The Threat of Originality

By Emalee Smith, BrainBuilder Mentor | Tue, 18 Oct 2011

The scene plays out almost daily. My students struggle silently with a prompt, trying to scare up a creative thought of their own. I nudge them down mental pathways and inspire them to climb that mountain of ingenuity. But regularly their mental energy fizzles and they back away from the edge of imagination, frustrated and dejected.

I’ve often wished for the chance to speak with my sixteen-year-old self, to see if I was equally unable to scale heights of mental creativity. Was I having similar difficulties? Is my current ability to conceive ideas and compose language that transmits them a relatively new acquisition? A few yellowing essays, found stuffed into aging file cabinets, and grubby books filled with scribbled annotations tell me that I have always excelled at creating and expressing new ideas. So, am I just a 28 year old weirdo? My students and I are on opposite ends of the same generation. How did I come by this creativity of mind? And how did they miss out on it?

And early causative condition comes to mind. My grade-school education included 3-4 years of homeschooling. The “edges” of my academic subjects were necessarily blurred. We did art in terms of history and science in terms of culinary craft.

But the industrial, factory-ish model of classroom education has difficulty synthesizing and and cross-pollinating concepts. Schools separate subjects intentionally. We leave the math classroom and head for the English hallway, then an hour later traipse down the history hall, only to leave those dates and names behind when we march to art class. But which teacher will tell us that they all have something very much in common? Who reveals that science and literature share a purpose (you can find it in Frankenstein’s monster), or that art and math depend heavily on one another? As a species, we naturally group and separate, organize and pigeonhole. Perhaps this tendency prevents us from seeing the connections.

The black hole that is high school creativity is especially ironic in light of the dizzying capabilities of the Internet. New ideas come from strange mixtures of concepts, hiding in unlikely places. Prior to the advent of the Internet, these “amalgamation” experiences were statistically rare. But today, I can read about a news event on CNN, then watch the original video on Youtube, which will remind me about a post I saw on Facebook, where I remember to text my friend, who tells me about the latest news. Feedback loops abound in social and technological media, and the trails we follow lead to fabulous places. Idea orchestration is more likely in this environment than it has ever been in the past. So why do young minds have so much trouble with innovation? Why aren’t they even more energized and inspired by the Internet’s veritable cornucopia of information?

My theory? Fear. The whole system—teachers, parents, administrators, admission offices--puts such a high premium on grades and rankings. Students hesitate when they are intimidated by the possibility of poor grades. Some evaluation is necessary in order to encourage progress, but when evaluation always trumps real learning, the system decays. Also, strangely, it is just as easy to fear success, as it is to fear failure. Creativity frightens me because a new thought could change the circumstances on which I am just now getting a tenuous grasp. Creativity frightens me because I might fail. Therefore, in an age when the opportunity to discover is extraordinarily available, young minds seem paralyzed by the threat of originality.