There's a great, global debate raging about "The Creative Economy" - and about where the world's innovative knowledge workers will come from, to fuel future economic success - in a new realm where brains trump brawn, services trump manufacturing, and imagination trumps knowledge.
Unfortunately, the United States education system continues to strip creativity - in every form - out of the classroom, and out of education altogether.
In the all-encompassing drive for educational "accountability" (driven by NCLB - No Child Left Behind legislation), the creative arts have been driven out of education almost entirely - and these are the activities that enable students to practice creative and innovative thinking ... to learn to think beyond "What Is" and to create "What Can Be."
Nothing could be more important to global competitiveness than the ability of our workforce to think creatively and our business success to be fueled by innovation - yet these are precisely the abilities we undermine by eliminating creative education.
This past week on Meet the Press (7/13/08), Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) noted this serious discrepancy:
"We can do accountability in different ways. What we have done with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is squeeze the creativity out of the classroom, because teachers have begun just "teaching to the test" (the standardized tests required by NCLB). We need to measure progress and reward progress, not hit some one number, some "one size fits all."
But as long as we keep accountability in NCLB by forcing people to measure progress and judging them and saying 'If you do better, good for you ... If you do worse, you've got a problem' - but that's not what we've been doing with NCLB. What we've done is we said 'one size fits all.' We need to reauthorize NCLB, but we need to change it so that we get accountability through progress, rather than one standard number for everybody. ... in terms of all the globalization talk, really, we're going to be left behind. ..."
Teaching to the test emphasizes knowledge only - not imagination. And student testing never measures the most important factor - a student's potential. Not what he or she currently is, but what he or she can be.
For that, we need educators and parents who understand how to share with our children - and how to apply for ourselves - the conscious use of the creative process.
In creative spirit,
Julie Ann Turner
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