Children and parents like these live in an educational world governed by a simpleminded Darwinian precept as inescapable as gravity: hypercompetition is the only path to success. The more hyper the competition, the greater the success. In that pitiless world, depressed and suicidal youngsters are collateral damage, left behind in a race to the top where nothing matters except one product: nationally and internationally competitive students. The Asian system can clearly manufacture that product, at least according to international comparisons like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), where Chinese and South Korean students routinely achieve top math, language, and science rankings.4 That’s why some educators and politicians view Asia’s educational gulags with admiration.5
Charles Darwin—himself a middling student—might have recoiled at this dog-eats-dog view of education, even though it was arguably his theory that enshrined the value of competition in our minds. At the same time, he would have been hard-pressed to argue what’s wrong with competition.
Nothing, it turns out. Competition is essential.
But it is not sufficient.
It is not sufficient to educate people who will live fulfilling, productive, and, most of all, creative lives. Their creativity is not a luxury. It is increasingly essential to building innovative organizations and a dynamic society. In a 2010 IBM survey, more than fifteen hundred CEOs in thirty-three industries cited creativity as the most important factor for business success.6 And former US president Barack Obama said this at a 2010 conference: “Our single greatest asset is the innovation and ingenuity and creativity of the American people. It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century.”7
Although competition is often seen as essential to this creativity-based prosperity, competition alone cannot build it. Landscape thinking is helpful when trying to find out what can build it. This chapter describes how we can apply landscape thinking to the policies and politics that undergird a society to see which ones we should keep, which ones we should adopt, and which ones we should abandon to make our people, organizations, and nations as creative and innovative as they can be.
One of the greatest shortcomings of our present, hypercompetitive educational system is the punishing consequences it exacts for failure and the extreme emphasis it places on standardized tests. High-stakes mandatory tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) cause a creeping erosion of learning and teaching that starts in kindergarten and continues in grade school, where drilling in math and language displaces music, arts, and simple play.8 Standardized high-stakes tests are not bad just because they steal time from true learning. They also homogenize education. That is especially insidious from a landscape perspective, as it eliminates the possibility of mental recombination not just within a single mind, but also among minds with a diverse set of knowledge and skills.
Homogenization was the intended effect of the predecessor to China’s gaokao exam, the imperial keju exam, which was used to select top government and court officials for more than thirteen hundred years. With success rates as low as 2 percent, the keju required years or decades of preparation. Candidates were tested on subjects like civil law and taxation, but most importantly on the Confucian classics, which ingrain the values of order and obedience.9 The keju not only helped build a meritocratic government, it also instilled precisely the values that keep an authoritarian emperor in power. “All heroes under the sun have fallen into my trap” is what seventh-century emperor Taizong observed upon watching successful keju candidates arrive at his court. Many of those who had failed the exam became teachers to keju candidates and perpetuated the Confucian message, whereas others had their rebellious streak rubbed out by years of studying Confucian classics. For more than a thousand years, the strategy that Tang Dynasty poet Zhao Gu called giving “white hair to all heroes” fed a homogeneous and obedient elite to the government.10
Chinese and other Asian governments today are aware of the damage that a system of hypercompetitive testing does to society.11 Unfortunately, in China as in the West, children have become hostages to the system because opting out of a college admission test means gambling with a child’s future. This situation persists, even though hard data proves that a test-driven education stymies creative thinking. Just consider Torrance test scores as one measure of creativity. By that measure, the creativity of 250,000 US children between kindergarten and twelfth grade has fallen steadily since 1990, even while IQ scores have been continually increasing. Although television and mobile devices play a role, they cannot take all of the blame. In US schools, the likely culprit is standardized testing and the escalating time taken for test prepping.12 Sadly, Chinese kids are even worse off. One study asked 139 undergraduate students from two highly selective US and Chinese universities (Yale and Beijing) to produce artwork that was rated for creativity by nine judges, some of them Chinese, others American. Both the Chinese and American judges found that the artwork of the Chinese students was less creative than that of the Americans, regardless of the Americans’ ethnic backgrounds. In addition to broader societal patterns, the authors faulted the Chinese education culture, where the stakes of testing are even higher than in the United States and where students have even less time for creative endeavors.13
The hypercompetitive education model ignores a core lesson from landscapes, namely that reaching peaks requires times of unfettered exploration during which selection and judgment are suspended. The youngest, preschool-age children especially learn much better by such exploration than by academic classroom teaching. A study of 343 children compared students who attended an academically oriented preschool program, where teachers instructed them in a classroom, with children in programs that allowed them to pursue “child-directed activities”—mostly just plain-old play.14 By grade four, the students who had attended the academic preschool had lower grades than the kids who had just played. What is more, the academic children had missed out on the kind of exploration that is as important to becoming human as playing is to a great many other species.15
Even in older students immersed in the academic rigors of math, science, and grammar, creativity-building exercises remain important. Such exercises go beyond conventional art and music classes and are easy to embed in any curriculum. A case in point is the Private Eye Project created by Kerry Ruef, an American educator who aims to enhance children’s creativity by centering on the kind of analogical and metaphorical thinking that creates those remote connections so central for literature and science.16 Using tools as simple as a jeweler’s loupe to observe objects like seashells, insect wings, and dry leaves, its open-ended exercises begin with deceptively simple questions, such as “What does it remind you of?” A dry leaf will remind kids of a snake’s scales, a rotten bone, a beehive, a knitted blanket, a flag with holes, or flaking skin. These similes can become the starting point of a painting, a lesson in the physics of desiccation, or a story (“Yesterday I was a green flag, but now I am full of holes.”). It is perhaps no coincidence that Ruef is also an award-winning poet.
