A Letter to the Board of Education: Adding a Class on Creative Thinking by Saketh Tangirala

A Letter to the Board of Education: Adding a Class on Creative Thinking

Everybody has a creative mind, but not everyone starts out knowing exactly how to bring such an
asset to its full potential. Following Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s 2010 criticism of the decline in creativity in “The Creativity Crisis,” which stated that the creativity quotient metric has decreased since the 1990s, a solution to this issue has become more prevalent in debate with time: specifically teaching creative thinking in school. Creativity refers to one’s ability to think outside the box; people may believe that it requires a specific mindset, yet it is something that expands upon experience, like all other ideas. For this reason, creating a class in which creative thinking is explicitly taught will benefit the vast majority who are unsure of how to start manufacturing their unique innovations.

An area where creativity is required is math competitions, such as the American Mathematics
Competition or AMC. There are varying difficulties, such as the AMC 8 for eighth graders or the AMC 10 for tenth graders. Due to this layout, the level of pure math in such competitions usually encompasses what someone in the eighth or tenth grade usually learns. If this is the case, then why is it so difficult to get all twenty-five questions correct? It is because these questions require a lot of thinking outside the box. An example question can involve a geometric shape that has another shape inscribed or circumscribed around it, and asking for a specific measurement (usually, this shape is a circle or a rectangle). It is a given that nearly everybody has learned about the mathematical properties of basic shapes at some point in their lives; the only thing they need to do to solve such a question is to combine the information they learn into a working method.

People call this creativity, but in reality, it does not consist of anything inherently new. If someone were to teach a class in which solving these types of problems was taught, then people could expand their knowledge given elementary examples into new levels of difficulty. This is entirely plausible, considering that the aforementioned question type appears on the AMC exam at least once a year.
However, the teaching of creative thinking does not always have to be in a rigid setting where there is
often only one correct answer (like math problems). All language prompts of argumentation are supposed to be answered with a level of creativity to them (if the answer is not innovative or unique, then what does it bring to the table?). Again, most high school students taking such composition classes are already well-versed in the idea of communication; they have most likely spent years upon years talking to different people and getting into debates over even the smallest and most mundane issues. And again, if this is the case, then why is it that the AP Language and Composition exam is considered at least mildly difficult, even by those who have taken a class on it? Why do such classes even exist, to begin with? It is because not everybody knows how to bring the fruits of writing and diction to life. Not everybody can get their jumbled-up thoughts flowing onto the paper or out of their mouths so easily, even if the thoughts themselves are creative enough to blow the world’s mind.

The students that come out of such composition classes are bound to use their knowledge for the sake of
writing never-written-before works of argumentation and exposition, even though the class only gave them templates of rhetorical strategies and a set of grammatical rules. This means that English classes are examples of classes that exist to teach creativity anyway. They are valued so much that boards of education across the world consider them as core material. The South Brunswick School District even considers the English graduation requirement as four full years of learning! If these classes are so beneficial to students in today’s times, then expanding this to other subjects (like mathematics) would also be a very successful decision. Since not everybody starts with the experience needed to gain “creative thinking,” the addition of classes that explicitly teach it will do wonders for those who have the basic building blocks of innovation but are unsure or currently not capable of using them to their full potential. People will be able to see the positive effects of such learning in not only environments where there is one correct answer, but in places where there are multiple as well.

 To the Board of Education that I am writing to, please consider my stance; your students,
with the tools they already have, given the right pathway, will do wonderful things in the future with their knowledge.

Source:
The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek