Fostering creativity with wisdom

Abstract

Over the past five years, creativity has become a focus of attention for policy‐makers in education. However, the increased interest in creativity has occurred as if without reference to any value framework. This article suggests that in fact an invisible underpinning value framework has been provided by western individualism, in turn both supporting and driven by the globalized capitalist marketplace. What could this mean for nurturing creativity with wisdom in schools? Working from the stance that wisdom involves making thoughtful, well‐informed and appropriate judgments leading to sound courses of action with regard to the consequences, this paper discusses some significant objections to a market‐driven model of creativity in education, discusses a possible framework for understanding creativity in a way which emphasizes responsibility as well as rights to expression and proposes wisdom as a necessary element of pedagogy.

Notes

1. This is a large‐scale, empirical project, spread over ten years, based at Harvard University's Project Zero and working in collaboration with research groups at Stanford University and The University of Chicago. Co‐directed by Professors Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and William Damon, it explores how professionals in the US succeed or fail in carrying out work that is excellent, ethical and engaging in the face of powerful market conditions, and rapid changes in society. It has worked with 12,000 subjects in nine domains and the results of the study have been written up in half a dozen books and dozens of articles. More information about the GoodWork Project can be found on the web site: www.goodworkproject.org.

2. A term developed by Jonathan Rowson in his doctoral work at Bristol University.

3. Clearly another dimension of this would include how researchers can investigate creativity with wisdom.