While kindergarteners can already benefit from Private Eye, the Berkeley-based program called Studio H requires the sustained attention of older children. Part of the regular curriculum of the Realm Charter School in Berkeley, California, Studio H was founded by architect Emily Pilloton and builds real-world projects like farm stands, farmer’s markets, or tiny houses for homeless people. To build such a house, students would first learn about architectural drawing, model building, and tool wielding. They would then develop multiple designs—divergent thinking—and whittle them down to a single one—convergent thinking—which they would then build as a team.17
Studio H is sophisticated, but even simpler programs and a small dose of play’s suspended judgment can have powerful long-term effects. In a Spanish study, eighty-six Spanish schoolchildren aged ten or eleven were subdivided into two groups and followed throughout almost an entire school year. In the first group, fifty-four children partic
ipated in exercises meant to enhance creativity. For one such exercise, students were paired up, and one student had to draw an animal. Her partner then had to start another drawing from a body part of that animal, such that the ears of an elephant might become the wings of a butterfly. In other exercises, students created imaginary advertisements, invented new names for familiar objects (puree-launcher for spoon), or conceived telephone conversations between unusual partners, such as a cow and a duck. In the second group, the remaining thirty-two children worked on art projects that were a normal part of the school curriculum, but not deliberately designed to enhance creativity. At the end of the year, children in both groups were tested on their ability to change from one line of thought to another, to create novel and unusual ideas, or to fashion images that two artists evaluated for originality. Not only did the children with creative playtime display greater creativity than the other group, but those children whose creativity scores had been the lowest before the experiment improved the most through playing.18 Other studies also show that practicing creativity resembles learning a sport: anyone following the right exercises can learn to play tennis, even though few may end up playing it like Federer.19
But any amount of creativity training does not solve the problem of how to select the best candidates for success in college and in a profession. Fortunately, there are alternatives to the insidious standardized test.20 Grade reports or teacher’s letters may seem quaint, but they can work well. Case in point: a 2014 study of 123,000 US college students enrolled in thirty-three colleges that did not require standardized test scores for admission. It showed that good SAT scores did not predict the students’ college grades nearly as well as good high school grades did. Students who had tested well but had low high school grades also had lower college grades and were less likely to graduate.21 Another alternative is assessment centers, which originated when the US intelligence services needed to select spies during World War II. To this day, corporate assessment centers evaluate the best candidates for skilled jobs in companies like AT&T and General Electric. Candidates can spend up to several days at such a center, where they perform individual tasks, undergo interviews, and participate in group activities, which evaluate not just hard, job-specific skills, but also motivation, teamwork skills, and emotional intelligence.22
Grade reports and assessment centers allow merit-based selection while not automatically penalizing unusual curricula or combinations of skills.23 That is, they do not penalize diversity in individuals or in groups. And diversity is landscape thinking’s most basic prescription for creativity. Human knowledge is so vast that even with twenty years of schooling, a single mind can only absorb a minute fraction of it—the fraction that it can recombine. By endowing different minds with different skills, a diverse education increases the chances that some of them will harbor the right combination to solve tomorrow’s hard problems. A society’s creative potential can unfold only if different schools share little except a small set of core subjects, such as math and language, and if students within a school can explore different combinations of subjects—scientific and artistic, theoretical and practical, academic and vocational. An education driven by standardized testing has the opposite effect: not only does it make students run up a hill at maximum speed, it also makes them all run up the same hill.24
Diversity in education also requires that teachers have autonomy to teach diverse content and—just as important—that students have autonomy to pursue idiosyncratic interests. The reason: intrinsic motivation. It’s what psychologists call the desire to do things even when no extrinsic reward beckons. Its opposite, extrinsic motivation, can stifle creativity. One study, conducted by Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile with creative writers, demonstrated that even thinking about extrinsic rewards can be bad for creativity.25 In the experiment, Amabile subdivided a cohort of writers into two groups. The first group had to complete a questionnaire on the intrinsic joy of creative writing, and the second on extrinsic rewards, like teacher approval, financial security, or a best-selling novel. Members of both groups were then asked to write short poems, which were judged by a dozen poets. According to the jury, the writers who had contemplated extrinsic rewards wrote worse poems.26
