"When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital - why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of."

This seems like a great way to teach children to be creative, and just generally intelligent.

Not to mention imagination and creativity. I'm not completely aware of the situation in U.S. schools, but here (Greece) it's utterly terrible, even in private schools/colleges.

But this essentially goes to show that education and culture (or lack thereof) can have an avalanche effect on society, yet we don't pay as much attention to it as we should (see the planned 25% budget cuts on education in the UK, and elsewhere).

Counter-opinion: Good! Public education is all about obedience and stifles creativity, teaches children that they should follow orders rather than set their own objectives, passes off clearly incorrect propaganda as history, and neglects important life skills like personal finance and goal-setting in favor of learning archaic and useless facts. A main function of public education is the role of baby-sitting and instilling obedience and loyalty to the current government. Cutting this system returns the responsibility of educating children to the people who care the most and have the least conflicting interests with the children - their parents.

[1] I apologize in advance for paraphrasing. "Propaganda is passing as history" would be true if the winner didn't always write the history books. The important factor here is critical thinking: if a kid is given the chance to develop it instead of being spoon-fed whatever is passing off as fact, then (s)he could tell subjective from objective, and could relate to "the other side" when dealing with historic facts.

The problem is, public education chokes out private education the same way that public roads often choke out railroads and water transport. It's hard to compete with free, but it's possible by offering better quality. But it's near impossible to compete with already-been-forced-to-pay-for-it; it means any parent who wants to privately educate their kids needs to pay twice - first through property and income taxes, and second through private tuition.

I know more about the American system than the UK one, and I'll tell you - I'm pretty sure if the U.S. announced today that they were going to scrap the entire public education system at the end of 2010 with no transition at all, there'd be a better system in place by 2011. It's that bad.

The most frequent counter-argument I hear is that the poor couldn't afford it, but the poor are the ones getting the worst out of the current cookie-cutter-centralized-managed system. There's been lots of experimental design in charter schools and custom tailored programs that work, but it's impossible to make ground in a politicized arena. I say scrap it all and let the citizens come up with something better - it made sense to have central education for a while after the Industrial Revolution got underway, but the system is outdated now. I'd be comfortable seeing government spending on education close to 0%: give tax credits for education spending and let parents and private organizations sort it out. They'll come up with something better. They'd be very hard pressed to do any worse than it currently is.

As a tool in your arsenal it's great, as the cornerpiece of your education system it's really not. People need to be shown what to do ultimately.

Finally, America is becoming "less creative" based purely on the judgment of two scientists (literally they look at the drawings and say "I give this one a 15/18"). Seems a little melodramatic/farfetched. I'd be the first to believe the hypothesis but what a stupid experiment.

Doing the lab before reading the theory behind it can be an extremely effective approach to build real understanding of the nature of the experiment, and allows students to explore the very same thought process that the originators of the theory followed to transform their experience of reality into a useful conceptual model. If you've reached this point, the value of the textbook is only in learning the conventions of language and notation that are generally used to frame the idea.

But the whole approach requires an instructor who already has both the enthusiasm and the skill ask the right questions and lead students to their own intuitive understanding. If teachers are simply going through the motions and following a process without being fully engaged in the dialogue, the Socratic approach simply won't work.

Unfortunately, most public school teachers probably do not have the qualities that are needed to make it work.

Papert is the inventor of Logo and his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas inspired the name of Lego Mindstorms.

That book shows how education should be taught.

I wouldn't be too worried about this.

It was especially encouraging to hear how schools can fulfill the standardized curriculum requirements without turning the kids into zombies:

[...] they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum "from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. "You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’" says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. "Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’"

First of all, it is getting absurdly easy to find useful feedback. For every topic you might discuss, for every skill you might learn, there's at least one discussion forum, and in each of those forums there are intense, even competitive practitioners of the involved art who will tear you apart if you aren't working up to standard. Sometimes this is done in bad faith, but on the whole, that part of the "creative loop" is the best it's ever been. The main factor that holds people back from any creative endeavor is motivation. When hanging out with friends the motivation problem becomes a major factor; our likelihood of engagement and satisfaction is a lot higher when we get together to _create_ rather than to _consume_. But we have to get ourselves pumped up to do something creative, and engagement is difficult because everyone involved has to pierce through the BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary activities into "hard work" or "way over my head."

My second point is that by losing the work environments in the "heavy" industries, the USA will be deprived of creatives in those fields - but that doesn't necessarily mean we lose out on creatives. Look at Richard Florida's books on the "Creative Class" - one of the points he argues is that our major cities are getting increasingly "peaky" as the creative people in each industry pool together more and more closely. We already have some creative powerhouses(NY, LA, SV to name a few), and there is no reason for them to decline anytime soon. Where we still have industries involving physical goods and high capital requirements, intense pressure exists to take a high-tech approach and automate everything rather than battle to get cheap labor. For example, think of what Amazon is doing with shipping. That stuff requires a lot of creative know-how, and in the coming years we're probably going to see similar approaches taken in a lot of industries that are traditionally "people services."

