Guiding Creative Talent

E. Paul Torrance

• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789125009
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Anyone with an interest in the problems of highly creative children will find this volume useful in guiding a wide range of creative talent at all age and educational levels. In preparing this material, I have drawn most heavily upon my own research and that of my colleagues concerning the creative thinking of children, adolescents, and adults. Although my emphasis is upon the problems of highly creative children, I believe you will find these materials useful in guiding a wide range of creative talent at all age and educational levels. I have also attempted to give these research findings and observations meaning from my experience as a teacher, counselor, and principal in a high school and as a college teacher and counselor, roles in which I have met many highly creative individuals. I have also drawn upon my research concerning behavior under emergency and extreme conditions, especially situations involving coercion.

Chapter 1—CAUSES FOR CONCERN

Why should counselors, teachers, and administrators be concerned with the problems of creative individuals? What business is it of theirs whether or not one is highly creative? Doesn’t everybody know that the highly creative person is “a little crazy” and that you can’t help him anyway? If he’s really creative, why does he need guidance anyway? He should be able to solve his own problems. He’s creative, isn’t he?

Unfortunately, these are attitudes which have long been held by some of our most eminent scholars and which still prevail rather widely. Most of the educators I know perk up when they discover a child with a high Intelligence Quotient or a high score on some other traditional measure of intellectual talent. They are impressed! Most of them are rather impressed if they discover in a child some outstanding talent for music, or art, or the like. Some counselors and psychologists even go to the trouble of testing such things as finger dexterity and speed in checking numbers and names. Not a counselor or psychologist among my acquaintance, however, bothers about obtaining measures of their client’s creative thinking abilities. I was trained in counseling myself and did work as a high school and college counselor for several years, and for two years I served as the director of a university counseling bureau. In all this time, I never did hear anyone mention a test of creative thinking. I certainly never used one!

What puzzles me, however, is why I remained so ignorant of such instruments. I find now that many such tests have been developed only during the past seventy years. Descriptions of these tests are now fairly detailed and scoring procedures can be satisfactorily reproduced. The reason for this state of affairs is simply that we have not really considered this kind of talent important. This kind of talent has not been valued and rewarded in our educational system, so guidance workers have seen little reason to identify it and to try to contribute to its growth.

SOME LEGITIMATE CONCERNS OF EDUCATORS

There are very legitimate reasons why educators should be concerned about assessing and guiding the growth of the creative thinking abilities. I would like to discuss a few of these.

Mental Health

Schools are legitimately concerned about the mental health of children, adolescents, college students, and adults. They would like to be able to help their students avoid mental breakdowns and achieve healthy personality growth. These are legitimate concerns of education. But what does all this have to do with creativity?

Actually, it has a great deal to do with creativity. There is little question but that the stifling of creativity cuts at the very roots of satisfaction in living and ultimately creates overwhelming tension and breakdown (Patrick, 1955). There is also little doubt that one’s creativity is his most valuable resource in coping with life’s daily stresses.

In one study (Hebeisen, 1960), a battery of tests of creative thinking was administered to a group of schizophrenics who appeared to be on the road to recovery. Many of them were being considered for vocational rehabilitation by the State Department of Welfare. These individuals manifested an astonishingly impoverished imagination, inflexibility, lack of originality, and inability to summon any kind of response to new problems. Their answers gave no evidence of the rich fantasy and wild imagination popularly attributed to schizophrenics. There was only an impoverished, stifled, frozen creativity. They appeared to be paralyzed in their thinking, and most of their responses were the most banal imaginable.

Although it will be difficult to prove, I suspect that schizophrenics and others who “breakdown” under stress constitute one of the most unimaginative, noncreative groups to be found. I also suspect that it was their lack of creativity rather than its presence which brought about their breakdowns. Certainly the schizophrenics tested lacked this important resource for coping with life’s stresses. Creativity is a necessary resource for their struggle back to mental health.

Fully Functioning Persons

Schools are anxious that the children they educate grow into fully functioning persons. This has long been an avowed and widely approved purpose of education. We say that education in a democracy should help individuals fully develop their talents. Recently there have been pressures to limit this to intellectual talents. There has been much talk about limiting the school’s concern to the full development of the intellect only.

Even with this limited definition of the goals of education, the abilities involved in creative thinking cannot be ignored. There has been increasing recognition of the fact that traditional measures of intelligence attempt to assess only a few of man’s thinking abilities. In his early work Binet (1909) recognized clearly this deficiency. It has taken the sustained work of Guilford (1959a) and his associates to communicate effectively the complexity of man’s mental operations.

Certainly we cannot say that one is fully functioning mentally, if the abilities involved in creative thinking remain undeveloped or are paralyzed. These are the abilities involved in becoming aware of problems, thinking up possible solutions, and testing them. If their functioning is impaired, one’s capacity for coping with life’s problems is indeed marginal.

Educational Achievement

Almost no one disputes the legitimacy of the school’s concern about educational achievement. Teachers and guidance workers are asked to help under-achievers to make better use of their intellectual resources and to help over-achievers become better “rounded” personalities. But, how do you tell who is an under-or over-achiever? In my opinion, recent findings concerning the role of the creative thinking abilities in educational achievement call for a revision of these long-used concepts.

We are finding (Getzels and Jackson, 1958; Torrance, 1960c) that the creative thinking abilities contribute importantly to the acquisition of information and various educational skills. Of course, we have long known that it is natural for man to learn creatively, but we have always thought that it was more economical to teach by authority. Recent experiments (Moore, 1961; Ornstein, 1961) have shown that apparently many things can be learned creatively more economically than they can by authority, and that some people strongly prefer to learn creatively.

