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Evren Çakır

Brain, Education, and Inquiry

        Creativity in education has been limited and undervalued, understood as a purely artistic phenomenon that is not useful in other realms. However, the idea of creative thinking in school is not divorced from the value-constructs in place – if money-making is the end goal, creativity helps. “A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future” (Bronson and Merryman; Creativity Crisis). So why is American creativity declining? The results of analyzing around 300,000 creativity scores of children and adults, a study done with Kyug Hee Kim, shows that after 1990 creativity scores have been consistently declining (Bronson and Merryman; CC).

 Bennett Smith

            For several weeks now, our class discussions have focused on the problems with education – what has not been working and what has, our own past experiences, and how we could possibly remedy the current education deficit, so to speak. Recently, the lens with which we have been viewing education has shifted in order to include how the brain works in hopes that we can better approach education with a more thorough understanding of how inputs are processed, information manipulated, and outputs produced.