Skilled students are thorough thinkers. They distinguish between opinion and fact. They ask powerful questions. They make detailed observations. They uncover assumptions and define their terms. They make assertions carefully, basing them on sound logic and solid evidence. Almost everything that we call knowledge is a result of these activities. This means that critical thinking and learning are intimately linked.
It’s been said that human beings are rational creatures. Yet no one is born a thorough thinker. This is a learned skill. Use the suggestions in this chapter to claim the vast, latent thinking powers that are your birthright.
4. Creative people
It all started innocently enough. I had set out to learn what I could about creativity. And there I was: an amateur with a cause and three colleagues: two people from the Corporation for Entertainment and Learning, and my wife and coeditor, Judith, who is an educational consultant—all tossed about on a turbulent sea churned by the high-horsepower engines of scientists, scholars, psychiatrists, historians, educators, sociologists and philosophers whose careers have been devoted to exploring creativity.
The waves came over our little boat almost immediately. Here was the very considerable novelist Bernard Malamud declaring that “creativity is a complex thing… Maybe sometime in the future they actually will find the genetic tissue that makes it what it is. I don’t want to be around when that happens. I want artistic creativity to remain forever a mystery.”
On the other hand, there was the author George Prince acknowledging that although once he had thought of creativity as an extraordinary act of producing something new and useful, now he sees it “as less cosmic and more common, an everyday affair, a mode of thought and action that is ultimately associated with learning and changing not only one’s self but one’s situation.”
There you have it—the basic tension between those who believe creativity to be a mystery, possibly a gift to genius alone, and those who believe it can be demystified, nurtured, even democratized. One school will have nothing to do with trying to dissect creativity into scientifically defined variables. Another considers creativity to be the endowment of all of us. Actually, the conflict represent not only opposing views of creativity but also differing ideas about human nature.
Two things are implied in the word “creativity,” as I have come to understand it: novelty and significance. What is created is new, and the new opens up paths that expand human possibilities. All creative behavior breaks from the past but remains indebted to it. Maya Angelou—poet, author, director, actress—told me that she never “left” Stamps, Arkansas, although she had moved from the little Southwest Arkansas town 30 years ago: “You carry your home wherever you go” When I asked Maya Angelou to go back with me to where her own ascent creativity was first threatened and then forged, she did not want to go. But finally she agreed, and we glimpsed just how creative behavior grows from deep roots, which it never totally serves even as it transcends them.
There are other examples. Fred Smith, who founded Federal Express, had some compelling sense of duty which motivated him from childhood and became obsessive of while he was in Vietnam. Samson Raphael son, the playwright, says that the drive to be creative has its roots in some remote past no longer operating consciously but still there nonetheless. The inventions we shall see are all examples of departures from tradition, but none could have occurred without tradition.
Creative people, then, often look at something from the past that is the result of convergent thinking and by thinking about it divergently come up with a novel use of a familiar object. They look in the common place to find the strange. Instead of thinking toward old solutions, they think away from them, making the leap from the unexpected to the inspired. Poets do it with metaphors and smiles. Journalists can do it with garbage. Yes, garbage. It was the first subject we decided to explore because we sensed that it would be a usual vehicle for demonstrating that you can think creatively about almost anything, if you learn how to relate and connect what at casual glance seems odd to couple. In our research, we found an Arizona professor, a garbologist, teaching contemporary civilization through what people throw out; a New York artist turning ordinary things off the streets into works of art; and an East Texas sewage plant where earthworms are used to turn sludge into topsoil. 感谢您阅读《Ideas 》一文，留学群(liuxuequn.com)编辑部希望本文能帮助到您。
