I'm Not Sure Schools Can Teach Creativity

At least not generic “creative thinking skills”

We all admire creativity. The chef who creates a new culinary experience. The soccer player who masters new skills and befuddles their opponents. The scientist who breaks new ground and develops a life-saving medicine.

We all want our children to be creative. Maybe they could become that chef, that soccer player, or that scientist. Even if they don’t reach such lofty career milestones, we want them to use creativity to find solutions to ordinary problems, and to stick with things and persevere in the face of obstacles.

*This* is what creativity looks like.

So it’s become trendy in education circles to talk about instilling our children with “creative thinking skills.” If we just teach them in the right way, or give them the right mental habits, maybe they will develop some of this innate creativity and have it carry forward no matter where life takes them.

And this seems to fit intuitively. We all know “creative” people who seem to find faster ways of doing things, who do lots of things well, or who always seem to figure out the best strategy before we do. These people tend to be non-conformist and think outside the box in more types of situations.

But can this be taught? That is, should we think of creativity as a general, transferable skill? Or is it limited to specific domains and contexts?

A recent article in Educational Pyschology Review surveyed 50 years of research and found that creativity is not teachable, at least not in the generic sense. They write:

The vast majority of Human beings cannot be creative in all domains, but only in those they master. In this sense, creativity is not “domain-general” but exclusively “domain-specific.” As domain specific knowledge, it is possible to teach it and to learn it. More accurately, creativity is a general process (based on the production of random solutions), but it requires domain-specific knowledge (about the problem itself) to produce a relevant solution.

In concrete terms, the most innovative chefs aren’t tossing random ingredients together in the hopes of finding some new flavor combination; they master the classics in order to update them, and they learn the styles of different cuisines in order to combine them in new ways. The same is true for the soccer player who does hours upon hours of drills so they can execute in the most high-pressure situations. And the scientist, who has to learn all the science in their field before they can make new discoveries and push the field forward.

In other words, the most creative people on the planet are highly competent professionals who have mastered their respective domains. They do tend to be younger or less-experienced or moving into a slightly adjacent field, but you can’t take the master chef and expect them to be an expert soccer player or ground-breaking scientist or anything too far afield. That’s not how creativity works.

And this, I think, is the lesson for schools and educators. If they want their students to be 'creative,' they need to be able to answer the follow-up question: “Creative in what?”