Post by nathanjohnson on Aug 3, 2011 13:27:27 GMT -5
It’s hard to believe that kids today are becoming less creative. With all the fancy new outlets for expression – better toys, new ways to connect, iPads, iPhones, generally improved technology – one would think that children nowadays could find a million ways to be creative, given the many tools they have. Yet, Po Bronson’s article “The Creativity Crisis” shows a downward trend in Creativity Questionnaire (CQ) scores since the test’s inaugural experiment by creator E. Paul Torrance in 1958. Further, we’ve seen an upward trend in Intelligence Questionnaire (IQ) scores since the same time period. All of this brings to mind: are our children becoming robots? Many would think so, especially given one of the other articles we were assigned to read called “The Organization Kid.” Yet the cause, in my mind, for this is downward trend in creativity is simple: nationalized curriculum.
What began as general legislation under Reagan, and was later codified into No Child Left Behind is the manifestation of this national curriculum. In 1958, when Torrance conducted his first tests, there was no major push towards improving America’s education. Indeed, at the time, America was the world’s superpower, adept and best at everything from manufacturing to education. No other nation could compete with American test scores. However, towards the seventies, we began to notice that Asian nations were beginning to catch up with our students in classroom performance. So we began a trend of having a national push to increase test scores. We began administering more standardized testing in order to better judge how our students were performing. Along with that, we began to incentivize increasing test scores through merit-based grants and funding. While this seems like a legitimate idea, it takes an integral part of the classroom away. This takes away the freedom to teach by the teacher. When our instructors began teaching by the test, for the test and to the test, our students are no longer being asked to search for their own answers. Instead, they begin the cycle that is plaguing many high schools of today, in which they merely memorize facts to perform on a test, only to be long forgotten shortly after. When we began to nationalize our curriculum and our standards, we began seeing an upward trend in test scores, as seen by the Flynn Effect. Yet our one-on-one interaction between students and teachers decreased because teachers now had a larger curriculum to teach, and had to begin teaching it early on.
What has happened is that we are ignoring the fact that America is a diverse place. What should be standard in the rich suburbs of California is not going to be standard in the rural, farming counties of Kentucky. By increasing one-on-one interaction between teachers and students, and decreasing pressure to teach to national standards, we can begin to see not only an increase in our CQ scores, but also, hopefully, maintain the beneficial Flynn effect. Yet if we cannot do these things, all we will likely see is continued outperformance by our Asian counterparts.
What began as general legislation under Reagan, and was later codified into No Child Left Behind is the manifestation of this national curriculum. In 1958, when Torrance conducted his first tests, there was no major push towards improving America’s education. Indeed, at the time, America was the world’s superpower, adept and best at everything from manufacturing to education. No other nation could compete with American test scores. However, towards the seventies, we began to notice that Asian nations were beginning to catch up with our students in classroom performance. So we began a trend of having a national push to increase test scores. We began administering more standardized testing in order to better judge how our students were performing. Along with that, we began to incentivize increasing test scores through merit-based grants and funding. While this seems like a legitimate idea, it takes an integral part of the classroom away. This takes away the freedom to teach by the teacher. When our instructors began teaching by the test, for the test and to the test, our students are no longer being asked to search for their own answers. Instead, they begin the cycle that is plaguing many high schools of today, in which they merely memorize facts to perform on a test, only to be long forgotten shortly after. When we began to nationalize our curriculum and our standards, we began seeing an upward trend in test scores, as seen by the Flynn Effect. Yet our one-on-one interaction between students and teachers decreased because teachers now had a larger curriculum to teach, and had to begin teaching it early on.
What has happened is that we are ignoring the fact that America is a diverse place. What should be standard in the rich suburbs of California is not going to be standard in the rural, farming counties of Kentucky. By increasing one-on-one interaction between teachers and students, and decreasing pressure to teach to national standards, we can begin to see not only an increase in our CQ scores, but also, hopefully, maintain the beneficial Flynn effect. Yet if we cannot do these things, all we will likely see is continued outperformance by our Asian counterparts.