Imagine: How Creativity Works (30 page)

And it’s not just art schools that are creating pockets of brilliance. High Tech High, a San Diego charter school, was founded in 2000 by a group of local tech executives frustrated by a lack of skilled workers. The school renovated an abandoned navy facility, transforming the cavernous concrete warehouses into a series of loft-like classrooms. Like NOCCA, High Tech High emphasizes learning by doing — every student is required to complete numerous projects that take up much of his or her school day. (Instead of playing with paint and guitars, the kids play with scrap metal and programming code.) “People act like we’ve got this radical concept of education,” says Larry Rosenstock, the fast-talking CEO of the school. “But it’s actually been around for a long time. [John] Dewey said it best: ‘Understanding derives from activity.’ Kids don’t learn when they’re consuming information, when someone is talking down to them. They learn when they’re producing stuff.

That’s how you get them to work hard without realizing they’re working.” Past projects at High Tech High have included the construction of a human-powered submarine and a robot capable of accurately kicking a soccer ball forty-five feet. Last year, a High Tech High art class spent several weeks retrofitting an old cigarette vending machine — it cost two hundred dollars on eBay — so that it could sell student paintings. The machine is now set up in the lobby.

While High Tech High was initially criticized for its emphasis on these projects — some argued that students needed more classroom instruction — their academic results are indisputable. Every single High Tech High graduate has been admitted to college, and more than 85 percent of these students have graduated from four-year institutions. Furthermore, nearly a third of these graduates are first-generation college students. (High Tech High admits students using a random lottery system, drawing freshmen from all over the San Diego area.) “Our kids are growing up in a world of constant change,” Rosenstock says. “There is no test for the future that we can teach to. What we do know, however, is that being able to make new things is still going to be the way to succeed.

Creativity is a skill that never goes out of style.” What schools like NOCCA and High Tech High demonstrate is that the imagination is too important to be ignored. When children are allowed to create, they’re able to develop the sophisticated talents that are required for success in the real world. Instead of learning how to pass a standardized test, they learn how to cope with complexity and connect ideas, how to bridge disciplines and improve their fi rst drafts. These mental talents can’t be taught in an afternoon — there is no textbook for ingenuity, no lesson plan for divergent thinking. Rather, they must be discovered: the child has to learn by doing.

This was demonstrated in a recent study led by MIT psychologist Laura Schulz. The experiment consisted of giving four-year-olds a new toy outfitted with four tubes. What made the toy interesting is that each tube did something different. One tube, for instance, generated a squeaking sound, while another tube turned into a tiny mirror.

The first group of students were shown the toy by a scientist who declared that she’d just found it on the floor. As she revealed the toy to the kids, she “accidentally” pulled one of the tubes and made it squeak. Her response was sheer surprise: “Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that again!” The second group got a very different presentation. Instead of feigning surprise, the scientist acted like a typical teacher. She told the students that she’d gotten a new toy and that she wanted to show them how it worked. Then she deliberately made the toy squeak.

After the demonstration, both groups of children were given the toy to play with. Not surprisingly, all of the children pulled on the first tube and laughed at the squeak. But then something interesting happened. While the children from the second group quickly got bored with the toy, those in the first group kept on playing with it. Instead of being satisfied with the squeaks, they explored the other tubes and discovered all sorts of hidden surprises. According to the psychologists, the different reactions were caused by the act of teaching. When students are given explicit instructions, when they are told what they need to know, they become less likely to explore on their own. Curiosity is a fragile thing.

That’s why the best schools ensure that unstructured play —what happens when the child creates and explores on his or her own — is an essential part of the classroom experience. It doesn’t matter if the student is writing a poem or soldering a computer circuit or scribbling with crayons — she needs to feel for herself the thrill and struggle of making something new. Because even if these students at NOCCA and High Tech High don’t end up pursuing their art or majoring in computer science, they will never forget what they learned as teenage artists and engineers.

On my last day at NOCCA, I spent a few hours in the auditorium surrounded by five hundred extremely excited students. The kids were getting ready for interlude day, their chance to perform for one another. The range of expression at the Interlude was stunning. Although the show began with someone singing Brahms, it quickly veered into poetry and jazz guitar. There were PowerPoint slides of oil paintings and a collection of funny video shorts; someone recited a Macbeth monologue, and a troupe of students performed a scene from West Side Story. The only connecting thread was the ardor of the kids onstage. After the performances were over — the students gave themselves a standing ovation — I struck up a conversation with Tiffani, a dance student. I asked her if she planned on becoming a professional dancer. “Probably not,” she replies. “I love to dance — it makes me so happy — but dancers make no money. I want to make money.” I then ask Tiffani if she thinks her dance training will still be useful. Wouldn’t it be better to go to a regular school? “Oh, no way,” she says. “I’m not just learning how to dance here. It might look like that when you look at our classes because we’re always dancing. But that’s not it. What I’m really learning is how to say something.” 

4.

What are the meta-ideas that we need to embrace? How can we create more pockets of brilliance? This might seem like an impossible task, a misguided attempt to replicate a vanished golden age. But it’s not. We now have enough evidence to begin prescribing a set of policies that can increase our collective creativity. In fact, we’ve already proven that it’s possible to create a period of excessive genius, a moment that’s overflowing with talent. The only problem is that the geniuses we’ve created are athletes.

Bill James, the pioneer of sabermetrics — the statistical analysis of baseball — points out that modern America is prodigiously good at producing sports stars. As a result, a city like Wichita, Kansas — roughly the same size as Elizabethan London — can produce a professional athlete every few years. Think about how impressive that is: the high schools of Wichita are able to regularly churn out talented individuals, such as Barry Sanders and Gayle Sayers, capable of competing at the highest levels in the world. Their physical genius — which is often quite creative — is worth millions of dollars.

