WentuTreat

25/01/2022

How parents can foster ‘positive creativity’ in kids to make the world a better place
Creativity involves the production of ideas that are both new and also useful or effective. This definition makes it sound as though creativity is quite positive. And often it is.

During the pandemic, creativity gave birth to new ways to work, attend school, tour museums, experience concerts and more – not to mention to develop vaccines and cutting-edge COVID-19 treatments.

As university professors who have collectively studied creativity for over 50 years, we know the many personal and social benefits of creativity.

But we also know that there is a dark side of creativity, too.

Cybercriminals, for example, used their creativity to take advantage of the disruption and fears caused by the pandemic to attack countries, businesses and institutions and steal personal information from people.

Or think about how hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin were promoted as COVID-19 treatments. Some people gained something from these novel treatment ideas – perhaps money, power or the prospect of reelection – but the drugs had no empirical support and people who took them may have bypassed drugs that could have actually helped them.

The point is, creativity is not always socially desirable. So, merely teaching kids to be creative does not cut it in the modern age. Here we offer tips for parents and caregivers on how to minimize the negative forms of creativity in children – and themselves – and foster positive creativity instead.

1. Identify the purpose of a new product or idea
Discuss with children the objectives of innovations – their own or ones they use in everday life. Assess the objectives not only for novelty and usefulness or meaningfulness, but also for how they contribute to the common good. Like criminal hacking, creativity can be used to benefit the inventor but harm other individuals. Hacking itself is not bad unless done with the wrong intention. Ethical hackers use their creativity to help companies locate weaknesses and vulnerabilities of their information systems by using the same skills and tactics of criminal hackers.

Encourage kids to think about what the common good is – not just what’s good for the members of one’s own team – and how to reach it. These discussions apply to the projects or activities that kids are involved in, too. How will the project contribute, even in a small way, to a better world? For example, if the child is writing a short story for a class in school, might there be a beneficial lesson in the short story that readers could take away?

2. Probe for unintended consequences
Discuss different ways people can use a product or idea. Most ideas or products can be used in a positive way at one time or in one place but have a negative effect in another. Or it may be some of each at any given time. For example, social media outlets allow for communication, connection and community-building in a way that was never possible before their advent. But people can also use social media to spread misinformation and hate.

3. Think long-term too
Discuss both short-term and long-term consequences of creative products and ideas. When plastics were first invented over a century ago, they were seen as miracle products for their strength, flexibility, durability and insulation. Today, however, much of that plastic is used once and thrown away. Plastics that don’t biodegrade break down into small pieces that can be toxic and ruin ecosystems.

4. Provide examples of positive creativity
Parents and children together can come up with examples of positive creative ideas and projects. Discuss how creators came up with those ideas and how they influenced people’s lives. Compare examples of positive creators with examples of negative creators. For example, people who specialize in internet security can use their training either to protect the security of people’s information stored in their computers or to try to access that information to steal the victim’s money or identity.

5. Promote perspective-thinking and empathy
There are plenty of books and other creative activities for children that aim to promote empathy and perspective-taking along with creativity. Creative empathy involves feeling as someone else feels whom you do not know or know only vaguely. Creatively taking multiple perspectives means putting yourself in the place of someone – perhaps someone of a different culture, race or ethnic group, or simply someone you do not know – and asking why they may see a problem, such as of racism, differently from the way you see it. Role-playing is a great way to teach these skills, as it involves actively embracing a role rather than just passively reading about it.

We believe the best future for the world lies not with those who are merely creative, but rather with those who are positively creative.

25/01/2022

My magnificent seven. Seven really bright ideas (and one as old as time itself) from 2018
Few things are as valuable as a bright idea.

They rarely pop up in meetings (where most of the time people agree with other people), or in business (where most of the time it’s easier to keep doing what you’ve been doing), or in government departments (where most of the time it’s easier to implement policy than develop it).

But genuinely fresh ideas do emerge from time to time, often in the heads of political advisers (especially those that come from outside politics) or of academics whose mission is to work out how to make things better without caring about the likelihood of their ideas being accepted.

Australians have often led the world
Australia has long punched above its weight developing ideas for the rest of the world, among them Torrens Title, the secret ballot (referred to elsewhere as the “Australian ballot”), the living wage, the eight hour day, taxing married women as individuals rather than as part of their husband’s household, allowing women to stand for parliament, universal government-provided unemployment benefits, free and compulsory primary school education, free healthcare through Medibank, which became Medicare, and affordable education through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme.

How we do it, how we manage to move beyond the obvious to find genuinely new ideas that work, is explored in a new book released this year entitled Hybrid Public Policy Innovations: Contemporary Policy Beyond Ideology, edited by Mark Fabian and Robert Breunig of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU.

Here are my seven favourites on business and the economy from 2018:

Conditional superannuation

Liam Lenten is road-testing the design of a system that would direct a proportion of the pay of sports stars and chief executives (say 10%) into a trust fund to be paid out a certain number of years after they retire. If they have been found to have embarrassed the firm or brought their industry into disrepute, they would forfeit some or all of it. It would concentrate their minds.

Handing copyrights back to authors

Rebecca Giblin points out that in order to get published, authors are willing to sign away their copyright for life (which given the Australian copyright term, means life plus 70 years). But publishers hardly ever publish for that long. Forcing copyright to revert to authors after 25 years would enable them to regain control of their work and ensure it didn’t disappear.

Replacing company tax with cashflow tax

Ross Garnaut, Craig Emerson and Reuben Finighan suggest taxing companies not on profit, but on cashflow – money in minus money out, with no deductions for interest payments or payments that aren’t at arm’s length. It would make investment in new equipment much more attractive and payments to tax havens much less attractive. It would raise more and secure our tax base.

