A Brief Historical Ontology of Creativity Research in the United States: Tracing the Zeitgeist

Abstract

In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson gave a speech entitled “Schools Kill Creativity” addressing critical concerns about the way children were being educated. He stated that academic success and the concept of intelligence were viewed too narrowly. Citing the growing complexity of problems facing society, he called for a drastic restructuring of educational beliefs and practices. To Robinson, fostering creativity was the answer. A video of the speech was posted on the website www.ted.com in June of 2006. To this date, there have been 17 million views. Robinson’s online biography mentions that the most popular comment regarding this talk is that “everyone should watch this” (“Speakers”, 2006). Clearly, this speech embodies a major social criticism of the current education system.

Robinson has been credited with launching “a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy” (“Speakers”, 2006) and is seen as a worldwide leader in creative education. However, his sentiments and efforts are neither new nor original. Almost sixty years earlier, in 1950, a speech entitled “Creativity” was given by the president of the American Psychological Association Joy Paul Guilford. He too criticized the public education system for stifling creativity in children, and believed the definition of intelligence was too narrow. Citing the growing complexity of problems facing 1950s America, Guilford saw creativity as the answer and demanded drastic educational restructuring (Runco, 2004).

Guildford’s address sparked the initial movement of psychological research in the field of creativity and the massive undertaking of defining, testing and fostering it in the decades following his speech (Barron & Harrington, 1981). However, Robinson echoes much of the same concern sixty years later: schools are still not nurturing the creativity needed to solve the myriad of problems facing society. Separated by over six decades of research in the field, questions are raised about why Robinson is again advocating for inquiry into education and creativity. Taking into account the underlying social attitudes and opinions in both periods of history, it seems there may be a distinct set of cultural, political and social events leading to the call for educational research in creativity. This paper extends the sociocultural theory of Zeitgeist to examine trends in creativity research and proposes that more inquiry into creative education might not be necessary.