foreword to the inventive answer creativity and young people

8/14/2019 Foreword to the Inventive Answer Creativity and Young People

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Foreword to The Inventive Answer

Creativity and young people

I have learned how to get more ideas from my head and use them more

effectively- 12 year old

When we set out on the pilot phase of Ignite!, NESTAs Fellowship project foryoung people between the ages of 10 and 21, we knew that we were in

largely uncharted territory. The landscape of creativity, education and talentis often talked and written about, but equally often, in much the same terms

as El Dorado or Atlantis were the subject of fable in the Age of Discovery.The maps we worked from for exploring our particular areas of interest werepartial or contradictory.

We decided to set out on a programme of action research. More particularly,

in seeking the widest possible reference, we were determined to allowourselves a genuinely heuristic exploration, discovery for oneself.

Ignite! is founded on the premise that exceptional creative talent does notwait for adulthood to emerge. We have sought various definitions of

creativity and from these have sought various descriptors of the kinds ofyoung people and their mental characteristics in order to explore the furtherdifficult notion ofexceptionality. We have taken the view that if we candefine creativity and locate it in the education of young people, we should be

able to identify those young people who excel in thinking creatively, ordisplay more frequently the habits of creative thinkers. The further challenge

is then to design programmes of support that continue to nurture their innateabilities.

We are encouraged by the progress of the project so far (nine months in tothe pilot phase at the time of writing), and some of the experiences of youngpeople quoted throughout the essay that follows indicate an excitement on

their part to engage in something new and experimental.

We are also encouraged by the signs of the times that suggest that there isa gathering recognition of the importance of creativity as an essential

component of the volatile process of learning.

In The Inventive Answer, writer Richard Ings explores some of theterritory from a personal perspective. He throws some of the debate around

priorities in education into sharp relief, and draws on research and personalexperience to conclude that the decade of 10-21 is an entirely appropriate

target age range for an initiative like Ignite!.

We hope he is right.


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Rick HallIgnite! Project Leader

April 2004

Note

The views expressed in the essay are the authors and do not necessarilyreflect NESTAs policy or priorities.

The names of young people referred to in quotation have been changed.


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The inventive answerThoughts on creativityand young people

Richard Ings


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The inventive answerThoughts on creativity and young people

In this article, writer Richard Ings responds to the decision by NESTA

to extend its Fellowship Programme to young people aged 10 to 21 bysetting the aims and aspirations of the Ignite! project into a widercontext of child development and creative thinking.

*

The child has the cultures repertoire of acceptable ways of

being foisted upon him, and answers back often in rage, butmore acceptably in inventiveness and innovation.

Adam Phillips, The Beast in theNursery

*

Many writers argue that creativity consists of discovering something new in

the world, either producing it entirely from scratch or, more often, fromexperimenting with existing elements and thoughts and combining them inan original way. To make such discoveries necessitates a decisive step -which might feel more like a leap - beyond the safety zone of the tried and

tested into the unknown. When such steps are made (in) public, the senseof intellectual risk is heightened by the potential embarrassment of exposure.

In going out on a limb, the creator may well feel a sudden loneliness, isolatedby their personal and unconventional discovery, and waiting - perhaps only

for a moment or perhaps for ever - for others to understand them andwelcome what they have created.

In many respects, particularly in terms ofexperimentation, riskandpersonal

discovery, this scenario about the creative enterprise could also be describingthe way in which children and young people learn and develop. This process

begins with the dynamic risk-taking of the very young child, necessary if it isto acquire basic skills, and goes right through to adolescence, when there is

an equally vigorous experimentation with new ideas and new behaviours asadulthood beckons. One key issue I want to explore in this article is why andhow this natural creativity of the child and the adolescent seems to

evaporate in the climate of our culture and how it might be nurtured,instead. The fact that so very few of us end up as wholly creative adults is, Iwill argue, a sad testament not just to the narrowness of our educational

philosophy but, more generally, to the conservative, uncomprehending andoften punitive attitude our culture has towards children and young peoples

creativity.


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Ideally, young people should be learning to take more control andresponsibility for themselves during the years from 10 to 21, the age range

targeted by this new project from NESTA. This occurs fundamentally througha process of re-viewing received ideas and exploring new options and freshpossibilities, in the necessary effort tocreate a new (sense of) identity forthemselves. The personal experimentation in the middle phase (around 13-

18) is often particularly fervent, yet it comes at the very time when theeducational system shifts into its most Gradgrindian mode, herding young

people through a rigorous series of examinations designed to equip them forthe adult world of work.

