What happened to being Creative?

My son, Ian, almost flunked kindergarten. His teacher wanted to hold him back from moving on to first grade. And her reason…He colored outside the lines.

Flash forward 15 years and I am having lunch with a former high school teacher of Ian’s. And this teacher is telling a principal how brilliant my son is. How he can do anything he wants and study at any school he wants. How the teacher would give Ian and tech manual and Ian was off and running because he was learning and doing wonderful things.

And he would probably still color outside the lines.

At one time Ian wanted to become a pyro-technician. They blow things up and use computers to do it. And he wanted to work for Disney because Disney does cool stuff. Which they do. Who else would build a Himalayan adventure in the middle of Florida? Or would bring Cars to life enough that people would wait in line for hours to see what Cars Land looks like? That is why he wanted to work for Disney.

I wonder how many Imagineers colored outside the lines in kindergarten.

They have done some studies that show that over time, kids become less creative. We put them in a system and tell them they have to meet our standards of success. And they have to progress at our rate. And don’t get creative about what we say on the test, we want you to say it exactly the way we tell you.

Let me share two examples of what I am talking about. When I started my graduate program I was finishing up my last couple of undergraduate courses. (I was being creative and starting while I was still paying undergraduate tuition.) I had the same teacher in a grad class as in an undergrad class. In the undergrad class I was told what to learn and how and when to repeat it back. Just as I had been told since kindergarten.

The change was at the grad level. There it was, “Steve, tell me your thoughts and opinions and ideas and defend them.” It was like I suddenly had a brain because they class I was taking was a 500 level class rather than a 400 level class.

The second example was working at a two-year college. All the students were required to take a class in computers. They were taught Word and PowerPoint and things like that. One day I walked by the window of the class my son was in. And I could see from the back what the students were working on with their computers. And I could see what the teacher was teaching because her computer screen was projected at the front of the class.

She was teaching some part of Word. But the students were someplace else. There were at least 25 students in that class and only two were copying the teacher. The rest were doing other things on their computer. Why? Because they already knew what the teacher was doing. They were in the class because it was required for graduation.

But here is the real problem. You could test out of the class. But the test was not based on getting the right answer to the question. It was based on using a specific keystroke to get the answer. It didn’t matter that you knew a shortcut, you had to do it “their way.”

Does that sound as stupid to you as it does to me? The kids knew how to get the results, but they had learned another way to do it. Instead of rewarding them for their success, we punished them for their creativity.

We need to stop telling students, “This is how you get there.” We need to start to say, “This is where you need to get to. How can you do that?” Let the kids learn. The chances are they will find very creative ways to get there.

What would have happened if someone had told Thomas Edision that you couldn’t make an electric light…And he believed them? What would have happened if someone had told the Wright brothers that man couldn’t fly…And they believed them?

What if

 someone told you something like that? Would you believe them? I hope not.