Imagination & Creativity

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” When I was a teacher, I posted this quote at the front of my classroom along with a picture of Einstein sticking out his tongue. The American public education system has chosen a standards-driven, test-centered curriculum designed to cultivate a generation of hoop jumpers, and I wanted my students to know that greatness is about more than memorizing facts, acing tests, and going along with someone else’s agenda.

Greatness requires autonomy, self-discovery, and the ability to find connections where others don’t.

The great psychologist and thinker, Jean Piaget, said, "Education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists"

In the first week of my eleventh grade English course, I wrote, “200=400” on the board and told my students that English class is unique, because it’s the only class where 200 and 400 can be the same. Obviously, they knew that 200 didn’t equal 400, but I wanted them to imagine as many ways as possible that those 2 numbers were the same. They imagined a surprisingly extensive list. They both have 3 digits and two zeroes. They both end in zero. They’re both whole numbers. Both divisible by ten, by five, by two, by a hundred, etc. Both have three syllables. They were both on the board. Both written in chalk. Both would be lots of pizzas but not a lot of grains of sand. There’s a thousand ways they’re the same.

Now you can argue about the words imagination and creativity all you want and what they actually mean (and I’m all for clearly defining terms), but there’s no arguing that the concepts are linked and that a key aspect of both is mining for buried connections between things. All great, creative work unearths a beautiful, unexpected link between things or ideas. Whether you’re comparing sand to time or a forest to an ocean or the writer to the reader, metaphors are the backbone of creativity.

Another key aspect of both imagination and creativity is conjuring something from nothing. They don’t imitate. They innovate. Imagination conjures an idea from nothing. Creativity communicates something new to the world – something born in your imagination. Honestly, I don’t think I have a concrete or concise definition of either of these terms – but here’s my stab at it -- imagination and creativity work together to discover unexpected connections between things or ideas and to conjure something new out of nothing.

So why are these concepts becoming a lost art? Well, I believe there are 2 main reasons: (1) Education (2) Technology.

I believe we’re in the dark days of education. Our government thinks it needs to control everything, and in many ways, it’s ruining a generation. We’re creating a student culture focused on tests and bubble answers and the bottom line. We’re teaching them exactly what they “need to know” according to the Department of Education and the State Board. When I was a teacher, I had to demonstrate how every lesson supported a standard that would be evaluated on the Pennsylvania statewide Standardized Assessment – a standard and a test both devised by some politician in Harrisburg who’ll never meet my students. That doesn’t teach our students how to find their own way in this world. Where is there room in a curriculum like that for creativity, critical thinking, or problem-solving? We’re enabling a generation of students to rely on us to set their standards and dictate what they do and how they think. And they’re going to go through life allowing themselves to be dictated, because they’re not equipped to do otherwise. I know you didn't ask for it, but my philosophy of learning is that it's the hero's journey, and my understanding of that is based on constructivist teaching principles and Piaget's constructivist theory of knowledge. To learn, a student goes from the known world out into the unknown to discover something new. They use all of the knowledge they had previously gained in the known world to understand this new concept. Learning should be a little bit scary and a bit of struggle until you start to see connections between this new world and the world you came from. Then, you can start problem-solve and construct this meaning for yourself. So each student has the privilege and the responsibility of becoming their own hero each time they learn something new. Instead, our educational system is stripping our students of every scrap of self-discovery and self-motivation, and we’re not helping them build the tools they need to be creative. It’s infuriating, but that’s not even the end of the story. Piaget said, “The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”

Technology – it’s a great thing, but I believe we’re being too careless in how we integrate it into our lives. Technology should supplement and support. It shouldn’t redesign the way we think. Software today is designed to be hyper-intuitive and to take away our control by pushing us through processes and making decisions for us that increase efficiency and convenience. Microsoft Word is a good example of this. Word thinks it’s really smart. It tries to predict what you’re doing, and when it does, it starts making decisions for you. Oh, you’re making an outline, here you go. And now you’re stuck with Word’s decision. So what starts happening is that, over time, our minds start to conform to Word’s “thought” patterns. And we start to allow a machine to dictate how we approach problems or organize our thoughts. And it’s not just Word. Every software application you interact with during the course of a day is molding your mind to match its patterns. Click here. Click there. Hover here. Click. You’re learning to be more like a machine.

The machine is training you to think more like it. How messed up is that?

And if an app isn’t intuitive enough, then it sucks – and you never take the time to figure out the logic of it. You don’t want to think it through, because it’s too difficult or too much work, and that’s just another symptom of the problem. We want life to be easy, so we’re allowing smartphone apps and Congress to make our decisions for us and to fight for the causes we wish we had the mettle to stand up for.

Technology is conditioning us to think with certain patterns and along certain paths, and the brain is just like a muscle. The parts of your brain you use the most, become the strongest. If you develop a mental routine, all the parts of your brain that aren’t engaged by that routine start to atrophy – just like if you exercise your biceps but ignore your triceps. Technology is inundating us with constant stimuli along similar paths and patterns, and it's literally warping our minds. Eventually, all our brains'll be hunchbacked old men.

We need the courage to step away from the entanglements of politics and technology to a place of quiet self-reliance, a place away from all the clutter. That’s the one place that’s totally ours. It’s on that spot we can build up from nothing our castle of imagination and creativity.