Instead of encouraging a shift over these years from dependency on adultinstruction to independence, giving the young person enough confidence tostart taking the initiative and assuming responsibility for themselves, the

setting up of regular achievement hurdles from the age of 7 through to thelate teens tends to keep young people in a permanent state of waiting for life

theirlives - to begin. This seems to me to be a modern enactment of the

Victorian dictum: of children being seen (examined) and not heard. Thissystem of discipline is no longer, of course, for subjects induction intoservice to Empire and the class system, but into a new servitude to a culture

of docile consumption, in a society where the market has triumphed inalmost every sphere of activity.

It may well be useful to such a society to have infantilized citizens, grown-

up only in the chronological sense, and an education system that retardsrather than encourages creativity. Creativity is, after all about questioning

authority, challenging the status quo, upsetting the apple-cart somethingthe state and its institutions do not usually have the time or patience for.

More fundamentally still, such repression may be mirrored in our ownpsyche, when it often seems a lot more comfortable to accept norms and tofollow set patterns of thinking than to risk stepping beyond the agreedparameters.

This article, then, will look at what encouraging creativity might mean in the

context of young peoples development, what implications that has for ourviews on learning and originality, and finally what potential impact NESTAs

own initiative might make in this context.


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Part One A paradise lost

Somehow the sun does not seem to shine so brightly as it used;the trackless meadows of old time have shrunk and dwindled

away to a few poor acres. A saddening doubt, a dull suspicion,creeps over me. Et in Arcadia ego I certainly did once inhabitArcady. Can it be that I also have become an Olympian?

Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age

In the Genius Issue of December 2003, American Esquire magazine ran its

annual round-up of the brightest and the best, a gallery of individuals whohave demonstrated extraordinary levels of creativity, innovation and

enterprise, among them Paul Moller, inventor of the Skycar, a vehicledesigned to give a whole new meaning to off-road driving. The signs of hisfuture inventiveness were evident very early on:

He was wielding a hammer as soon as he could walk. He builthis first house at age six, a structure about the size of a

bathroom. When he was eight, he built a bigger, sturdierdwelling with a shingled roof that stood for many years. Not

that he needed the space; it was just that nobody ever told meI couldnt.

Although considered a prodigy by his own family, Mollers early creativity isnot so rare - or, rather, should not be so rare. In a perfect world suchimaginative enterprise would be universal, as - arguably - every child begins

with the same potential. The late David Bohm, Emeritus Professor of

Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, certainlybelieved that the rosy memories most of us have about our early childhoodare not fantasy but can be traced back to the real and pleasurable experience

of untrammelled discovery and creativity:

it is well known that a child learns to walk, to talk, and toknow his way around the world just by trying something out

and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (orthinks) in accordance with what has actually happened. In this

way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creativeway, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him, and

this leads people to look back on childhood as a kind ofparadise.

In Bohms account, paradise is lost once such wide-ranging learning has been

narrowed down to a repetitive exercise designed mainly to accumulateknowledge to please the teacher and to pass examinations. The limited

boundaries of this vocational version of learning only harden once theindividual emerges from schooling into the world of work, when the utilitarian

spirit finally triumphs over the impulse to learn for the pure pleasure of it.


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Thus, Bohm writes, the ability to see something new and original graduallydies away, recalling Kenneth Grahames wistful thought that, grown-up, he

may have lost the vision he had as a child.

One of Bohms key insights, that we generally underestimate the child andthe potentially unlimited extent of its creativity, is shared by Margaret Boden,

who writes in her book, The Creative Mind, that:

A young childs ability to construct new conceptual spaces isseldom appreciated even by its doting parents. All human

infants spontaneously transform their own conceptual space infundamental ways, so that they come to be able to thinkthoughts of a kind which they could not have thought before.

It would seem to me that all our efforts to be creative later in life must relatein some way to this early period, when in the right kind of environment

creativity happens naturally, as part of a growing, i.e. learning, process. This

is the original form of what Boden terms P-creativity - coming up with anidea by yourself which, on rare occasions, may lead to H-creativity, thecreation of a unique idea, never thought of by anyone else before. Although

NESTA may ultimately be interested most in H-creativity the developmentof ideas that are entirely new (and potentially useful) to the world thefundamental process to understand (and then nurture) is summed up inBodens words: Never mind who thought of the idea first: how did that

person manage to come up with it, given that theyhad never thought of itbefore?

I have seen three of my own children acquire a range of skills, including the

immensely complex and abstract skill of language, and I am still no closer tounderstanding precisely just when the penny dropped, how the never-before-thought idea emerged, where the learning actually began. What alsointerests me here is that this creativity or learning seems to happen

primarily from within the child, driven by its own needs and drives, and notas a passive response to any direct form of teaching or instruction from me.

In trying something out and seeing what happens, the child discovers thingsfor itself, through its own passionate curiosity, without having to be

dragooned into learning; indeed, its whole existence is a learning situation.

