killing creativity?

I have a teacher in school who is supposed to teach me World History, but instead finds a way to push projects that are important to her (and completely unrelated to history) into the curriculum of her students. Her favorite one to talk about is "The Positivity Project" which apparently is a campaign which pushes other people to be kind to each other through character traits that they think all humans should have. While I am all for kindness and generosity, I find this really annoying. I just want to learn about ancient civilizations and all that- this isn't the time to hear about why we need to have better teamwork and build stronger relationships with others! ​​

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However, a few days ago my teacher began speaking about creativity, one of the "character traits" valued by this campaign, and why it has declined so rapidly in young children and students. Part of me thought that if people are genuinely creative, they will find a way to do this even if their school isn't especially inspiring. But part of me thought otherwise.

Studies show that top CEO’s believe that the most important leadership quality in a person is creativity. This makes sense because how are you meant to attract new customers or even employees if you’re not being completely innovative? It’s pretty much impossible- nobody wants to be stuck in a job that isn’t at least slightly interesting. But how are you meant to harness these creative and new ideas if you've grown up in a world where answers are at the click of a button and a world where high scores and numbers are the only standard of excellence? Creativity isn't a lone ability that you're either born with or you're not. It is cultivated over time using experiences and other skills, like curiosity. 

I think about Isaac Newton, and how he didn't have Google to look to when he wondered why an apple fell on his head. He really had to be hands-on and experiment, and it ultimately led to "what goes up must come down" and everything that relates to gravity today. He did all this work just because he wanted to. 

​But kids nowadays (probably even including me) have been raised with the magic of iPhones and technology- making it so simple to do everything while physically and mentally doing very, very little. The point of machines is to make things easy, but is this too easy. Are we losing the intelligence that separates us humans from animals? Or on the contrary, are we becoming better because we're the real brains behind these smart devices?

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I think, like always, people are just naturally being fearful of the unknown. When Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean, people feared he was going to sail right off the end of the Earth, washing up into outer space. We like to know consequences and take calculated risks. But here, there are no numbers to make calculations- just the unknown. Whether things go badly or not in the future, creativity is a necessity. We literally would not be alive without it. I think humans, no matter what generation, work off of needs and necessities, so we will find some ingenious way of solving a problem because we are forced to. No matter what, there will always be thinking happening outside the box and coloring going way outside the lines for our species. We should probably get used to it!

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Happy 6 months of the blog, everybody! 😊