Can Creativity Be Taught?

That is the question Elaine Montoya, co-founder of the Motion Conference, posed to me. As a person who has been teaching for over 15 years (at Art Center College of Design and Otis), and as co-founder of The Skool (an online education platform), Elaine knew I was passionate about both design and education. The question is deceptively complex because both worlds—creativity and teaching have so much meaning and require context. My first instinct was to say yes, of course. I'm a teacher. Wouldn't I be a hypocrite if I didn't think so? But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that creativity can't be taught.

“The Creative Adult Is The Child Who Survived.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, author "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing”

Creativity doesn’t need to be taught because we are all born creative beings—it's innate. If that's the case, why do so few people self-identify as being creative? Even worse, why do so many creatives struggle with the process of expressing themselves, and need quality design education?

Let's start by breaking the question down into the two key words—“creativity” and “teaching”. First, let's focus on the word “creativity”. Most of us would correlate being creative with an ability to express ourselves in a traditional art form like drawing, painting, sculpture, poetry, animation, composing music, etc. ... You get the idea. So if you’re not able to express yourself in one of those art forms, you might not see yourself as being creative.

But let’s broaden what it means to be creative. To me, creativity is the ability to connect two or more disparate ideas to create new meaning. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

This can be done with words, word and image, images and countless other variations. Here are some examples:

Unlike the previous century, dominated by traditional agriculture or industry based economies, the 21st century needs knowledge workers—people who can “draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems” (Richard Florida). The "Creative Class" will think and create new approaches to problems, stem the tide of global competition and spur economic growth to countries through innovation. 

“The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers— creative and holistic 'right-brain' thinkers.”
—Daniel H. Pink, author A Whole New Mind

It might not feel like it at this moment, but creative people are more valuable today than at any other point in human history. So what happened? Why are we less creative in a time when we need to be more creative? Why do we have to be taught to be creative if we were all creative to begin with?

One explanation is, although we all start out creative, as we get older we lose a part of our imagination. We become more rigid in our cognitive elasticity. We learn about physics, logic, math, chemistry, English, history, etc. … The “rules” are drilled into us in school. We memorize, recite and are tested on our ability to regurgitate what we learned. We learn to go along to get along. Divergent and independent thinking is discouraged through grading practices and disciplinary meetings. So the more we learn, the less seems possible—the less flexible we become in our thinking.

1+1 = 2

This leads me to the second word “teaching”. We associate teaching with giving someone information. Teachers share what they know by imparting their body of knowledge to students. 

I was at a parenting workshop, when a well-known author explained it this way. "Parenting," he said, "is like downloading an operating system to your kids so that they think and behave like you." There’s no point in hovering over your kids telling them what they should or shouldn’t do. What matters is how they behave when you are not around. Sounds pretty reasonable. That’s what I thought I was doing as a teacher. I was downloading my experiences to my students. I was teaching them about how I compose a frame, how I position the camera, how I edit sequences together for meaning. I wanted them to make similar decisions.

As with each class I taught, after multiple in-class assignments, lectures and critiques, my students struggled mightily to find meaningful, conceptual connections on their own. Without my guidance and prompting, they failed repeatedly. Why was that? How is it that this group of designers and illustrators do not get it? Often times, their explanation was, "I didn't know we could do that. Isn't that against the rules?" To which, I responded, "What rules? Who told you couldn't do put those two things together?" 

The answer—they were victims of a rigid education system designed to stamp out divergent thinking. They mastered the rules they were taught. The better they got at learning the rules, the more they were rewarded, the less creative they became. They lost their ability to imagine.

1+1 = 2

Having recognized this, I've taken on a different approach to teaching. It takes me back to Elaine's question about "teaching creativity." Now, the root of the word education is educe. Educe means to draw out—to draw out and not put in. I have to help my students "unlearn" what they've been taught to free their minds once again. In promoting creative thinking, the rules need to be broken. My duty then, as a teacher, is to help my students get rid of the barriers that are getting in the way of their goals— to become the creative thinkers they were born to be.

 1+1=3

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Chris Do is the founder and CEO of Blind and the cofounder of The SKOOL. He is an Emmy winning director, respected lecturer on the business of creativity, and host of over 100 episodes on YouTube called The Process. #BizOfDesign
@theChrisDo

Special thanks to Colleen L.B. Mathis for editing this post.