It is something that every child seems to possess in abundance, the creative urge. The ability to take a cardboard box and transform it into a racing car, a fairytale castle, a pirate ship, a spaceship, and to create and enjoy adventures in the mind and to weave stories around those adventures. The ability to make magic from the mundane, to take the World apart in the mind and reshape it and mould it into something new and exciting. You see it in every play group and playground throughout nursery and infant school and it still hangs on in pockets in junior school, but it seems to gradually tail off with the onset of the more structured learning of late junior school and certainly senior school. There has been a tremendous amount of research, some good, some not so good into areas such as learning through play, and self regulated learning for older children, and throughout the home schooling movement into maintaining and even enhancing this creativity throughout childhood.
Reports of the results of these experiments in childcare and education are mixed, with some proponents of the various systems claiming some amazing results and opponents tending to be rather more dismissive. Unbiased opinion tends to appear hard to come by as disagreements over impartiality are commonplace. An investigation of the research suggests that there are benefits and disadvantages to encouraging creativity as one would expect with any education system. The benefits are suggested to go beyond simply increasing the levels of creativity, not simply in the artistic disciplines but further into the sciences, languages and the humanities to include an increased encouragement to learn and explore concepts and an increased capacity to create the links between knowledge and understanding that are generally accepted to be crucial to learning more complex theories and concepts in later education.
On the downside there are numerous reports of increases in challenging behaviours, particularly in questioning authority figures, and increased difficulty in social integration in the context of mixing with people, and particularly other children who have not been exposed to similar learning strategies. There have been limited studies into the success of children educated using enhanced creativity techniques in later life as opposed to those educated with more traditional techniques but of course such studies are fundamentally open to dispute since every child is individual anyway, and it is difficult to extrapolate the extent to which education style has influenced end result. There is little evidence to suggest that a creative learning strategy enhances post education performance even in creative fields once factors such as socio-economic background, parental involvement and teacher quality are factored in.
So it appears that being creative is something that we all to a greater or lesser extent lose as we grow older, but conversely there is often a re-flowering of creativity later in life. It is often seen post forty years as people begin to become established in their careers and have a little more free time and increases towards retirement. There are suggestions that this is a part of the “mid-life crisis” but I feel that this is to mis-understand the strength of the creative drive, and also its fragility. Stress and a sense of lack of time are anathema to creativity unless that creativity is your primary occupation. Professional authors talk of having to work to deadlines, painters talk about the quality lent by pressure and time constraints and this is perfectly understandable. Many people work best under pressure in their primary occupation, but when that creative outlet is a hobby, the setting of deadlines whether real or artificial can lead almost inevitability to sterility of thought and a binding of creativity. My personal belief is that unless you make creativity your primary function adding pressure to the mix is detrimental.
I am happy to debate this latter point…..
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