Past posts live here. Come 👋🏼 at me on FB, IG, Threads, & Bluesky

How to Live is a reader-supported newsletter. To access all posts and unlock the entire archive, please consider becoming a paying subscriber

How School Kills Wonder: NASA's Forgotten 1968 Study on Education's Silent War Against Creative Genius.

We live in a world that claims to value innovation and original thinking, yet as we move grade through grade, we are indoctrinated against making unexpected connections between disparate subjects to arrive at creative solutions. 

We are forced to sit still when we need to be moving. We need to wake up early when we need to sleep. We are expected to pay attention for long periods of time to learn in one specific style, measured against arbitrary standards using one type of test, in a staid environment, for which we are graded. 

We are forced inside from outside the box. 

The baffling thing about the system of educating children and teens is its whole-cloth misapprehension of what children and teens need. This is why our system excels at diminishing our creative capacity. By the time we’re fully grown, our school system has eradicated our innate inventiveness by nearly 100%. This is not hyperbole, nor conjecture. This, dear readers, is fact.

In 1968, NASA wanted to assign its most innovative engineers and scientists to tackle the most challenging problems. However, they lacked the tools to identify their team's most creative and imaginative members. They commissioned Dr. George Land, author and general systems scientist who discovered Transformation Theory, and business leader Dr. Beth Jarman to create an instrument to pinpoint creativity. 

While the method was successful, it didn’t answer a fundamental question: Where does creativity come from? 

Land replicated the study to answer this question, using 1600 children aged 4-5. The test presented children with problems and asked the kids to come up with new or different ideas to solve them.

What they discovered stunned them—98% of those 1600 children scored at the “creative genius” level for imaginative thinking. 

That’s right.

You heard me.

Brills.

They decided to follow these children and turned it into a longitudinal study. 

Testing them again at 10 years old, the children’s creativity and imaginative thinking had plummeted to 30%. By age 15, the number had dropped to 12%. 

The longitudinal study on kids ended there (apparently, the teachers running the studies got too depressed by the results), so they decided to test adults. 

People, buckle up. 

We scored a measly 2% for creativity. 

These findings led Land to a profound conclusion: Non-creative behavior is learned. 

The implication is clear - our education system and societal norms inadvertently stifle the natural creative abilities we all possess as children.

To dig deeper, I turned to the work of the late and wonderful Sir Ken Robinson, a renowned educationalist and creativity expert.

In his celebrated TED talk, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?", (scroll down) Robinson reveals the sundry ways education squanders imagination, creativity and talent. Instead of elevating our innate sense of wonder, schools are the largest contributor to the decline in creative thinking. 

As children, we are not afraid to be wrong. We take risks. We don’t consider falling off a balance beam a failure; we view it as part of the learning process. Only when we begin school are we shamed for our mistakes, improvising, guessing, and taking risks.

For a brief and beautiful window, children absorb the world firsthand. Everything is new, without reference points, preconceived notions, shoulds, or ideas about how to experience, say, see, or do things. We are nothing less than creative geniuses.

Then we go to school.

You must upgrade to read the rest of this piece to learn how to tap into your 5-year-old creative genius.

Join How to Live