As we approach a discussion about the Ignite! age-group, I want to hold onto this image of passionate curiosity and to argue, following Freud, that

ultimately desire lies behind all learning.

Reaching a critical stage

Writing about much older young people, Isidor I. Rabi, Nobel Prize winner inPhysics, argues that teaching in his field largely fails to recognise the

personalnature of creativity:


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We dont teach our students enough of the intellectual content

of experiments their novelty and their capacity for openingnew fields. My own view is that you take these thingspersonally. You do an experiment because your ownphilosophy makes you want to know the result. Its too hard,

and life is too short, to spend your time doing somethingbecause someone else has said it is important. You must feel

the thing yourself.

This feeling the thing yourself rather than doing what you are told to seemsto me to be basic to any kind of creativity and it relates directly to the issueof control over creativity and learning (and indeed over personal agency as awhole), an issue that is most vividly acted out at two critical stages of

separation and development in young peoples development.

The terrible twos, a phase of development that may actually begin as young

as 18 months, is our less than charitable term for the time when the child,once so biddable, starts to challenge parental authority and test its ownpowers. This is undoubtedly also a testing time for parents and carers, as a

delicate balance must be struck between setting boundaries and allowingoccasional trespass, between curbing the childs natural and anti-socialtendency to grandiosity whilst nurturing its growing self-confidence andindependence. The child needs to learn that it is not the centre of the world

but equally to know that it is loved unconditionally. It needs to have theconfidence to try things out for itself but to know that there are limits to its

freedom of action, not least for its own safety. This is the first and mostsignificant period of separation and individuation from parental authority, and

how well or badly it is handled will profoundly shape the childs developmentand its chances of reaching a healthy adulthood. David Bohm makes animportant distinction between telling a child how to behave and telling it whatsort of person it should be. Exhorting a child to be a good boy or girl, for

example:

implies the effort to impose a mechanical pattern very deeplyin the whole order in which the mind operates. A similar effort

is implied when the child is told what he should think andwhat he should feel.

The second period of separation is, of course, adolescence or, as Kate Figes

has called it in her recent book, the terrible teens. It is only now thatparents discover if the earlier process has gone well; unresolved issues over

power and powerlessness are finally acted out, often very painfully for allconcerned, sometimes with tragic results: drug abuse, self harm, suicide.

Even if the earlier separation process has gone well, the teenage years canoften be a battleground. Harry Enfields comic creation Kevin the teenageris based on a stereotype but in every stereotype there is a kernel of


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observable truth and every parent must on occasion sympathise with Kevinshapless mother and father, faced with yet another bewildering tirade.

Yet, the teenager from hell, like the terrible two-year old, is not some aliencreature but a version of ourselves as we struggle to make sense of ourworld and wrest control over it. The childs enquiring why?, aimed at

discovering how the world works, becomes the emotional why?ofadolescence, challenging the way the world works, and becomes, if

sustained, the convention-busting why not?of the creative adult.Recognising the value of this curiosity is vital to an understanding of how

creativity develops. Victor Weisskopf, Professor of Physics at MIT, arguesthat:

we must always begin by asking questions, not giving answers.

In this way we contribute to the joy of insight. For science isthe opposite of knowledge. Science is curiosity.

This is a very powerful statement and flies in the face of our conventionalwisdoms about education, which all seem to come down to a belief in thebenefits of accumulating facts: the mere acquisition of knowledge. This kind

of education is, in effect, a closed system rather than a truly educativeprocess, where (to track education to its semantic roots) learning is drawnor led out of active subjects. Yet, in popular culture as much as at school,rote learning of facts is highly valued; from University Challenge to The

Weakest Linkvia Mastermind, the common perception is that knowing theone correct answer to a factual question is the clearest indication of high

intelligence. However, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues pithily: It isnot always enlivening to be well informed.

Unofficial education

Phillips contrasts official education, which socialises children into adopting

norms of thinking and behaviour, with unofficial education. Official educationis based on imitation, not transformation.

To be parents or teachers (or psychoanalysts) rather than

merely autocrats or bullies, we need to distinguish betweenvocabularies that are to be imitated that offer themselves up

as fetishes, or for identification (being like the kind of person

who speaks like this) and vocabularies that invitetransformation (the difference, say, between a poem and aninstruction manual).

The frustration for many teachers today is that there is less opportunity than

ever before to develop transformative vocabularies. One teacher, quoted byKate Figes, sums up the current drive as [p]rescribed learning rather than

explored, bemoaning in particular the loss of two years when such exploring


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had, at least in theory, been more feasible: the year prior to the GCSE year,and the first year of A-levels, now dominated by A/S level examinations.