...and plain ol' laziness. I wrestle with this all the time -- it's quite hard to force myself to work on a project, or read a book, or pick up a pencil and try drawing again for the first time in decades, when I can instead pick up my laptop and browse HN for a while.

This problem is compounded by living vicariously: I can read about other people being creative, and that's fun.

Eventually I get to a point -- usually at the end of the day -- where I feel compelled to make, fix, or build something, but I should have been doing that all day anyway (and waiting until the end of the day is not optimal).

I've not yet figured out how to fix this.

So I read through your comment history, and understood that you're just grinding an axe. It would be nice if you didn't do that.

Creativity doesn't require someone to buy it. The article did a pretty neat job of describing creativity, defining it, understanding it, and coming up with ways to improve it.

And here is my answer - you want be more creative in engineering creativity increase you industry output.

1. The article described specific research into creativity that does suggest that it can be taught, but you're completely ignoring the content of the article.

2. We live in a global economy now. A firm in the U.S. can design a product which is manufactured in another country. This would negatively affect U.S. manufacturing output, but would not have any impact on "creativity" as you describe it.

3. I have to disagree with pretty much every single statement you're making here. Creativity can be spontaneous -- any bored kid in a school class with a pencil and a paper will show you that. Loss of industrial knowledge does not mean there is "less and less left to be taught to people" -- that's completely uncorrelated, because industrial knowledge isn't the only form of knowledge available to a modern society. Whether or not you "buy" the "fairy tales", the interesting parts of this article do suggest that abstract creativity can be taught, and those suggestions are based on quite a lot of research -- versus your simple assertion that it's not true because it doesn't fit into your industrial-complex worldview.

And so on. You're pushing some kind of agenda and it's not even self-consistent.

It can as long as there still remains workforce skilled in details of manufacturing and engineering. They don't disappear overnight. Remember, the USA had decades of industrial development and superiority to the rest of the world.

You'll see less and less of that kind of creativity, the more your country transforms into service economy where people only can cut hair to each other.

   There is no industry left in USA

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/...

Even if it weren't true, there are more opportunities to be create value with unconstrained creativity than ever before.

You can sit down and write code or draw designs and be creative with zero outlay.

Excuses excuses excuses.

There is no business case, no economic pressure for creativity. Yes, you can create, but you do not have time - for your creation nobody is gonna pay money - so there is no incentive to be creative.

Excuses?! Any engineer knows that many good ideas appear as the result of interaction with production process, but if something is designed in USA but made in China then the loopback time grows very big and you end up with making same boring stuff year after year, year after year...

I'd love to hear just how it is you think that "manufacturing-as-a-percentage-of-GDP" is any kind of an indicator for creativity in a country, considering that manufacturing is one of the most menial jobs there is.

    You are looking at a very wrong graph. 

Case in point: You'd be pretty silly to think that the US isn't an agricultural powerhouse. However, only 2% of the US is employed in that industry which contributes 0.9% of GDP. However, it has one of the highest outputs in the world - and perhaps the highest per worker.

Another point: The US' manufacturing value is so high because it builds expensive goods. There is more innovation occurring with jet engines and airplanes than textiles.

Even if there is innovation going on in the jet engine, there is still a lot of space for innovation in less hi-tech industry.

(If I'm getting the colors right. Having so many similar colors in one graph certainly reduces its usefulness.)

More important to a designer than a set of techniques (empty of content) to induce creativity are a knowledge of current practice and products and a growing stock of firsthand knowledge and insights gained through critical field observation of engineering projects and industrial plants. In the 1950s, engineering schools still provided many opportunities to gather such knowledge. It is ironic that the radical change in curricula [introducing "creativity" courses] that occurred n the 1950s eliminated those activities that put the students in touch with the authentic world of engineering. - Engineering and the Mind's Eye, pp. 57-58

(For the record, I don't buy into your theory that China is a problem here at all.)

But, the article claims the worst decline is in children from kindergarten to sixth grade. I respectfully submit that such children are probably not taking geopolitical factors into account in their decision to not be creative.

I personally suspect that the test is a bit of a crock. Notwithstanding that, and a bit of the usual left brain/right brain nonsense thrown in, it actually seemed like a pretty good article (though probably not as good as if they'd left "creativity" out of it). An emphasis on rote learning and standardised tests, if that is indeed the way the system is going, is definitely going to have an impact on engagement if nothing else.