I assume most people accept that there is a crisis in the earth’s resources; that it is potentially catastrophic and that it has something to do with how human beings have been behaving for the past three hundred years. One climate crisis is probably enough. But I believe that there is another climate crisis, which is exactly analogous to the climate crisis in the natural world and that its consequences are just as serious. This is a crisis of human resources. We are all born with tremendous capacities, but our systems of education and work inhibit many of our best talents and those of our children.
As the past few months have made clear, the world is engulfed in an economic revolution, and the United States is as vulnerable to it as everyone else. This revolution is being driven by two main forces. The first is technology and the second is population change.
Information technologies are transforming the economic and cultural landscape. Children and teenagers are living now in a different world from their parents. They network, communicate and create online in ways that many adults don’t really understand and often fear. The next five, ten, twenty years will see even more profound changes that may divide our children technologically from their children.
I’m told that the most powerful computer on earth currently has the processing power of the brain of a cricket. In the near future the most powerful computers will have the processing power of a six month old human child. At that point, we will cross a historic threshold: computers will then be capable of learning. I asked a prominent computer designer what that means. He said it means that they will be able to rewrite their own operating systems in the light of their ‘experiences.’ The next step could be a merging of information systems with human consciousness. It may sound improbable, but only 30 years ago the only person with anything approaching an IPhone was Captain Kirk.
The second main driver is demography. In the last 200 years, the population of the earth has risen from 1 billion to almost 7 billion. Half of that growth has been in the last 30 years. Most of it is not in the established industrialized economies but in Asia, the Middle East and the so called emergent economies. The birthrate within the traditional populations of Western Europe, the United States and Japan is mostly declining. The growth in those populations is mainly through patterns of migration. The population of the U.S. just passed 300 million, mainly as a result of migration from South America. The Asian and Hispanic economies in the U.S. are growing now at a faster rate than the U.S. economy as a whole.
Technological innovations and demographic changes are interacting in ways that make the present tumultuous and the future unknowable. The economic challenge everywhere is to maintain competitiveness and prosperity in a world where the nature of work, the sources of wealth and the supply of labor are being transformed week by week. The challenge to the U.S. is not just of cheap manual labor in other parts of the world. The U.S. is competing with highly educated and skilled intellectual labor, which is also less expensive at the moment.
It would be wrong to think that these skills are only linear and routine and that other regions are creative deserts. They are not. There is huge creative talent in, and moving towards, China and India. There are major economic challenges emerging in Russia, in the Middle East and in other parts of South East Asia and South America. There’s no doubt that the U.S. and Western Europe haVE an enormous, historic advantage in creativity and innovation over many other parts of the world. But the gap is closing every day.
This global revolution is not only economic: it is also cultural. We are living in a world of unprecedented social mobility and of instant access to information and ideas. All of this is raising profound questions of identity, values and purposes. Globalization is usually thought of as a process of homogenization and in many ways things are becoming more alike wherever you go: a Starbucks on every corner, the same fast food stores and iconic clothing lines. But all of this is a little deceptive.
There is also a powerful counter trend towards localization, to the reassertion of national, regional and local identities. As globalization gathers speed, questions of cultural identity are resurgent everywhere. The French are in no rush to stop being French; and Americans aren’t giving up on being American. Instead, we all exist, like Russian dolls, in increasingly complex cultural layers.
Although we are now more connected with each other than at any time in history, there seems to be little gain in cultural understanding. If we’re to have a chance of economic sustainability and cultural stability, we have to address how to care for the earth’s natural resources. We also have to make much better use of our human resources. In particular we have to develop the powers we now need most of all: creativity and innovation.
I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. There are many misconceptions about creativity. One is that only special people are creative. It isn’t true. We are all born with tremendous creative capacities. What is true is that relatively few people seem to discover and cultivate them fully.
A second misconception is that creativity is about special things, like the arts. This isn’t true either. The arts can be highly creative and for this and many other reasons a balanced arts education is fundamental to the development of every child. But creativity is possible in every area of human activity, including the sciences and mathematics. Some of the most creative ideas come from dynamic interactions between different ways of thinking. There is a lot of art in science and lot of science in art. Creativity is about making connections. One of the most important connections we have to make is to see that economic and cultural sustainability are intimately related.