Thus, the space that Figes argues is needed for the extensive discussion,analysis and experimentation essential at this age to develop [adolescents]powers of critical thinking, is simply not available at school. Indeed, schoolis part of the problem, not the solution.

For all the efforts to modernise the formal education sector, it remains

obdurately in the Victorian age. Wave after wave of new technology, fromthe tape recorder to the video to the computer, has been either

metaphorically or in reality consigned to the cupboard in the classroom, itsvast potential untapped. If it is used at all, it is usually to promote the samekind of pedagogy that incensed Dickens to his satires on Victorian education:the rote slate-scratching of those times upgraded to on-screen literacy and

numeracy exercises. Meanwhile, the serried ranks of cowed urchins oncedestined overwhelmingly for mines or factories or service below stairs have

become todays gradable units, processed in similar fashion through a system

regulated by the authority of architecture and expertise, school-defined timeand behaviour, and rigid standardised testing regimes. It is as if aparadigmatic shift had not occurred in our society, transforming the

economic base from mechanical to more creative processes. When theschool system we have inherited from our heavy-manufacturing forebears isclearly failing to produce people appropriately skilled for the latest (thefourth?) industrial revolution, even the most instrumentalist policymakers

need to think far more creatively about what education is and what it is therefor.

School corridors are also echoing with the feet of departing students, some

identified in the mushrooming statistics of the excluded and segregated,large numbers of others slipping below the radar of our attention, signing onfor registration and bunking off for the rest of the day. Yet, contrary totabloid claims, young people have not suddenly lost the plot or the

potential appetite for learning. They (and many who remain at their desks)simply know, whether they can articulate it or not, that school is not about to

equip them with what they actually need to survive and thrive in the world.The truism that school children are now studying for jobs that didnt exist

when they entered primary school has had to be revised: the fact that newkinds of work will emerge while they are at secondaryschool simply reflectsthe exponential growth of chip-based technologies and the cultural andeconomic transformations they are catalysing. The certificates handed out

by the examination system may be official proof of ability but they rarelyrelate to the actual skills and creativity that the modern world demands of

young people.

However hard schools and those in them and legislating over them try toreform, the central problem remains: that these are institutions based onclosed systems of knowledge and authority and thus not easily challenged.This means, in turn, that they are not usually creative places, because


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creativity is a challenging force, capable of undermining accepted knowledgeand offending those who draw their authority from that knowledge. They

seem hardly the best place for the natural creativity of the adolescent toblossom.

Untapped potential

My thesis is that the decade of adolescence is a time of great untapped

potential for creativity. Drawing on a range of studies, Kate Figes arguesthat, contrary to the overwhelmingly negative image we have of adolescence,it is in fact a time of great passion and creativity:

for adolescents themselves, these years can be as exhilarating,passionate and highly creative as they are difficult

emotionally. There is a vigorous, raw energy to the spirit ofyouth, forcing human society on to find new ways of doing

things, to embrace new concepts and hear new sounds.

Figes points out that recent research shows that the adolescent mind is stillforming, not yet adult but capable of more abstract thinking than the child,

and argues we are missing a great opportunity by not intervening toencourage that development in the way we do naturally with younger

children:

All too often, adult society misses opportunities to educate andguide adolescents when their intellectual skills are at theirmost malleable. If they are not stimulated adequately at this

highly creative time, when the brain is at its most capable ofabsorbing new skills specific to adult survival, they may missthat slot in their development.

The urgency of this cannot be overstated, not simply so that adolescents canmake the healthy transition into adulthood, Figes main concern, but because

this is a period when increased mental powers (a 15-year old can processinformation almost as swiftly as an adult) are combined with the visionary

imagination of the child. Adolescent idealism is, from one point of view, anexpression of narcissism why cant the world be as I want it to be? but,

from another view, it is a ferment out of which transformative thinking mayoccur.

These are the years when everything is, in an almost literal sense, up for

grabs, as the adolescent starts to get to grips with the world-as-it-is andfinds the comforting certainties of childhood inexorably sliding away. It is a

time of intense commitment and ferocious argument, of emotional turmoiland profound physical change. It is a time, too, when authority itself comes

under intense scrutiny, particularly that of parents, teachers and othercarers. Separation is necessary if the adolescent is to become a fully fledged


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and independent adult; challenging set values and received ideas,particularly of those who are seen to control their lives, is a vital aspect of

this. In questioning authority, adolescents are open indeed, vulnerable to alternative ideologies. Many continue the childs experimentation to seewhat happens. Adolescents create and shape their own spaces in thephysical world from their bedroom (a site of much creativity, as Paul Willis

and others have long discussed) to local street corners and abandoned lots as well as in their heads. They seek new ways of doing things; opt out of

what was expected of them as children.

