In Defense of Creativity

(From a speech given at Torchlighters Toastmasters on September 20, 2010.)

I am going to make some assumptions here. I assume you have children. I assume those children are in school and have some access to art and music classes. I also assume you are aware of the cutbacks schools are facing. Art and music programs are being cut back if not completely canceled. Programs like VH1’s Save the Music work to keep this from happening to music programs.

Where are the champions for the other arts? For that matter, why is creativity not included in the classroom as a whole instead of relegated to the art room?

During a lecture in Monterey, California, in February 2006, Sir Ken Robinson said:

“We are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

Later in the same lecture, he said:

“Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not because everything they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized.”

Creativity should be part of our everyday lives, not pushed aside because there are more “worthy” subjects to study or things to do. It is not confined to writing, art, dancing, and the like. It also includes cooking, gardening, teaching, and parenting, just to name a few. We need what Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, and Twyla Tharp, author of The Creative Habit, call “everyday creativity.”

If schools don’t think creativity is important enough to include in the classroom, someone needs to pick up where they leave off. Ideally, that would be parents, but they often have the same idea that the schools do that creativity is frivolous.

Quite the contrary. Creativity is vitally necessary.

While children are in the music room learning how to read notes or in the art room learning about shadows and contouring and color theory, they’re also learning how to evaluate problems and figure out solutions on the fly. If these programs are eliminated from the curriculum, being merely electives and not core courses, where do students learn those skills? How do they learn the everyday creativity necessary for day-to-day living?

A couple months ago, Newsweek reported on America’s creativity crisis. When I first heard about that, I poo-poo’ed it. When I read the article, I had to agree. Our creativity scores are going down. In large part, that’s because of the amount of time kids spend watching TV and playing video games.

In a grant I have applied for, I put forth a proposal for a program that includes in-person workshops, online courses, and books (including The Idea Pocket) that would help take up some of the slack in the area where I live (and anywhere I may travel).

Will it be enough? By myself, no, but it will be a start.