a fairy island of permanent warmth and sunshine where manna rained from the heavens to give us sustenance. When we evoke images of this kind we are using our imagination in a day-dream. From this day-dream, and from deliberate pretence and make-believe, it is but a small step to hallucinations or actual dreams, where we say that our ‘imagination’ gets the better of us.

Another use of the term is apparent when we talk of people ‘thinking imaginatively’, or of younger children ‘playing imaginatively’, or when we say that an account has been written ‘with imagination’. Here we attach a positive value judgment to the term, meaning by it that the thing has been done inventively (though we do not approve of too much invention, since we use ‘his imagination has run away with him’ as a polite euphemism for a whopping lie). This use corresponds to another dictionary definition of ‘imagination’, namely ‘artistically inventive or creative faculty’ and here, quite clearly, creativity is implied.

‘Imagination’, indeed, always implies going beyond the given data. Thus, for instance, in young Gauss's problem, simply adding up to find the answer was not imaginative, but going beyond the immediately obvious facts and seeing the hidden structure was an act of imagination and, thereby, of creativeness. (Bruner (1962) suggests the term ‘formal effectiveness’ for the kind of thing that young Gauss did: ‘It consists of an ordering of elements in such a way that one sees relationships that were not evident before, groupings that were not present.’) Although we are able to imagine things that are unreal, that we have never seen and that are inherently impossible, these things are in fact always somehow tied to a part of our reality. It is notable, for instance, that in medieval pictures painted by German artists, scenes from the Holy Land show a remarkable resemblance to medieval German towns with their half-timbered, gabled houses.

At first blush it would appear easy to contrast logical, systematic thinking with imaginative thinking. A Harvard publication, for instance, states: ‘Logical thinking is straight, as opposed to crooked thinking, and that of the poet may be described as curved thinking’ (Conant, 1945). Hutchinson (1949) differentiates between systematic thinking and insight. In systematic thinking, the objective, problem, and method are clearly defined, the process is deliberate, methodical, the problem is well within the range of abilities of the thinker. Awareness of logical relations and the application of the laws of associative thinking are emphasized. Such systematic thinking applies in situations where plans can be deliberately formulated, where the number of variables and hypotheses is not too large. Insight, on the other hand, according to Hutchinson, occurs in the solution of baffling problems and is accompanied by the emergence of the unexpected by feelings first of frustration, and then of apparently effortless integration, feelings of exhilaration, finality and accomplishment.

Hutchinson considers these two types to be the extremes on a scale of thinking and similarly Bartlett (1958) postulates a range of kinds of thinking, the extremes of which he calls ‘thinking within closed systems’ and ‘adventurous thinking’. Now it is tempting, but would be very inaccurate, to identify imaginative or insightful thinking with ‘adventurous thinking’ and systematic thinking, lacking the imaginative touch, with ‘thinking in closed systems’. Bartlett (1958) defines a ‘closed system’ as ‘one possessing a limited number of units, or items, or members, and those properties of the members which are to be used are known to begin with and do not change as the thinking proceeds’. An example of an easy task within a closed system would be the well-known Verbal Reasoning Test question, requiring interpolation of figures in a series, e.g.:

1 2 4 7 … 22 29

Extrapolation, too, where the direction which thinking is to take is predetermined, but the terminal point is not given, is of the ‘closed-system’ variety. Indeed, the difference between extrapolation and interpolation seems to consist mainly in the formal presentation of the given data, e.g. the above problem would not change in nature if it was given as:

1 2 4 7 11 16 …

The characteristic of the ‘closed system’ is the presence of a structure of logical constraints which determine a limited number of possible solutions, but these solutions need not be either easy or obvious. Where the evidence that has to be used in arriving at a solution is disguised, the problem-solving process may, in fact, be very complex. Bartlett gives as example an addition sum:

The data provided are: (i) D=5; (2) every number from 0–9 has its corresponding letter; (3) no two letters have the same numerical value. (The reader may wish to discover the elements of this ‘closed system’ for himself.) Another example of difficult thinking within a closed system would be the detective work of a Maigret who has to fill in the gaps in very incomplete evidence, though when all the data are available only one answer is possible.