Little of all this is exploited at school; in most cases, such volatility isfrowned upon. Children are still to be seen, not heard; told what to do, notasked if they know a better way to do it; disciplined, not invited to questionset knowledge or authority. This is a wasted opportunity, in my view. The

Ignite! project may be one glimmer of hope, in this respect. By seekingimaginative ways to identify young people of exceptional creative promise, it

cannot help but highlight the general failure of conventional teaching

methods to locate, release and encourage the creativity of young people. Ifit succeeds in its quest, the Ignite! Young Peoples Fellowship Project mightwell give our politicians and tabloid pundits pause.

As Kate Figes points out, no other age group is so consistentlymisunderstood, feared, reviled or defined by stereotype as the adolescent;even the word youth signals trouble. What struck me about the preamble

to the round-up of the brightest and the best in American Esquire was thatit set its creative stars within a wider firmament, with this statement:

Let us not forget that each American generation is great

because it is expected to be, and because it is allowed to be.

One might read this, on one level, as an expression of a kind of patriotismalmost entirely foreign to a contemporary British reader, yet at another and

much deeper level, one might find something to admire and envy in itssentiments. Why is it so hard to imagine any Prime Minister of this country

voicing such an expectation about our young people? Why is it so hard toimagine our young people feeling this country even cared?


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Part Two A flower can take a hint

My own secondary school was a voluntary-aided boys grammar school,

founded in 1722 to educate local boys of any age from 9 to 14, in the arts ofwriting, arithmetic, mathematics and navigation so they could be apprenticed

to masters of ships sailing in the East Indies. By the time I joined, a coupleof centuries later, the school had grown from 12 to nearly 500 students,most there on academic merit but with a sizeable minority of fee-payingboarders from service families stationed abroad. The culture of the school,

as a result, was faintly comparable to the traditional public school world Ienjoyed reading about in Frank RichardsBilly Bunterbooks. When I started

there, most of the teachers we called them masters - wore gowns andsome even sported mortar boards. Discipline was brisk and, in the case of

Latin lessons, riotous, with a gym shoe wielded ad libitum. Another teacherhad the charming habit, which would surely lead to some sort of litigationnow, of hurling chalk at boys he thought insufficiently gripped by his

mathematical monologues. This image of flying chalk whistling towards an

unsuspecting boy, his dreaming head turned towards a sunlit window - hasstayed with me and was indeed the first to pop, unbidden, into my own head

as I pondered how to approach this article. Why this image, then?

It seems to me to be a more complex moment than simply a frustratedteacher trying to get a students attention, to call him back into the present

tense of mathematics. The image has something to do with the contrastbetween teaching and dreaming, between authority and its subjects,between the classroom and the world of light outside. My focus shifts to theboy in the brief moments before the chalk connects imagine the film

slowing down and to the unreadable expression in his eyes. What does

creativity look like? As John Howkins, author ofThe Creative Economy,notes, other people observing creative people at work are often puzzled

they dont look as if theyre working. Does the teacher consider as he

grimly watches his chalk fly through the air that this boy may in fact be theonly student in the class paying attention?

In developing Freuds ideas about dream-work, Adam Phillips suggests a

possible interpretation of this classroom scenario:

As if, while we go about our official business, an artist inside usis all the time on the look-out for material to make a dream

with. So the student finds herself unwittingly drawn tospecific bits of the subject being taught whatever theemphasis of the teacher happens to be which she will then,more or less secretly (even to herself), transform into

something rather strange. If she did this while she was asleep,we would call it a dream; if she does it while she is awake, it

will be called a misunderstanding, a delusion or an originalcontribution to the subject.


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A misunderstanding, a delusion, an original contribution to the subject: weare considering creativityhere the production of something new and rather

strange in the world. Phillipss central purpose in his book, The Beast in theNursery, is to tease out the profound difference between official education -what the maths teacher is trained and paid to impart - and unofficial, half-hidden learning. Drawing on Freuds radical ideas about dream-work,

Phillips claims that really significant learning does not come about throughteaching at all, but through a process that is only partly, if at all, conscious.

Thus:

people can learn but they cant be taught; or, at least, theycant be taught anything of real significance. And that is partlybecause no one neither student nor teacher can ever knowbeforehand exactly what is of personal significance; that is,

exactly what a person will find significant, select out to dreamwith, to remember or forget; to work on.

At this deep, dreaming level of the self, nothing stems the flow of desire.What is desired or valued and thus learned or developed at this level ischosen by the dreamer; in Phillips words, the self always chooses its

teachers, and is always deschooling society. One challenge the Ignite!project faces, then, is to recognise as one teacher ruefully admitted after acreativity seminar held by NESTA that the teacher (or the parent or theadult) may actually be impeding creative thinking, that young people learn

despite the adults, not because of them.