And yet, the same excess does not apply to other kinds of talent. Wichita has not produced a surplus of gifted writers, painters, jazz musicians, or inventors. As James notes, this is largely because our culture treats athletes differently. The first thing we do is encourage them when they’re young, driving the kids to baseball practice and Pop Warner tournaments. This doesn’t just allow children to develop their talent — it also lets coaches identify those with the most natural ability. Second, we constantly celebrate athletic success. Winning teams get trophies and parades, coverage in the local newspaper, and the congratulations of the community. Finally, we have mechanisms for cultivating those with athletic potential at every step of the process, from Little League to the NCAA to the major leagues. They are showered with attention and rewarded with huge contracts.

So it’s possible to create more geniuses — we’ve already done it. The question now is whether our society can produce creative talent with the same effi ciency that it has produced athletic talent. Our future depends upon it.

The first meta-idea we need to take seriously is education. Because it’s impossible to predict where the next genius will come from, ages of excessive genius are always accompanied by new forms of educational opportunity. They occur when the sons of illiterate tradesmen go to college, when even the child of a glover gets a library. Like in Elizabethan England, we need to ensure that every student has a chance to succeed. We do an excellent job of lavishing gifted athletes with attention and scholarships, but too many of their peers are forced to attend failing schools with high dropout rates. Their imaginations never have a chance. Think of all the wasted potential.

However, it’s not enough to increase access to the classroom or raise the test scores of the lowest performers. We also have to ensure that those with talent are allowed to fl ourish, that we have institutions that can nourish our brightest kids, just as we nourish our best quarterbacks and jump shooters. Like the administrators at NOCCA and High Tech High, we must identify those with motivation and potential and then give them the tools to discover and invent. “Something very special happens when you concentrate talent,” Wedberg says. “The students here inspire and challenge each other. My favorite moments are when I see kids who are surprised by what they’ve done. It’s like they can’t believe they’re actually this good.”

If we’re not going to properly educate our own children, then we need to at least open the doors and encourage immigration. This is the second important meta-idea: ages of excess genius are always accompanied by new forms of human mixing. The numbers are persuasive. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Patent Office, immigrants invent patents at double the rate of non-immigrants, which is why a 1 percent increase in immigrants with college degrees leads to a 15 percent rise in patent production. (In recent years, immigrant inventors have contributed to more than a quarter of all U.S. global patent applications.) These new citizens also start companies at an accelerated pace, cofounding 52 percent of Silicon Valley firms since 1995. We all benefit when those with good ideas are allowed to freely move about. 
(Last, immigrants bring America a much-needed set of skills and interests. In 2010, foreign students studying on temporary visas received more than 60 percent of all U.S. engineering doctorates. (American students, by contrast, dominate doctorate programs in the humanities and social sciences.) What makes these engineering degrees so valuable is that, according to the Department of Labor, the 5 percent of American workers employed in fields related to science and technology are responsible for more than 50 percent of sustained economic growth.)

Just look at Elizabethan England, which experienced an unprecedented mixing of its population. Some of this mixing was born of urban density, as people flocked to London from all over the country. However, the period was also marked by the rise of international trade and the emergence of a merchant class that moved freely across national borders. “What you see in this period is a dramatic growth in the number and variety of human collisions,” says Robert Watson, a professor of English literature and history at UCLA. “People were meeting people like never before.” 

One of the consequences of all these new “collisions” was an explosion of new words in the English language. Some of these words came from the city streets, as all the recently arrived Londoners were forced to reconcile their regional dialects and local idioms. However, most of the novel words came from abroad. “What really seems to be driving the growth [of the language] is this large group of multilingual citizens in England,” says Watson. “You’ve got people learning French, Latin, Greek, and German.

They’re traveling abroad, encountering new things. And they can’t help but import many of these foreign sayings into English.” As a result, the writers of the period had a vastly expanded palette of expressions with which to paint their world. Shakespeare, for one, took advantage of it: his work features a vocabulary that’s unparalleled in literature, as his plays use more than twenty-five thousand different words. (His closest rival in terms of variety was John Milton, who clocked in at less than half that.) The richness of Shakespeare’s art is inseparable from this richness of language, which itself depended on those immigrants around him.

This lesson isn’t restricted to the sixteenth century — encouraging the collisions of creative people is always a good idea. In fact, these interactions are so important that even seemingly minor regulations can have an outsize effect. Consider the presence of noncompete clauses, those binding contracts that prevent employees from working for competitors. Thanks to a quirk of the California Civil Code, virtually all noncompete clauses are void in the state. As a result, engineers in Silicon Valley are free to constantly jump between firms and chase more interesting problems and bigger paychecks. This leads, over the long run, to a surplus of horizontal interactions and weak ties. (According to a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve, the unbridled movement of workers in California has played an important role in the development of Silicon Valley.) The larger point is that we meddle with the social network at our own peril. Like Shakespeare, we should aspire to live in a time filled with new words.

Another crucial meta-idea is a willingness to take risks. It doesn’t matter if we’re giving out small-business loans or research grants to young scientists: we have to consistently encourage those who take chances. Most entrepreneurs will fail, and many of those grants will lead to inconclusive experiments. (Even Shakespeare wrote a number of bad plays.) But those failures are a sign that the system is working, that we’re giving new ideas a chance. In my conversations with Yossi Vardi, the start-up impresario of Tel Aviv, he repeatedly referred to the importance of chutzpah, the Yiddish word for audacity. “You can’t have creativity without chutzpah,” he says. “It takes enormous chutzpah to believe that you have an idea that will change the world and make a lot of money. But unless you believe that, then you will never become an entrepreneur.”