Traditional tests of intelligence are heavily loaded with tasks requiring cognition, memory, and convergent thinking. Such tests have worked rather well in predicting school achievement. When children are taught by authority these are the abilities required. Recent and ongoing studies, however, show that even traditional subject matter and educational skills can be taught in such a way that the creative thinking abilities are important for their acquisition.

Most of these findings are illustrated dramatically in a study conducted during three years in the University of Minnesota Laboratory Elementary School. We differentiated the highly creative children (as identified by our tests of creative thinking) from the highly intelligent (as identified by the Stanford-Binet, an individually administered test). The highly creative group ranked in the upper 20 per cent on creative thinking but not on intelligence. The highly intelligent group ranked in the upper 20 per cent on intelligence but not on creativity. Those who were in the upper 20 per cent on both measures were eliminated, but the overlap was small. In fact, if we were to identify children as gifted on the basis of intelligence tests, we would eliminate from consideration approximately 70 per cent of the most creative. This percentage seems to hold fairly well, no matter what measure of intelligence we use and no matter what educational level we study, from kindergarten through graduate school.

Although there is an average difference of over 25 IQ points between these two groups, there are no statistically significant differences in any of the achievement measures used either year (Gates Reading and Iowa Tests of Basic Skills). These results have been duplicated in a Minneapolis public high school, the University of Minnesota High School, and two graduate school situations. Getzels and Jackson (1959) had earlier obtained the same results in a private secondary school. These results were not confirmed in a parochial elementary school and a small-town elementary school known for their emphasis on “traditional virtues in education.” Even in these two schools, however, achievement is significantly related to measures of creative thinking and the highly creative group is “guilty” of some degree of over-achievement, as assessed by usual standards.

It is of special interest that the children with high IQ’s were rated by their teachers as more desirable, better known or understood, more ambitious, and more hardworking or studious. In other words, the highly creative child appears to learn as much as the highly intelligent one, at least in some schools, without appearing to work as hard. My guess is that these highly creative children are learning and thinking when they appear to be “playing around.” Their tendency is to learn creatively more effectively than by authority. They may engage in manipulative and/or exploratory activities, many of which are discouraged or even forbidden. They enjoy learning and thinking, and this looks like play rather than work.

Vocational Success

Guidance workers{1} have traditionally been interested in the vocational success of their clients. Indeed, the guidance movement got much of its impetus from this concern. Of course, it has long been recognized that creativity is a distinguishing characteristic of outstanding individuals in almost every field. It has been generally conceded that the possession of high intelligence, special talent, and technical skills is not enough for outstanding success. It has also been recognized that creativity is important in scientific discovery, invention, and the arts.

We are discovering now that creative thinking is important in success even in some of the most common occupations, such as selling in a department store (Wallace, 1960). In one study it was found that saleswomen ranking in the upper third in sales in their departments scored significantly higher on tests of creative thinking than those who ranked in the lower third in sales. An interesting point in this study, however, is that the tests did a better job of discriminating the high and low selling groups in what the personnel managers considered routine sales jobs requiring no imagination than in the departments rated as requiring creative thinking. Thus, creative thinking appears to be important, even in jobs which appear to be quite routine.

Social Importance

Finally, educators are legitimately concerned that their students make useful contributions to our society. Such a concern runs deep in the code of ethics of the profession. It takes little imagination to recognize that the future of our civilization—our very survival—depends upon the quality of the creative imagination of our next generation.

Democracies collapse only when they fail to use intelligent, imaginative methods for solving their problems. Greece failed to heed such a warning by Socrates and gradually collapsed. What is called for is a far cry from the model of the quiz-program champion of a few years ago. Instead of trying to cram a lot of facts into the minds of children and make them scientific encyclopedias, we must ask what kind of children they are becoming. What kind of thinking do they do? How resourceful are they? Are they becoming more responsible? Are they learning to give thoughtful explanations of the things they do and see? Do they believe their own ideas to be of value? Can they share ideas and opinions with others? Do they relate similar experiences together in order to draw conclusions? Do they do some thinking for themselves?

We also need more than well-rounded individuals. We ordinarily respect these well-rounded individuals, broad scholars, and men of many talents. Dael Wolfle (1960) has made a case for those who develop some of their talents so highly that they cannot be well-rounded. He argues that it is advantageous to a society to see the greatest achievable diversity of talent among those who constitute the society.

A recent warning by Henry Murray (1960), a well-known Harvard psychologist, sounds very much like the one Socrates gave in his day. It reads as follows in part:

An emotional deficiency disease, a paralysis of the creative imagination, an addition to superficial—this is the diagnosis I would offer to account for the greater part of the widespread desperation of our time. Paralysis of the imagination, I suspect, would also account, in part, for the fact that the great majority of us, wedded to comfort so long as we both shall live, are turning our eyes away from the one thing we should be looking at: the possibility or probability of co-extermination....—p. 10.

GUIDANCE ROLES

Many will say, “Surely, schools have a right to be concerned about mental health, full mental functioning, educational achievement, and vocational success. They ought to be concerned that coming generations contribute productively to our society. But how can school guidance workers contribute to the creative growth necessary for these things?”

This is a legitimate question. Parents and peers play such important roles in the encouragement or discouragement of creative expression and growth, what can school guidance workers do? There are at least six special roles which school guidance workers can play in helping highly creative children maintain their creativity and contin...