The story of the flying chalk might now be a tale of the ultimate frustration ofteaching up against the mysterious and invisible process of learning. In

mathematical terms, we might substitute the simple formula oft + c = ewith the more complex algebra ofp t + d = en. The first represents theold notion ofteacherand chalkequalling education, while the second takesaway the traditional teacherfrom thepupiland adds dream-time to produce

infinite educational and creative possibilities.

An unknown world

The very young child, discussed earlier, makes its creative discoveries orlearns not in a classroom or under a teachers instruction but by engaging

with a world full of unknowns. The world is not explicit, after all: it doesnt

explain itself. Whether we are babies or philosophers, we have to come upwith the explanations. How does this happen? Maybe that is stillunanswerable, but happen it does. As the premier poet of Innocence andExperience, the visionary William Blake saw that our wits are sharpened byconfronting the unknown: What is not too explicit is the fittest for instruction

because it rouses the faculties to act.


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In his fascinating and innovative collection of 39 micro-lectures in proximityof performance, Matthew Goulish, founder member of US avant-garde

troupe Goat Island, cites traveller Alexandra David-Neel, who, in 1931,described Tibetan learning rituals. Desirous of learning the alphabet, ayoung person brings gifts to the home of a teacher and sits respectfullythrough a three-part ritual. First, the teacher invokes the spirit of science,

then recites the thirty letters of the alphabet. Before the student isdismissed, the teacher asks the student to repeat with him a series of

apparently nonsense syllables, whose meaning he does not disclose. Thisfinal step, writes David-Neel, is meant to cause an increase of mental

ability.

Goulish compares this methodology to our own cultures approach tolearning: the choosing of a teacher parallels our administrative activity; the

teaching of the thirty letters relates to our objective disciplines; the sense ofa ritual to classroom performance and thus to art. However, the final,

seemingly meaningless formula has no obvious equivalent in our experience:

this aspect of the described learning ritual places themeaningful in the context of the meaningless. It shows the

teaching of a lesson in the light of the unteachable. It presentsus with the frightening possibility that learning only takesplace in the presence of the unlearnable.

In Adam Phillips terms, the recitation of the alphabet would correspond tohis notion of an order, i.e. something explicitly taught in our official

education, whereas the challenge of the nonsense syllables is a hint.Phillips draws this latter notion from the following passage from a letter

written by John Keats, which he describes as a hymn to intelligent laziness:

You dont have to do very much to get things done, as long asyou dont need to know what you are doing. If you have too

much of a plan youve got a real job on your hands. it isbetter to be a flower than a bee: a flower can take a hint.

In linking this to Ludwig Wittgensteins complaint about the distraction of too

much (A word or two can make you think; any more and you could feelusurped, force-fed, too full), Phillips implicitly critiques an approach tocreativity based on trying to absorb vast amounts of information. In linkingit to Marion Milners experiments with free-drawing, where Milner discovered

the tendency, indeed overpowering temptation, to resolve a scribble intosomething recognisable and easily sharable - thus turning a hint (the

unknown) into an order (the obvious) - Phillips makes a vital point about therelationship between the hint and the discovery of the new:

the risk of whats possible is turned into an order. Fear of theunknown is cured through flight into the intelligible. The newis pre-empted. The familiar, the unsurprising, restores our


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collusive sanity. Hints can be made something of; orderscan only be submitted to or rejected. it is as though we are

continually giving ourselves orders, trying to live up to coerciveideals. If we conform, out of fear, with what too quickly makessense, our hunger for recognition becomes a self-blinding.

Working towards transformation

Conforming to official education (and getting the grades) may be a practicalnecessity in order to be recognised, i.e. to function effectively as a citizenand worker in our culture, but the self-blinding this entails may andusually does prevent the emergence of fully creative adults. To encourage

orthodoxy, to validate just one given style of thinking, Margaret Bodenargues, can render certain thoughts impossible. The highest form of

creativity, Boden and others argue, is the transformation of conceptualspaces in the mind; by this, she means going beyonda set thinking style.

Our everyday notion of creativity that is, coming up with new ideas in agiven field of activity is about an exploration within existing limits: a newversion of things but not a transformation.

What, then, does this mean for Ignite! in its quest for young people capable or potentially capable - of transformative thinking? Somehow, dream-time

has to be fed, but this is hard to legislate for. Certainly, the traditionalclassroom approach, complete with (metaphorically) begowned teacher and

flying chalk, is a poor option. Indeed, some genuinely creative peoplebelieve that, to make creativity possible, order and authority has to beflouted. These troublemakers range from Salvador Dali, who famously

asserted that we should systematically create confusion to set creativityfree, to the ideas people at DARPA (the US Defense Advanced ResearchProjects Agency), who, according to Esquire magazine, create the future in

an atmosphere that encourages them to be, in the best way, irresponsible.