Paying households a carbon tax dividend

Richard Holden and Rosalind Dixon want the proceeds of a A$50 per tonne carbon tax paid to households as a tax-free bonus of about A$1,300 per adult per year. Relative to their incomes, low-income households would gain the most, and even after paying more for electricity, all but Australia’s highest earners would be better off. It would build a constituency for the carbon tax.

Tapping superanuation earnings to fund aged care

Ben Spies-Butcher suggests imposing a flat levy on the lightly-taxed income within super funds in order to bring aged care up to the necessary standard. Because older people have bigger super accounts, it would fall most heavily on those nearer to needing aged care. In principle it would be no different to the (not particularly useful) insurance fees taken out of super accounts.

Allowing homeowners to rent land instead of buying

Cameron Murray says if instead of buying land, homeowners could buy the house on which it was built and rent the land for 2% of its value per year, they could occupy their home for as long as they wanted and still give the owner a decent profit when they moved and the land had grown in value. It would be cheaper than renting and they would get security of tenure.

Targeting payments so that they cut poverty

Ben Phillips, Matthew Gray and Richard Webster have built an algorithm to calculate how to get the biggest cut in poverty out of any given payments budget. A test run points to big gains from using modest cuts to the pension and family benefits to fund a substantial increase in Newstart, one far bigger than proposed by the “raise the rate” campaign.

And here’s one more.

It isn’t new, but it is built on an insight as old as ideas themselves.

While big ideas have their uses, as “lighthouses” that can point the way to where we could be, most of the time change happens by “tinkering”, making a series of minor adjustments, with a result that is evenutally impressive.

Emily Millane argues that it is important not to despair. Removing rough edges, hammering away at what we’ve got, all the time being guided by what could be, can eventually give us results as good as those we would have wanted to have sprung up fully formed. It’s how things usually happen, and it’s worth doing, even if it takes decades.

Here’s to progress, and to good ideas, in 2019.

25/01/2022

Why it is (almost) impossible to teach creativity
Industry and educators are agreed: the world needs creativity. There is interest in the field, lots of urging but remarkably little action. Everyone is a bit scared of what to do next. On the question of creativity and imagination, they are mostly uncreative and unimaginative.

Some of the paralysis arises because you can’t easily define creativity. It resists the measurement and strategies that we’re familiar with. Indisposed by the simultaneous vagueness and sublimity of creative processes, educators seek artificial ways to channel imaginative activity into templates that end up compromising the very creativity they celebrate.

For example, creativity is often reduced to problem-solving. To be sure, you need imagination to solve many curly problems and creativity is arguably part of what it takes. But problem-solving is far from the whole of creativity; and if you focus creative thinking uniquely on problems and solutions, you encourage a mechanistic view - all about scoping and then pin-pointing the best fit among options.

It might be satisfying to create models for such analytical processes but they distort the natural, wayward flux of imaginative thinking. Often, it is not about solving a problem but seeing a problem that no one else has identified. Often, the point of departure is a personal wish for something to be true or worth arguing or capable of making a poetic splash, whereupon the mind goes into imaginative overdrive to develop a robust theory that has never been proposed before.

For teaching purposes, problems are an anxious place to cultivate creativity. If you think of anyone coming up with an idea — a new song, a witty way of denouncing a politician, a dance step, a joke — it isn’t necessarily about a problem but rather a blissful opportunity for the mind to exercise its autonomy, that magical power to concatenate images freely and to see within them a bristling expression of something intelligent.

New ideas are more about a blissful opportunity for the mind to exercise autonomy. shutterstock
That’s the motive behind what scholars now call “Big C Creativity”: i.e. your Bach or Darwin or Freud who comes up with a major original contribution to culture or science. But the same is true of everyday “small C creativity” that isn’t specifically problem-based.

Read more: Creativity is a human quality that exists in every single one of us

Relishing the independence of the mind is the basis for naturally imaginative activity, like humour, repartee, a gestural impulse or theatrical intuition, a satire that extrapolates someone’s behaviour or produces a poignant character insight.

A dull taming
Our way of democratising creativity is not to see it in inherently imaginative spontaneity but to identify it with instrumental strategising. We tame creativity by making it dull. Our way of honing the faculty is by making it goal-oriented and compliant to a purpose that can be managed and assessed.

Alas, when we make creativity artificially responsible to a goal, we collapse it with prudent decision-making, whereupon it no longer transcends familiar frameworks toward an unknown fertility.

We pin creativity to logical intelligence as opposed to fantasy, that somewhat messy generation of figments out of whose chaos the mind can see a brilliant rhyme, a metaphor, a hilarious skip or roll of the shoulders, an outrageous pun, a thought about why peacocks have such a long tail, a reason why bread goes stale or an astonishing pattern in numbers arising from a formula.

We pin creativity to logical intelligence as opposed to fantasy. Shutterstock
Because creativity in essence is somewhat irresponsible, it isn’t easy to locate in syllabus and impossible to teach in a culture of learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are statements of what the student will gain from the subject or unit that you’re teaching. Internationally and across the tertiary system, they take the form of: “On successful completion of this subject, you will be able to …” Everything that is taught should then support the outcomes and all assessment should allow the students to demonstrate that they have met them.

After a lengthy historical study, I have concluded that our contemporary education systematically trashes creativity and unwittingly punishes students for exercising their imagination. The structural basis for this passive hostility to the imagination is the grid of learning outcomes in alignment with delivery and assessment.

It might always be impossible to teach creativity but the least we can do for our students is make education a safe place for imagination. Our academies are a long way from that haven and I see little encouraging in the apologias for creativity that the literature now spawns.

My contention is that learning outcomes are only good for uncreative study. For education to cultivate creativity and imagination, we need to stop asking students anxiously to follow demonstrable proofs of learning for which imagination is a liability.

25/01/2022