Creativity Is Critical—and More Common Than You Think

Sean W. Malone | AI Generated

It’s 5:15 on a Wednesday evening.

You get done with your work for the day, wander into your kitchen for something to drink, and realize that not once this entire day have you given a single thought to what’s for dinner. But your stomach is starting to rumble, so you frantically search through your fridge and freezer and shelves to cobble something edible together.

Raise your hand if that’s ever been you (it’s certainly been me more times than I’d like to admit).

Congratulations. You have engaged in creativity.

But wait, isn’t creativity for, like, artists, musicians, that sort of thing? Yes, certainly. But imagining a scene and translating it onto canvas isn’t the only form of creativity. It’s not even the most common one. We just tend to refer to the more everyday forms of creativity by other names: problem-solving, thinking on your feet, innovation.

Creativity means not being limited to or by existing ways of thinking or doing things. It’s not necessarily inventing something entirely new from whole cloth. Far more frequently, it’s putting together previously existing things in a novel way.

Creativity is, fundamentally, being able to look at a situation and ask if it could be better or, at the very least, different. It’s working within constraints without blindly accepting limitations. It’s plotting a path from X to Y. Creativity is, to use the example from Apollo 13, figuring out how to fit a square peg into a round hole.

And once we move past the notion that creativity is only for the arts, it’s not hard to see that all of us think creatively just about every day. It’s coming up with what’s for dinner based on the ingredients we have on hand. It’s coordinating schedules and deciding what to wear today and planning a vacation. We just don’t call it creativity. 

But maybe we should. It would, at the very least, begin to remove the mystique from the idea while reinforcing its importance to society as a whole. Because you cannot think critically without thinking creatively.

When we educators use the term “critical thinking,” we generally mean considering the merits of a school of thought or completed conclusion. We mean that we want our students to consider the implications of things if they were to be applied broadly. We want them to anticipate arguments and counterarguments, to evaluate validity.

We all understand the merits of critical thinking and how important it is to a healthy, engaged society. But asking our students to think critically means asking them to imagine. It means asking them to take the various bits and pieces that they’ve learned and put them together in a different way. To shed, at least for a moment, conventional ways of thinking and consider something different.

It means asking them to be creative.

The good news is that creativity is a learnable, trainable skill, just like most things in life. We also generally know how to do it already, at least on a very basic level. And a robust, well-rounded education only bolsters that instinctual creativity. 

What we learn and how we learn it can have a huge impact on our capacity for creativity. We’ll get into the two main elements of creativity and how they relate to education in future posts.

For now, I’ll leave you with the challenge to think about all the ways you think creatively without even realizing it.