This irresponsibility is, in fact, another kind of responsibility: a firmcommitment to pursue a personal vision that may be very much at odds withaccepted thinking. If the fool would persist in his folly, writes Blake, hewould become wise. Which is encouraging, but the problem, of course, is

that fools make mistakes and making mistakes, as David Bohm points out,undermines our ingrained sense of the ego as essentially perfect.

Overcoming this widespread fear of making mistakes, however, is essential if

we are to give primary emphasis to the perception of what is new anddifferent.

The risk, of course, is that by persisting in our folly we will be rejected by ourpeers. Against this, John Howkins argues that the feeling of actually creating

something does not depend upon other people giving their approval or eventheir understanding. We and the young people we are concerned with

here need to find our rewards and our fulfilment in the exertion of our own


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creativity rather than in seeking acceptance amongst the authorities of thisworld. In other words, like the adolescent growing towards adulthood, the

goal must be full independence. In the phrase popularised by job ads in the1980s, we must be self-starters as Howkins writes: Someone who wantsa ready-made process, who waits for the whistle, who waits to be told, willcreate nothing.

The young child does not need a whistle or to be told but focuses totally on

the task in hand: on the challenge of walking, of building towers of bricks, ofmastering the fork and spoon. Only that kind of wholehearted interest

translated into adulthood, Bohm maintains, will give the mind the energyneeded to see what is new and different, especially when what emergesmight seem to threaten what is dear to us.

The stakes are higher yet. A child at play is a child at work, busy beingborn. To slacken in that work of creativity is to cease to grow or, completing

Bob Dylans line, to be busy dying. Bohm agrees: a healthy mind needs the

exercise of creativity as much as the body demands breath. This gives aproper sense of urgency with which to view NESTAs whole quest, not justthis new initiative for young people (though Ignite! may prove to be its most

significant move yet towards nurturing the roots of adult creativity).

The task is challenging. For Bohm, to awaken the creative state of mind isone of the most difficult things that could possibly be attempted. This is

because the journey towards originality and creativity is, in the end, as in thebeginning, a personal one: one, he warns, that cannot be reached through

mechanical exercises or prepared formulae.

*

Our cultures energy goes mainly into what Adam Phillips calls the ideal ofadaptation, but there is always the possibility ofimprovisation, by which he

means the child and the adults relative freedom to transform, according totheir unconscious desire, the cultural givens. Children and young people

have these cultural givens imposed upon them, mediated first by theirparents and then by their teachers. We must work hard to enable them to

turn these orders into hints; to challenge the accepted and the obvious; todefend their imaginative visions; to make new futures through theircuriosity; above all, to answer back, not in rage, but in inventiveness andinnovation.

Richard IngsJanuary 2004


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PostscriptRick Hall and Richard Ings in conversation

The draft version ofThe Inventive Answerwas posted on the NESTA Ignite!

website and given limited hard copy circulation following its launch at

NESTAs Annual Event in January 2004. Commissioned at the outset of theIgnite! pilot programme, the article outlined the kind of broad theoreticalquestions suggested by such an ambitious initiative. Subsequently, with thefirst round ofIgnite! workshops and residential Labs completed and initialfindings beginning to emerge, Richard Ings returned to NESTA to ask Ignite!

Project Leader Rick Hall how far practice had matched or outstripped -theory.

RI Did you find any connections between the issues raised in The

Inventive Answerand the actual experience of the workshopsand residential weekends with young people?

RH It was great to read the essay again after having done the Labs, asthere was a great deal that coincided between the two. For example,we have learned that there is great developmental potential still to be

exploited in the design of subsequent involvement of young people,particularly the emphasis on giving them time to relax, daydream,

reflect - to let ideas just emerge in a kind of free time as well as in therather more intense, rapt moments focusing on the workshopactivities. This was actually a strong learning point for us. It seems totie in well with that opening quotation from Adam Phillips, which you

return to at the end, which suggests the combination of comfort andchallenge inherent in the way that young people socialise and learn

and express their individuality and creativity.

The values of risk, of acknowledging the unknown and of embracingthe unexpected that you quote from various sources, fromWittgenstein to Milner, are very much at the heart of our aspirationsfor how the programme should develop in future. In the first round of

Lab experiences with our 10-15 year olds, we laid out a table ofdelights for them to taste; the overall menu was designed to offer

them the range of Multiple Intelligences a la Howard Gardner, and togive us an insight into what might work best with them. That has

been successful, but now I want to take them into a much riskier areaof more focused activity. They may have to opt for an extended idea

development process: solve this technological problem, find a designsolution to this question, make a new toy that satisfies these needs,create an expressive piece of art, cross this boundary, traverse thisnew territory...

