Foreword to The Inventive Answer

Creativity and young people

‘I have learned how to get more ideas from my head and use them more
effectively’
- 12 year old

When we set out on the pilot phase of Ignite!, NESTA’s Fellowship project for
young people between the ages of 10 and 21, we knew that we were in
largely uncharted territory. The landscape of creativity, education and talent
is often talked and written about, but equally often, in much the same terms
as El Dorado or Atlantis were the subject of fable in the Age of Discovery.
The maps we worked from for exploring our particular areas of interest were
partial or contradictory.

We decided to set out on a programme of action research. More particularly,

in seeking the widest possible reference, we were determined to allow
ourselves a genuinely heuristic exploration, discovery for oneself.

Ignite! is founded on the premise that exceptional creative talent does not
wait for adulthood to emerge. We have sought various definitions of
creativity and from these have sought various descriptors of the kinds of
young people and their mental characteristics in order to explore the further
difficult notion of exceptionality. We have taken the view that if we can
define creativity and locate it in the education of young people, we should be
able to identify those young people who excel in thinking creatively, or
display more frequently the habits of creative thinkers. The further challenge
is then to design programmes of support that continue to nurture their innate
abilities.

We are encouraged by the progress of the project so far (nine months in to

the pilot phase at the time of writing), and some of the experiences of young
people quoted throughout the essay that follows indicate an excitement on
their part to engage in something new and experimental.

We are also encouraged by the ‘signs of the times’ that suggest that there is
a gathering recognition of the importance of creativity as an essential
component of the volatile process of learning.

In The Inventive Answer, writer Richard Ings explores some of the

territory from a personal perspective. He throws some of the debate around
priorities in education into sharp relief, and draws on research and personal
experience to conclude that the decade of 10-21 is an entirely appropriate
target age range for an initiative like Ignite!.

We hope he is right.
 Rick Hall
Ignite! Project Leader
April 2004

Note
The views expressed in the essay are the author’s and do not necessarily
reflect NESTA’s policy or priorities.

The names of young people referred to in quotation have been changed.

The inventive answer
Thoughts on creativity
and young people

Richard Ings
The inventive answer
Thoughts on creativity and young people
In this article, writer Richard Ings responds to the decision by NESTA
to extend its Fellowship Programme to young people aged 10 to 21 by
setting the aims and aspirations of the Ignite! project into a wider
context of child development and creative thinking.

The child has the culture’s repertoire of acceptable ways of

being foisted upon him, and answers back often in rage, but
more acceptably in inventiveness and innovation.
Adam Phillips, The Beast in the
Nursery

Many writers argue that creativity consists of discovering something new in

the world, either producing it entirely from scratch or, more often, from
experimenting with existing elements and thoughts and combining them in
an original way. To make such discoveries necessitates a decisive step -
which might feel more like a leap - beyond the safety zone of the tried and
tested into the unknown. When such steps are made (in) public, the sense
of intellectual risk is heightened by the potential embarrassment of exposure.
In going out on a limb, the creator may well feel a sudden loneliness, isolated
by their personal and unconventional discovery, and waiting - perhaps only
for a moment or perhaps for ever - for others to understand them and
welcome what they have created.

In many respects, particularly in terms of experimentation, risk and personal

discovery, this scenario about the creative enterprise could also be describing
the way in which children and young people learn and develop. This process
begins with the dynamic risk-taking of the very young child, necessary if it is
to acquire basic skills, and goes right through to adolescence, when there is
an equally vigorous experimentation with new ideas and new behaviours as
adulthood beckons. One key issue I want to explore in this article is why and
how this natural creativity of the child and the adolescent seems to
evaporate in the climate of our culture – and how it might be nurtured,
instead. The fact that so very few of us end up as wholly creative adults is, I
will argue, a sad testament not just to the narrowness of our educational
philosophy but, more generally, to the conservative, uncomprehending and
often punitive attitude our culture has towards children and young people’s
creativity.
Ideally, young people should be learning to take more control and
responsibility for themselves during the years from 10 to 21, the age range
targeted by this new project from NESTA. This occurs fundamentally through
a process of re-viewing received ideas and exploring new options and fresh
possibilities, in the necessary effort to create a new (sense of) identity for
themselves. The personal experimentation in the middle phase (around 13-
18) is often particularly fervent, yet it comes at the very time when the
educational system shifts into its most Gradgrindian mode, herding young
people through a rigorous series of examinations designed to equip them for
the adult world of work.

Instead of encouraging a shift over these years from dependency on adult

instruction to independence, giving the young person enough confidence to
start taking the initiative and assuming responsibility for themselves, the
setting up of regular achievement hurdles from the age of 7 through to the
late teens tends to keep young people in a permanent state of waiting for life
– their lives - to begin. This seems to me to be a modern enactment of the
Victorian dictum: of children being seen (examined) and not heard. This
system of discipline is no longer, of course, for subjects’ induction into
service to Empire and the class system, but into a new servitude to a culture
of docile consumption, in a society where the market has triumphed in
almost every sphere of activity.

It may well be useful to such a society to have infantilized citizens, ‘grown-

up’ only in the chronological sense, and an education system that retards
rather than encourages creativity. Creativity is, after all about questioning
authority, challenging the status quo, upsetting the apple-cart – something
the state and its institutions do not usually have the time or patience for.
More fundamentally still, such repression may be mirrored in our own
psyche, when it often seems a lot more comfortable to accept norms and to
follow set patterns of thinking than to risk stepping beyond the agreed
parameters.

