a high degree, prevalent among kindergarteners and that their
scores on creativity declined with each year of schooling.2 When
the breadth of this pattern alarmed me, I conducted creativity
testing for my nine-year-olds and middle schoolers to see if this
decline was also apparent in our students at Athens Montessori
School. I hypothesized that children at Athens Montessori
School, as an aggregate, would score higher than a mean of 50
as a function of their interdisciplinary training, and that the older
students would not show a decline. My hypothesis was borne out
by the data in my small study showing a rise in standard scores,
creative indices, and national percentiles among the older group.
As a school Director, I was gratified to see that in both the
standard total score measures and the national percentiles
for the Final Creative Index scores for the entire sample, many
students displayed creative strength. In the older group, 30%
scored between the 53rd and 80th percentile, and 50% scored
between the 90th and 99th percentile. Ironically, the one
low-scoring outlier was an accomplished student in music
and drama who thought the test was ‘stupid’ and unnecessary,
accounting for his low score.
Today, elaborate and intensive neurological studies are
revealing a greater understanding of how imagination and
innovation manifest in the brain. Brain physiology, chemistry,
and anatomy are far more plastic than previously assumed. Dee
Coulter declares, “It is mental chemistry that takes place in the
child, producing a chemical transformation. These impressions
not only penetrate the mind of the child, but they form it.”3
Breakthrough thinking, or the “aha” phenomenon, is characterized
by interhemispheric synchronicity - the electrical activities
on both sides of the brain show similar wave patterns. Maria
Montessori recognized, over a hundred years ago, that education
was not the mere transfer of information but the shaping of
lifelong capacities for creative contributions to humanity.
Current educational practices frequently fail to recognize
that an educational system should be the embodiment of our
cognitive and creative understandings of ourselves. If we fail
to understand creative thinking, we cannot hope to have an
educational system that will produce creative individuals.
Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that if society
cannot find ways to make integrated understanding accessible
to large numbers of people, then the information is not only
useless but a threat to human civilization.
Despite the hyper-emphasis on science or STEM learning
today, we must look to the words of our most distinguished
scientists to garner the importance of creativity in their
endeavors. Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important
3 Original Mind: Uncovering Your Natural Brilliance, Dee Joy Coulter Ed.D., Sounds True, (2014)
4 The Saturday Evening Post, What Life Means to Einstein, an Interview with Post Reporter Sylvester Viereck, (October 26, 1929)
5 Henri Poincaré, Science et méthode (1908), as translated by Francis Maitland (1914)
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