RI The essay suggests a more permissive approach to encourage

creative thinking, where there is more time to gaze out of the


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window and this seems to have been an ingredient in theIgnite!sessions. How did your 10-15 year olds react to this?

RH What you identified in the essay was that the openness prevalent inprimary school education disappears into the grid of the secondaryschool curriculum, into distinct subject areas and so on. In fact, a

couple of young people said that our approach reminded them ofprimary school - but in an affirmative and positive way. The freedom

they discovered in working like this was something they reallyappreciated. Two lads on one residential said that school was about

desks and uniforms and a kind of rigidity whereas the Labs were theopposite; this is both a superficial and a profound point. There issomething fundamentally and intrinsically valuable about the approachthey were being invited to engage in.

RI My essay is implicitly and explicitly critical of the formal

education system. Was there any reaction to this stance and

how far are you yourself setting out to challenge and reformthe school curriculum?

RH Opinions varied - some thought that the essay could have been evenstronger in this respect, while others argued that your position wasoverstated or that there was not sufficient evidence to support it.However, the recent publication of the Tomlinson report has shown us

that the reform of the 14-19 curriculum is very much driven by therecognition that young people are voting with their feet, are being

turned off and are moving away from the treadmill of working towardsone qualification after another.

As for our own ambitions for Ignite!, we do not want to overstate ourability or intention to overhaul the entire education system! However,I do believe that we are creating something distinctive with this

programme. The evidence that we are gathering from it will be veryuseful, primarily because it is about creative thought processes, not

just creativity defined by skill in one medium or another, and notnecessarily linked to the gifted and talented. We have discovered

that these workshops have an intrinsic value and would very much liketo offer them as a resource to schools and teachers to help themstimulate new learning opportunities. Wouldnt it be great if there wasa creative thinking hour as well as literacy and numeracy hours?

RI What is the likelihood of that, realistically? Do you think that

there are signs that there is a break in the clouds, as KenRobinson claimed in the TES recently?

RHI do perceive a shift of emphasis in the general education climate agroundswell of change, a new wave that I hope Ignite! will be on the


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Quotes from residential Labs to illustrate Postscript text inthe following order:

Q What difference have you seen in the young peoples behaviour overthe weekend?

A It is very strict at school, very rigid 40 minutes this lesson, 40minutes that lesson but here they have more time to do stuff. Here,

it is student rather than teacher led.

Q Have any individuals surprised you?

A Martin is always messing about and fidgeting but here he is sofocused. Some of the ideas he has come up with have just amazed

me.

Q Why do you think you enjoyed the particular task you were given ofputting a car together?

A Because if you were doing it anywhere else, youd have a sheet ofinstructions. Today we were just given the materials to play aroundwith and to see what we could make of them.

Q Was there anything youve done this weekend that you wouldntnormally have the chance to do at school?

A Doing things by ourselves not just copying it all off the computer.

Q How have you found the adults youve been working with?

A They dont shout at you if you do something wrong, like they do at

school. If you make a mistake, it doesnt really matter. Its your call.

Q When do you feel most creative?

A Being away from where you normally are. Here you have things put in

front of you and told to make something. Thats when you startthinking more, using your head.


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Q If you had to think of one thing you have learned here that you could

pass on to a friend or a brother or sister, what would it be?

A Dont always do whats obvious.


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Selected bibliography

Margaret A. Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (London:Routledge, 2nd edition, 2004)

David Bohm, On Creativity, edited by Lee Nichol (London: Routledge, 1998)

Anna Craft, Can You Teach Creativity?, with Jana Dugal et al. (Nottingham:

Education Now Publishing Co-operative, 1997)

Kate Figes, The Terrible Teens: What Every Parent Should Know(London:Viking, 2002)

Matthew Goulish, 39 microlectures in proximity of performance (London:

Routledge, 2000)

Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age, in The Kenneth Grahame Book(London:Methuen & Co Ltd, 1932)

John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas

(London: Penguin, 2001)

Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery(London: Faber and Faber, 1998)

Paul Willis, Moving Culture (London: Gulbenkian Foundation, 1990)

Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics

(London: Rider/Hutchinson, 1979)

The Genius Issue, American Esquire magazine (Vol 140, No 6, December

2003)


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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all those people I interviewed in the course of researchingthis article. Fay Young, Katy Jockelson and Tony Sabey were particularlyhelpful in guiding and sharpening my exploration of the conditions for

creativity.

foreword to the inventive answer creativity and young people

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