The third misconception is that you’re either creative or you’re not, and there’s not much that can be done about it. The fact is that a huge amount can be done to cultivate creative abilities. It’s to do with providing the right conditions for growth.
For the most part, our current systems of education do not provide these conditions, and they were never intended to. They were designed in the 18th and 19th centuries primarily to meet the needs of the industrial revolution. In almost every way they are out of step with the technological and economic imperatives of the 21st century. One example is the dominant hierarchy of subjects in schools, which is being reinforced by the current programs of reform. At the top are languages, math and sciences; then come the humanities; and at the bottom are the arts.
There are two reasons for this hierarchy. The first is economic. There is an assumption that math, languages, and sciences are more important for national economic development than the arts. The second reason is cultural. There is an assumption that education is really about developing academic ability and that the arts are not really academic. For both reasons the arts suffer when budgets tighten and when conversation turns into economic competitiveness.
NCLB was introduced to address issues of economic competition by raising standards in public education. For the arts in schools, the impact of NCLB has been largely negative. One report claims that over 70% of schools have cut back or eliminated arts programs entirely as the direct result of NCLB. The arts aren’t victims of a deliberate assault, but of collateral damage. Math and literacy levels in the U.S. are too low. The assumed remedy is to focus almost exclusively on them and to push other disciplines to the margins, including the arts.
This approach is entirely self-defeating. Despite all the major reform programs of recent years, the needle of national educational achievement in the USA has hardly moved. The U.S. still faces high drop out rates, low graduation rates, high teacher turnover, low professional morale, and low international standards of education. The truth is that the current system doesn’t need to be improved; it has to be transformed.
The first reason is personal. At its heart, education is about individuals, not systems. I doubt that there’s a child in the country who gets up in the morning wondering what they can do to raise their state’s reading standards. To succeed in any task, learners have to be motivated and engaged. Education has to excite their passions and imaginations, not numb their minds. To do this, schools needs a rich curriculum not a honed-down one; they need impassioned, creative teachers, not demoralized test administrators.
Conventional education focuses on developing particular forms of academic ability. But there is much more to human intelligence than the conventional academic curriculum recognizes. A balanced education gives equal weight to the arts, the sciences, math and the humanities, and recognizes the many ways in which they can feed into and enrich each other.
The second reason is cultural. As the world becomes increasingly connected, it is essential to nurture a deeper sense of cultural understanding and tolerance. This simply can’t be achieved by a narrow system of instruction bound by an inert culture of standardized tests.
The third reason is economic. A vibrant, innovative economy needs great scientists, technologists and mathematicians, and it needs a literate workforce. It needs all of these to be adaptable to change and innovative in creating new opportunities for employment and sustainable growth. But it needs much more; it needs teachers, craftspeople, writers, artists, performers and designers of every sort energizing the culture and breathing inspiration into daily life.
One of the great ironies of contemporary education is that the pressures on schools that are stifling creativity are being promoted in the alleged interests of improving economic competitiveness. In my experience, business leaders are deeply concerned that students coming through the system are lacking the very qualities that businesses most need – the ability to think creatively, to communicate well and work in teams. Much of my work with corporations is about how to revive the creative abilities that so many people have lost touch with, partly as a result of how they were educated. The fact is the current climate of high stakes assessment, narrow forms of accountability and rigid conformity is suppressing the very qualities of diversity, creativity and innovation that are now essential to economic growth and recovery.
The two climate crises we face are intimately related. Dealing with them will need all our creative resources. Human imagination and ingenuity have brought us all to a perilous place, because we have not thought widely enough about the consequences of what we do. The only way forward is to invest even more deeply in our most distinctive capacities as human beings: imagination, empathy and creativity. There are immense creative resources lying dormant in all our students and in our organizations: in schools, colleges, public institutions and companies. To make the most of them we have to change the basic climate in education, the workplace and in our communities. It’s all about providing the right conditions for growth. If we do that properly, the growth will come. It always does. |
More
Benefits
