Creativity in the Classroom

By Dave Gray 

January 2010

Futurist Alvin Toffler once said that mass education has both an overt and a covert curriculum. The overt curriculum was “reading, writing and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects.”1 But beneath it, he said, lay an invisible or “covert curriculum” which consisted of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience and one in rote, repetitive work.

This makes sense when you look at the history of U.S. education. The public school system was introduced during the industrial revolution, which spanned from about 1840-1920. In 1840, most of the population (about 90 percent) lived in rural communities, and by 1920, the urban/rural split was about 50/50, as workers migrated to cities to work in factories.

The industrial revolution radically changed the way we turned raw materials into products. It changed the way goods were collected, processed, exchanged, distributed and ultimately controlled. This changed not only how we organized our work but how we organized society.

The factory teaching model that Toffler describes was successful throughout most of the 20th century. It is so deeply embedded in our educational system that it’s sometimes hard to see. We don’t notice it because it’s how we learned when we were in school – it’s how we were trained to be the people we are today. 

But today’s world brings new challenges, for which many of us find ourselves unprepared. New technologies with massive processing power are connecting more people to more information than was previously conceivable. The amount of new information in the world doubles every two years. It’s predicted that by 2015 it will double every week.

Like the industrial revolution, this new information revolution is shifting the way we collect, process, exchange, distribute and control a key asset – information. This new economy requires a new kind of worker, with different skills, methods and approaches.

It also requires a rethinking of our educational system. What should a new, revised curriculum look like? For clues, let’s examine the fundamental differences between industrial work and knowledge work.

How do we prepare students for a world that’s undergoing such radical change, a world where none of us have ever been and many of us still don’t understand? We need a system that looks at teaching differently; that rewards breadth of vision and creativity and recognizes a diversity of viewpoints.

We can’t teach facts anymore. Facts change too fast. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s students will have 10 to 14 jobs by their 38th birthday.