When the conditions of a given problem have been closely specified the solution can be arrived at by one small step or by means of a step-by-step trial of a limited number of alternatives to determine which one will fit the specifications. A computer can easily be programmed to carry out this task. The sparser the data provided, the larger the gaps in the evidence to be bridged, the greater is the number of alternative steps that might be tried. The practically limitless welter of permutations of moves possible, for instance, in a chess-game will, however, be reduced to a more manageable choice by the ‘intuitive familiarity’ of the good player with the strategies and possibilities of the game. Even within a closed system, then, in order to select the right combinations leading to effective solutions, a person needs to be attuned to the problem, to be sensitive to likely leads and have a sense of which facts or combinations are relevant (this is probably what is meant by intuition in a certain field—the process of attaining solutions without knowledge of all the relevant data, without going through a process of step-by-step logical reasoning). In other words, where steps are not closely specified, where gaps are large or many and links remote (which means most problems outside textbooks) an imaginative leap beyond the data is necessary as part of ‘closed-system’ thinking, if this is to be effective. On the other hand, where gaps are small or links obvious, thinking can be stepwise. Such steps for the mental mountaineer are, unfortunately, not normally provided in nature, but have to be hewn out of the rock of data by some pioneer thinker. In working out such steps—an essentially imaginative task—the pioneer will routinize and thereby facilitate subsequent effective thinking either for himself or for other, more routine workers. In a significant aside Herman Bondi, the well-known physicist, once said: ‘Mathematicians are not specially good at thinking, they are good at inventing ways to avoid thinking.’ The programmer will perform the same task for his computer by programming it with the necessary sequence of steps or strategies of search likely to lead to success and will thus routinize and give direction to a search that may require a very large number of steps and combinations of steps. By having ‘intuitive familiarity’ with a certain problem area built into it, the computer is in this way enabled to simulate the competent scientist or good chess-player (see above and cf. Newell, Shaw and Simon, 1962). It should be said, however, that so far, no chess-playing programme has ever been achieved that has been thought a worthy opponent by any, even moderate, human chess-player.

On closer analysis, then, we find that imaginative thinking is, indeed, often an important part of ‘closed-system thinking’ and the most crucial difference between systematic and imaginative thinking turns out to be one of size of step, though there may also be other differences, such as the level of consciousness at which the attempts at a solution occur. (The verification of a solution and its checking against criteria would, of course, again necessitate systematic thinking.)

Another way of looking at the distinction is to think of routine, systematic thinking as characterized by responses that are high in the stimulus-response hierarchy. A response that is strong or high in the hierarchy is more likely to occur in the presence of a stimulus, i.e. it is a common response. Original thinking, on the other hand, is typified by responses that are weak or low in the hierarchy, in other words, uncommon responses. Problem solving in this view (cf. Maltzman, 1955) involves the selection of re-ponses, often weak ones, as well as of whole ‘habit-family hierarchies’. However, this view fails to convey any sense of directiveness in the process of imaginative thinking.

At the opposite end of the scale to ‘closed-system thinking’ Bartlett (1958) places ‘adventurous thinking’ and he finds this exemplified in experimental thinking, in everyday thinking and in the artist's thinking. He contrasts the two as follows:

The thinker in the closed system is in the position of contemplating a finished structure. Very often this may be exceedingly complex and elaborate and the rules of its constitution difficult to appreciate. The thinker is, however, in the position of a spectator searching for something which he must treat as being in some way ‘there’ all the time. … The experimental thinker is in the position of somebody who must use whatever tools may be available for adding to some structure that is not yet finished, and that he himself is certainly not going to complete.

In ‘experimental’ or ‘adventurous’ thinking the gaps have become wider and the situation more loosely structured. The first main task has shifted from solving problems to formulating the problem in the most effective way, or to asking the right questions. Whilst there is more need and scope for imagination in ‘adventurous thinking’ than in the ‘closed-system’ variety, clearly, imaginative thinking is not co-extensive with or confined to thinking in unstructured situations, but can occur in many different fields and contexts.

Creative moments

But let us return to the creative process itself—and, as we have noted, imagination in one of its senses (‘inventive or creative faculty’) is synonymous with it. At the heart of creativity lie the creative moment and the creative impulse, the most intensely personal experiences an individual is capable of. It is here that the ‘I’ experiences—for creating means perceiving as well as doing—and acts following out its own most idiosyncratic ways. By definition, it is producing a novel recombination which is not predictable from general laws. No scientific, testable theory has, as yet, come to grips with this phenomenon and the best approach available to us is still through descriptive, literary accounts.

After forty-odd years the analysis of the creative process that is most widely quoted is still that by Graham Wallas (1926) and it must, therefore, be assumed to have a certain intuitive plausibility and appeal to a large number of artists and psychological writers. Wallas is concerned mainly with novel thought in the mathematical and scientific area, but it can be seen that his ideas have application in other fields too. He suggests t...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• THE STUDENTS LIBRARY OF EDUCATION
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• 1 The creative process
• 2 ‘Convergent’ and ‘divergent’ thinking, or how intelligent is a creative and how creative is an intelligent person?
• 3 What are creative people like?
• 4 Nurturing creativity
• 5 The creative child at school
• 6 Retrospect
• Appendix: Some divergent thinking tests
• Bibliography
• Further reading list