The Creativity Crisis
Out of context: Reply #52
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- ukit0
"Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone."
In a country of 1.3 billion people, we're expected to believe they beat us in creativity based on a single kid hacking his cell phone. And Europe is better in this according to him because...
"The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity."
LOL. And wait, also...
"...financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults"
What the fuck does that mean? It sounds like something you'd read on a Microsoft project overview;)
Even if you're able to decipher it, aren't we kind of overlooking the fact that Europe isn't a single country with a single education policy? I imagine the quality of education is quite different in say, Moldova, versus Germany or France.
In fact, nowhere in the article did he offer a shred of evidence to support his broader point - that the U.S. is worse off than other parts of the world. Let's be charitable and assume that this single "creativity test" (sort of a nebulous concept to begin with) proves beyond a shadow of a doubt creativity is declining. Wouldn't it be equally valid to assume that it's falling across the board, given that TV, video games, and the internet aren't unique to America? The Chinese and Japanese in particular love their video games and internet.
So let's look at the outcomes instead. If, say, China was clocking us in creativity, surely we'd see a flood of groundbreaking modern Chinese music and art, that was completely original and different from what the West has produced? As well as, I guess, Chinese cinema, scientific inventions, product design, etc.
Can anyone really say we've seen that?
China has made amazing progress (and being part Chinese I'm proud of it) but it would be a mistake to attribute it primarily to creativity. It's more accurate, so far, to describe China as the "Wal-Mart" of the world, while we have now become more like the Apple or Google or Goldman Sachs. Like Wal-Mart, any company that supplies a large percentage of the world's stuff is inevitably going to be massively successful. But it would be silly to conflate that with them being superior to us in every respect.