How Do You Kill Creativity?

Bill Gates' insatiable appetite for metrics is sacrificing creativity on the stone table of test taking.  It stabs to the heart his dreams of higher educational standards.   As it stands now, my teaching has a two-fold purpose.  I revel in promoting creativity in my classroom, but I am required to prep my students for a month and a half for their Regents exam.  In this period from May to the test in mid-June, creativity is stifled on all fronts.  In order to reach this point, I need to compress several units past recognition.  As tests are attached to even higher stakes, I am asked to repeatedly interrupt my teaching with department-wide assessments to track student progress.  I did not become a teacher to prep students for tests and stifle creativity in the classroom.  Yet, it has become necessary to do so. 

Creativity is the force of life.  It has powered us ahead from the simplest tools to the grandest solutions.  Without creativity, mankind will become a lost cause.  The United States has provided an unusually fertile soil for creativity.  With little upon the land, people found new ways to do more with less.  Even before Emerson came along to immortalize it, Self-Reliance was a vibrant facet of frontier life.  I can think of few things more amazing in their creative genius than the minds that melded our U.S. Constitution, giving us government on a grand scale without a king, and with a deep willingness to listen to the voices of the people.  We are now killing the same.

China was once the capital for world creativity.  Among many other things, China invented the compass, paper, gunpowder, printing, paper money, rockets, rudders and seismographs.  More recently, China impressed the world with its opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics and Ai Weiwei's Bird's-Nest Stadium.  Yet, this same nation sentenced Ai Weiwei to prison for his outspoken views.  China's educational system further reigns in creative minds by placing a premium on raising generations of test takers, children who do not ask questions, but rather fill in identical answers.  And, uniformly, they learn to obey rules without question.  To stray down another path is risky at best.

Chinese Seismograph

Ai Weiwei's Bird's Nest Stadium

I think as a nation we must constantly reevaluate and reinvent ourselves.  High-stakes standardized tests, however, are the wrong tools by which to evaluate ourselves.  No one could doubt the creative genius of Bill Gates, but similarly, I think, time will prove that all the faith he places in metrics are ill-founded.  If that which cannot be measured effectively is neglected in the name of doing better on high-stakes tests, we will lose the best things in life.  Creativity will become a caged bird.  Like a canary in an nineteenth-century mine, we will watch it die an uneasy death.