Education: Digging the Divergent

Creativity, one of man’s highest qualities, is one of the least understood. It is not sheer volume of work or novelty of expression; it is not always virtuous. Creativity is what Feodor Dostoevsky had: a tremendous capacity for sustained, self-motivated work—despite an untidy outer life that included epilepsy, compulsive gambling and enough hardships to stun Job. But few teachers can recognize creativity in children or tolerate it when they do. The child who paints pretty pictures or whizzes through the IQ test is called “gifted.” The one who plants an ingenious stink bomb in the teachers’ smoking room is a case for the cops.

Or is he? Last week, at 9,000-ft.-high Alta in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, 26 psychologists, educators, industrialists and military men gathered in a National Science Foundation-sponsored meeting to consider creativity. With surprising unanimity, they concluded that 1) success in the scientific age is not simply a matter of intellect; 2) U.S. education is distressingly geared to uncovering the “bright boy” who can dutifully find the one right answer to a problem; 3) schools ignore the rebellious “inner-directed” child who scores low on IQ tests because they bore him; 4) teachers not only make no effort to nurture the creative rebel but usually dislike him. More than 70% of the “most creative,” reported Educational Psychologist Jacob W. Getzels of the” University of Chicago in a startling guesstimate, are never recognized, and so never have their talents developed.

How can they be recognized? In a joint study, Professors Getzels and Philip W. Jackson traced the traits of “creative” high school students by comparing their likes and dislikes with those of “high-IQ” students. The creative valued humor first; their opposite numbers ranked “character” first and humor last. What supposedly governs adult success, the researchers decided, is what high-IQ adolescents most value. But creative kids enjoy “the risk and uncertainty of the unknown . . . tend to diverge from stereotyped meanings, to perceive personal success by unconventional standards, to seek out careers that do not conform to what is expected of them.” Concluded Getzels and Jackson: “It is no less than a tragedy that in American education at all levels we fail to distinguish between our convergent and divergent talents—or, even worse, that we try to convert our divergent students into convergent students.”