The Reason Your Child Might Be Less Creative

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Ideas

November 6, 2014 12:01 AM EST

Barker is the author of Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Our schools and workplaces claim to love creativity — but the research shows they don’t reward it. In fact, they punish it.

“…students with the highest GPA’s were the ones who scored lowest on measures of creativity and independence…”

“…supervisors judged their workforce the way teachers judged their students. They gave low ratings to employees with high levels of creativity and independence…”

Via How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character:

Teachers rewarded repressed drones, according to Bowles and Gintis; they found that the students with the highest GPA’s were the ones who scored lowest on measures of creativity and independence, and the highest on measures of punctuality, delay of gratification, predictability, and dependability. Bowles and Gintis then consulted similar scales for office workers, and they found that supervisors judged their workforce the way teachers judged their students. They gave low ratings to employees with high levels of creativity and independence and high ratings to those workers with high levels of tact, punctuality, dependability, and delay of gratification. To Bowles and Gintis, these findings confirmed their thesis: Corporate America’s rulers wanted to staff their offices with bland and reliable sheep, so they created a school system that selected for those traits.

Teachers often say they love creative students. They don’t:

Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity. Students displaying creative characteristics appear to be unappealing to teachers.

Are you a creative person? Want to be a CEO? Good luck. You’ll need it:

In sum, we show that the negative association between expressing creative ideas and leadership potential is robust and underscores an important but previously unidentified bias against selecting effective leaders.

(To learn the secrets to increasing your child’s creativity, click here.)

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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