Kindergartners vs. Business Graduates

Did you know that every person is fully creatively expressed by age three?

This is true across cultures, continents, socioeconomic variables, and time. By age three, children are inventing songs, stories, and skits; they are drawing – even if it is with a stick in the sand. By age three, you were fully creatively expressed. By age 18, most people have lost 90% of their creative expression.

I think that’s interesting.

Tom Wujec (see the TED talk posted earlier on this blog) leads an engineering competition in which teams are given a certain amount of spaghetti, tape, a marshmallow, and 18 minutes to create the tallest structure to support the marshmallow. Among the worst performers in this exercise are recent graduates of MBAs. Among the best performers are recent graduates of Kindergarten. (In fact, the group that consistently outperforms Kindergartners is architects, which is a relief, really.)

Why? Why do Kindergartners tend to do so well with this? First of all, Kindergartners naturally collaborate. No Kindergartner is trying to be the CEO of the spaghetti company. Second, they tend to begin with the marshmallow and then incrementally build up a structure under the marshmallow. This process gives Kindergartners immediate and descriptive feedback as to how well they are doing. (MBAs, on the other hand, argue a lot, jockey for leadership, draw out plans, and select a plan. In the remaining minutes, MBAs assemble their structure and then plop their marshmallow on top. In this case, they’ve had no feedback along the way and they also have no time left to adapt once the structure fails.)

What I’m getting at is this: As young children, we are fully creatively expressed and we are naturally collaborative. And, creativity, curiosity, and collaboration are some of the skills or traits that are deeply essential to being successful, competitive, and innovative in the “real world” – not to mention how these ideas affect the quality of our own lives!

We also know that most children/people are not naturally good thinkers. Thinking—real critical and analytical thinking—is a skill that needs to be learned. There are ways of thinking, habits of thinkers, strategies to be utilized.

So what? (This is my favorite question.) So what?

As teachers and parents, we are in a unique position to foster the real and natural strengths of children: creativity, curiosity, and collaborative skills. We also are here to help them learn how to think. Not what to think, but how to think. As much as possible, we should be encouraging creative responses, solutions, and ideas, questions of curiosity, and opportunities for collaboration. And within all of this, we teach strategies and habits of mind that help students develop the capacity to think. We model problem-solving protocols. We help children develop the endurance to think through a complex issue.

Picasso commented that every child is an artist and that the challenge is remaining an artist into adulthood. What if we raise children that enter adulthood as artists and thinkers?