Can You Learn Creativity?
March 14, 2007That’s the question for today: Can creativity be learned? Are we born with it? Does it matter what happens in school? Stop by the art loft and add your opinion. What was your experience with creativity? Did your parents encourage it? Who encourages your creativity now? This is a meaty discussion on creativity, so we’re having Buffalo Wings with traditional bleu cheese dipping sauce and celery sticks. And my husband’s lager is ready to pour as well as iced tea. Come on by!
Yes, to some degree, I think you can learn creativity! At least, you can learn to notice the world around you and connect the things you see to alternate situations. I don’t know, I always felt like creativity was about connecting things that others might not have connected, but I also write poetry and that’s fundamental to poetry, so maybe a different sort of creativity is needed for other arts. I wouldn’t describe myself as the “idea person” of any given group, but I’ve always enjoyed writing, which requires me to spin together images and lines of activity that I didn’t actually experience myself and had to come from my imagination.
Memories of creativity: growing up on a farm, my siblings and I didn’t watch television much. We read books and spent the rest of our time wandering around our farm. There was a wide, deep ditch that had trees growing at odd angles from it, so we’d go running around making paths along the side of the ditch until we had our own mini-forest. We also found the decomposed body of a badger in there once. I think I got a lot of the fuel for my imagination simply from being exposed to such things. When I got the opportunity to live in Japan for a year, that gave me a lot of fuel for imagination, too, and I wrote a lot of poetry that year.
Anyway, I do think someone (parents or teachers) has to put you in places where you can take in and then respond to experiences. If I’d been allowed to sit in front of a TV every day I probably wouldn’t have explored as much. I was also home-schooled for a while, and my mom let us do experiments, go to museums, and other things like that. I imagine that was helpful, too!
Fascinating article. I “learned” to be creative in an unusual way:
I had good parents, but they were not of the mindset that a child’s education was paramount. The downside of this thinking is that I was not prepared to enter college when I graduated from high school, but the good thing was that I wasn’t forced to take high school classes that I didn’t want to take just to get into college. Instead I chose to be “art major” and no one said “you won’t be able to get a job”, “that’s foolish and self-indulgent” or anything like that. I was left to myself, not brainwashed by that push to get into the “right” college and study the “right” things to get the “right” job. In this vacuum, I believe my capacity to be creative developed and flourished. I “learned” creativity through experience and environment.