Where has Creativity Gone?

By Lucy Springsteen-Chatfield

There are several answers why mainstream education does not know how to deal with creative students who typically dislike attending school.

First, highly creative people are exceptionally visual. Today, due to all the technology permeating our lives, children of the youngest generations are living in a much more visual world. In addition, the modern world moves very fast, pictures on TV move even faster, and in the world of videography there's a general rule of not keeping a picture on the screen for longer than six seconds. In order to cope our childrens' brains must adapt to the speeds of their environment. As a result, while there are still teachers who represent the older generations, children born into this world perceive this fast pace way of life as totally natural. Unfortunately, huge systems respond to changes slowly and mainstream education (in any country) is still running the transition from values of previous generations to those of today's times. Such is reflected in many outdated teaching methods, which are still being used. For these creative and visual students, school is too slow and too boring. This is why many are admonished by their teachers for staring out the window or gazing at the ceiling, instead of doing what the teacher was taught to do: listen.

It has been proven that visual learners imagine before they listen. Since teacher’s auditory teaching styles lack enough visual activation, visual students often tune out. The brains of highly visual students are packed with pictures and videos of what goes on around them. Once these students encounter a period of (by their standards) visual inactivity, they create their own visual stimulation to pass the time i.e. drawing in a notebook.

Moreover, texts for older school goers - especially college or university students - are difficult to absorb because they contain words without pictures. For example, if a visual student reads a travel story, s/he will easily visualize the content of what s/he reads, because a travel story is packed with concrete nouns, action verbs, and shorter active clauses. Nevertheless, if a visual student reads a text from say university lecture notes, s/he will be guaranteed to encounter jargon pertaining to the subject of study, lots of TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), abstract nouns unspecified to any sensory, adjectives, verbs, and passive clauses, where ownership is unclear. Students are thus unable to grasp the material.

Many of the students I have worked with—with or without learning difficulties—have gone on to become engineers, architects, designers, computer professionals and entrepreneurs. This solidifies the fact that the most creative people are the most visual and, paradoxically, the highest occurrence of learning difficulties is evident within the aforementioned professions.