PH students second to last in creative thinking – PISA (GMA Network)
The above headline tells of the newly released report of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that tested the creative skills of 15-year-old students in 64 countries worldwide.
Students were asked to think of original and diverse solutions for simple expressive tasks and familiar problems, like coming up with an interesting story idea or thinking of different ways to conduct an awareness-raising campaign in school. The test measures the capacity of students to generate, evaluate, and improve ideas in four different areas – creative thinking, visual expression, scientific problem-solving, and social problem-solving.
Test results revealed that the Philippines was second to the lowest next to Albania. Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, and Finland topped the test.
The bleak news above made me remember a book on my shelf Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi by Howard Gardner.
As I was flipping through the book’s more than 400 pages, what caught my eye was the heading A Developmental Perspective on a page with a pertinent excerpt I share below:
If, in early life, children have the opportunity to discover much about their world and to do in a comfortable, exploring way, they will accumulate invaluable "capital of creativity,” on which they can draw in later life.
Capital of Creativity
Picture a child – better still, your own -- barefoot, eyes wide as moons. They tiptoe through dew-kissed grass, chasing fireflies. Each blade of grass whispers secrets: the earth’s heartbeat, the scent of adventure. This is their laboratory wherein curiosity brews like potions. They collect treasures – pebbles, feathers, and the echo of distant laughter. These are the coins of creativity – the creative capital – minted in the forge of exploration.
Creativity isn’t a solitary genius hunched over a canvas; it’s a playground of possibilities. Children wield crayons like wizards, scribbling suns with purple rays and oceans with orange waves. Their art isn’t bound by rules; it’s a rebellion against beige walls and straight lines – crooked houses, rainbow-hued monsters – the world applauds. These early strokes shape their creative DNA.
Children are natural philosophers. They ask “why” until the sky blushes. What if clouds were marshmallow pillows? What if shadows danced at midnight? These whimsical questions are seeds – they sprout into innovation. Creativity thrives on the fertile soil of curiosity.
Remember climbing trees? Each branch was a ladder to the stars. Children leap, scrape their knees, and ascend. Risk isn’t a threat; it’s a ticket to the cosmic carnival. And when they fall, they learn resilience – the art of dusting off and trying again. Creativity blooms in scraped knees and bruised egos.
Not In Your Dreams
That reminds me of Kahlil Gibran’s poem On Children in college:
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
Let’s look at the other side of the coin which Gardner highlighted:
If, on the other hand, children are restrained from such discovering activities, pushed in only one direction, or burdened with the view that there is only one correct answer or that correct answers must be meted out only by those in authority, then the chances that they will ever cast out on their own are significantly reduced.
Here’s the twist: creativity isn’t immune to circumstance. Poverty casts shadows, restricting the playground. Some children inherit cardboard boxes; others, ivory towers. The capital of creativity isn’t evenly distributed.
Our local playground depicts this grim reality. In early life, Filipino children are restrained from such discovering activities because a total of 12.4% of Filipino children have been living in extreme poverty, according to the latest policy research working paper released by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank.
The figure is equivalent to around 5.14 million children who live in extreme poverty in 2022 – defined as living on less than $2.15 (about P126) a day. Thus, amid such a destitute life, they are restrained from, if not deprived of, discovering activities. No wonder, the Philippines fell to the bottom in creative thinking scores, second to the lowest, next to Albania.
Let’s snatch a glimpse at the bowels of the grim situation through the personal lens of Nina Archie, whose story, edited for brevity, we took from a “UNICEF for every child” publication.
Children began to flock in front of our car. They started dancing for money that the passengers would give. Some motorists would share but that does not mean that those coins are enough for living. Now, I started asking myself many things. Do they eat thrice a day? Do they study? Why do they dance and beg for money when they should be attending schools, and learning to read and write? Why are they amid the traffic not minding how polluted the air and how the temperature is?
I noticed that someone was sleeping beside where we parked and was not even bothered by people who walked and saw him lying down on those boxes. How could they sleep in the street with the oven-like temperature of the Philippines? How do they live without houses for safety and a proper source of water? Some are babies who looked only months old or worse, a newborn.
Another book The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores is a thought-provoking study carried out many years ago by Kyung-Hee Kim where her analysis rings like an alarm in the American milieu: creative thinking scores then decline. It’s as if the minds scale mountains of knowledge, but forget how to dance with ideas. IQs rise, but creativity wanes. It’s like pianists mastering scales but forgetting the jazz.
Back home, it's a double whammy. Creative thinking scores hang at the bottom rung, alongside lagging IQs in reading, math, and science. Just as the canvas is fraying, so too, does the symphony falters.
Imagine the classroom – the whispered hum of electric fans, the lingering scent of paper and pencils. Our children deserve more. Poverty shouldn’t be their conductor. We must rewrite the score. Let’s reshape education and take the sting out of poverty.
VP Sara resigned to pave the way to reshape education. Will Gadon, who the Inquirer Editorial tagged as the “walking, talking liability” do the same to pave the way to someone who can truly take the sting out of poverty?
Let’s honor the child within us – the one who once chased fireflies and believed in magic. Albert Einstein once said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” Creativity isn’t a luxury; it’s the heartbeat of innovation. Someone has sounded once this alarm – Innovate or perish.
Content put together in collaboration with Microsoft Bing AI-powered Co-pilot
Head photo courtesy of Freepik
Video clips courtesy of YouTube
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