It's common to focus on facts and skills, as being readily measurable. Still, there are ways to try to measure creativity, and they tell an uncomfortable story...
As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity | Psychology Today
Kim, who is a professor of education at the College of William and Mary, analyzed scores on a battery of measures of creativity—called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)—collected from normative samples of schoolchildren in kindergarten through twelfth grade over several decades. ...
According to Kim’s research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. ... more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. Yikes.... ...
the TTCT seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.[6] The correlation coefficients found between childhood TTCT scores and real-world adult creative achievements have ranged from a low of about .25 to a high of about .60, depending on which tests are included and how adult creative achievements are assessed.[6]
So, the decline in TTCT scores among school-aged children indeed does appear to be cause for concern. Kim herself calls it the “creativity crisis,” and that term has been picked up in a number of articles in popular magazines.
Well, surprise, surprise. For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.
Of course, maybe it's not freedom, maybe it's excessive fructose or excessive worry about fructose or too much or too little television. But it does seem like an issue worth considering, when we consider options for American schools.
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