When I graduated from college I never fathomed that seven years later I would begin my first online business. This is primarily because the internet was only available to a few agencies until 1995, and secondarily because I’m not clairvoyant.
Atari, floppy discs, cassettes, VHS, and bag phones are the technological memories of my childhood, but are completely unfamiliar to today’s kids, which is why when I ask, “Can one of you make sure to tape my show?” they look at me like I’m an alien. “Tape?”
The opportunities available for graduates today seem so vast and yet, their generation can no more anticipate what tomorrow will bring than mine, much less what the world will need, and what part they will play in the global theater.
With this understanding, I believe I will fail my children if I do not give them ample room to discover, develop and expand their own innate creativity, even when it slows down our homeschool day like Kenny’s incredibly shrinking pencil did last week.
Today’s answers most likely won’t be enough for tomorrow’s actuality. Change necessitates an abundance of creatives who can generate amazing new ideas, and predict possibilities beyond our current understanding in a world of ever-evolving technology and global-wide challenges.
In essence, if we help unlock our kids’ creativity, and free them to construct meaningful problems of their own to solve, it will serve as valuable practice for a future that neither we or they can even dream of yet.
And it really must be their own creative genius. More than once it has been clear to me that right when I think I have a finger on the expanse of my kids’ areas of interest, they prove me wrong, so it is best to set them free to create.
Creativity is the key to the future and, unfortunately, research shows that the creativity of children has been on a steady decline since 1990. Kids who are encouraged to express their own ideas, and are not restricted to “old school” systems just because it is how mom, dad, or everyone else did it, will grow in creativity.
Please note, I’m not saying following directions is obsolete or antiquated because that would not be true either. For instance, when Kenny received the Crazy Bubbles Project Kit from Zometool, the very first thing he did was look through the directions. He wanted to see how many pieces were in the kit, and he was interested in the selection of forms he could make by using their step-by-step instructions.
Working through the Zometool designs in his first kit familiarized Kenny with how the individual struts and nodes could be manipulated. So, when he opened the second project kit, Creator 1, which increased the amount of creative tools at his disposable, he was well-prepared and eager to forge forward with actualizing his own ideas.
Basically, the initial guidelines served as a catalyst for Kenny’s personal pursuit with his construction. While building, he was in the flow, talking to himself, humming, stepping back and looking, and all the while, completely unaware of the passing time.
I am not a proponent of throwing wisdom to the wind, but sometimes I have to re-evaluate my nomenclature to ensure I’m not falsely assigning “tradition” the crown of “wisdom”. Tradition is more about maintaining how something has been done through the years, but wisdom is knowledge applied. For our children, and for all our future, the key is where that knowledge is gained, and more specifically, how.
I agree with Sir Ken Robinson’s statement that we’re all born with deep natural capacities for creativity, and more specifically, “it is urgent to cultivate these capacities” because no matter what way we look at it, our future really is in our children’s hands.
What are your thoughts? What do you do to nurture your child’s innate creativity?
Heather Sanders is a leading homeschooling journalist who inspires homeschooling families across the nation. Married to Jeff, Heather lives in the East Texas Piney Woods and homeschools her three children, Emelie, Meredith and Kenny.