Object lessons in the power of intrinsic motivation are those exceptional creators who found their calling in childhood, such as Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, who became a naturalist before age ten; chemistry Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, who started his first chemistry experiments at age thirteen; and astronomer Vera Rubin, who discovered her love for astronomy in her first decade.27 Their inner drive could have been crushed not only by rigid curricula, but also by heavy-handed teachers, boring schools, stifling bureaucracies, mind-numbing memorization, and repetitive tasks.28 The immensely quotable Einstein said it best: “It is… nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”29
But nurturing the autonomy that preserves intrinsic motivation is easier said than done. Creative pupils often display traits like risk taking and impulsiveness that can be at odds with the responsibility and dependability that make a teacher’s workday pleasurable—or merely bearable. And while most teachers will claim that they love to work with creative children, a string of psychological studies shows otherwise: they really love punctual, courteous, and conforming teacher pleasers with good grades and often stigmatize the energetic, rebellious, nonconformist, creative types as troublemakers.30 But asking teachers to bear the sole responsibility for nurturing autonomous curiosity is really a bit much—who among us could fault a teacher for trying to keep a lid on thirty bouncing kids? Parents must do much of the work here. An important part of that work is choosing the right style of parenting, one that combines emotional support with academic involvement. The former encourages autonomy, while the latter prods students to work beyond the mandatory minimum and does not just push them but rather challenges them to push themselves.31
In sum, landscape thinking carries a simple and universal message about childhood education: cultivate diversity and enable autonomy. Such an education will endow individual minds with diverse skills, and it will endow different minds with different skills—recombination-ready. On the way to acquiring these skills, creativity training and playful learning will put to good use the time that test preparation wastes in today’s hypercompetitive schools. And as we shall see next, the same principles apply in different guises to universities primed to educate tomorrow’s creative elites.
Sometime in early 2009, I received an application to our Ph.D. program at the University of Zurich. The applicant did not come from a top university, his early college grades had been middling, and he had been out of academia for a few years. Normally, I would not take on a student like that, but the application was articulate, well researched, and carefully reasoned, and his references glowed with enthusiasm. So, I took a chance on Amit Gupta.32
I would not regret it. Over the four years of his dissertation research in my laboratory, we had many conversations where Amit proved to be a fountain of ideas for his own research and an enthusiastic collaborator whose creativity lifted everybody’s boat. (He always balanced working hard with his passion as an amateur rock musician, which also helped explain his earlier grades.) And, four years later, he accomplished what other young scientists would kill for: the publication of the breakthrough results of his research in the most august scientific journal Nature.
Recognizing creative talent does not get easier from high school to grad school, but some things don’t change: standardized tests like the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) do not help much. Amit would have fallen through the cracks in many graduate programs that impose test-score cutoffs or minimum grade-point averages. I myself might have tossed his application aside if years ascending a steep learning curve on selecting talent had not taught me otherwise.
My ascent on that curve began after I had left my home country of Austria—as a product of a solid but
staid 1980s Germanic education—to attend graduate school in the United States. A few years later, Ph.D. in hand, I entered, like practically all my colleagues, the peripatetic life of a postdoctoral fellow, a journeyman researcher with a Ph.D. but no permanent job. That journey involved way-stops in both the United States and Europe before I settled into a faculty position at a US university and eventually moved back to Europe. My final destination was Zurich, Switzerland, fifteen years and six transatlantic moves after I had first left the Old World.33
In both the United States and Europe, I served on numerous admission committees for master’s and Ph.D. programs that selected the best from among hundreds of applicants. Time after time, we would interview Olympian test-takers, many of them from countries where rote memorization and test scores were the be-all and end-all. And time after time, we would be disappointed. To be sure, their memorization muscles were powerful, but their schooling had prepared them poorly for the real life of a scientist, where rote memorization does not help one imagine a great—or even just a good—experiment. Sadly, some of these mental gymnasts did not even understand the questions behind their modest college research projects. Like soldiers following a general, they had just blindly executed the commands of a professor.
Life Finds a Way Page 17