This article, then, will look at what encouraging creativity might mean in the
context of young people’s development, what implications that has for our
views on learning and originality, and finally what potential impact NESTA’s
own initiative might make in this context.
Part One A paradise lost

Somehow the sun does not seem to shine so brightly as it used;

the trackless meadows of old time have shrunk and dwindled
away to a few poor acres. A saddening doubt, a dull suspicion,
creeps over me. Et in Arcadia ego – I certainly did once inhabit
Arcady. Can it be that I also have become an Olympian?
Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age

In the ‘Genius Issue’ of December 2003, American Esquire magazine ran its
annual round-up of ‘the brightest and the best’, a gallery of individuals who
have demonstrated extraordinary levels of creativity, innovation and
enterprise, among them Paul Moller, inventor of the Skycar, a vehicle
designed to give a whole new meaning to ‘off-road’ driving. The signs of his
future inventiveness were evident very early on:

He was wielding a hammer as soon as he could walk. He built

his first house at age six, a structure about the size of a
bathroom. When he was eight, he built a bigger, sturdier
dwelling with a shingled roof that stood for many years. Not
that he needed the space; it was just that “nobody ever told me
I couldn’t.”

Although considered a ‘prodigy’ by his own family, Moller’s early creativity is

not so rare - or, rather, should not be so rare. In a perfect world such
imaginative enterprise would be universal, as - arguably - every child begins
with the same potential. The late David Bohm, Emeritus Professor of
Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, certainly
believed that the rosy memories most of us have about our early childhood
are not fantasy but can be traced back to the real and pleasurable experience
of untrammelled discovery and creativity:

…it is well known that a child learns to walk, to talk, and to

know his way around the world just by trying something out
and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or
thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened. In this
way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creative
way, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him, and
this leads people to look back on childhood as a kind of
paradise.

In Bohm’s account, paradise is lost once such wide-ranging learning has been
narrowed down to a repetitive exercise designed mainly to accumulate
knowledge ‘to please the teacher’ and to pass examinations. The limited
boundaries of this vocational version of learning only harden once the
individual emerges from schooling into the world of work, when the utilitarian
spirit finally triumphs over the impulse to learn for the pure pleasure of it.
Thus, Bohm writes, the ‘ability to see something new and original gradually
dies away’, recalling Kenneth Grahame’s wistful thought that, grown-up, he
may have lost the vision he had as a child.

One of Bohm’s key insights, that we generally underestimate the child and
the potentially unlimited extent of its creativity, is shared by Margaret Boden,
who writes in her book, The Creative Mind, that:

A young child’s ability to construct new conceptual spaces is

seldom appreciated even by its doting parents. All human
infants spontaneously transform their own conceptual space in
fundamental ways, so that they come to be able to think
thoughts of a kind which they could not have thought before.

It would seem to me that all our efforts to be creative later in life must relate
in some way to this early period, when – in the right kind of environment –
creativity happens naturally, as part of a growing, i.e. learning, process. This
is the original form of what Boden terms ‘P-creativity’ - coming up with an
idea by yourself – which, on rare occasions, may lead to ‘H-creativity’, the
creation of a unique idea, never thought of by anyone else before. Although
NESTA may ultimately be interested most in H-creativity – the development
of ideas that are entirely new (and potentially useful) to the world – the
fundamental process to understand (and then nurture) is summed up in
Boden’s words: ‘Never mind who thought of the idea first: how did that
person manage to come up with it, given that they had never thought of it
before?’

I have seen three of my own children acquire a range of skills, including the
immensely complex and abstract skill of language, and I am still no closer to
understanding precisely just when the penny dropped, how the never-before-
thought idea emerged, where the learning actually began. What also
interests me here is that this creativity or ‘learning’ seems to happen
primarily from within the child, driven by its own needs and drives, and not
as a passive response to any direct form of ‘teaching’ or instruction from me.
In ‘trying something out and seeing what happens’, the child discovers things
for itself, through its own passionate curiosity, without having to be
dragooned into learning; indeed, its whole existence is a ‘learning situation’.

As we approach a discussion about the ‘Ignite! age-group’, I want to hold on

to this image of passionate curiosity and to argue, following Freud, that
ultimately desire lies behind all learning.

Reaching a critical stage

Writing about much older young people, Isidor I. Rabi, Nobel Prize winner in
Physics, argues that teaching in his field largely fails to recognise the
personal nature of creativity:
 We don’t teach our students enough of the intellectual content
of experiments – their novelty and their capacity for opening
new fields. …My own view is that you take these things
personally. You do an experiment because your own
philosophy makes you want to know the result. It’s too hard,
and life is too short, to spend your time doing something
because someone else has said it is important. You must feel
the thing yourself.

This ‘feeling the thing yourself’ rather than doing what you are told to seems
to me to be basic to any kind of creativity and it relates directly to the issue
of control over creativity and learning (and indeed over personal agency as a
whole), an issue that is most vividly acted out at two critical stages of
separation and development in young people’s development.

The ‘terrible twos’, a phase of development that may actually begin as young
as 18 months, is our less than charitable term for the time when the child,
once so biddable, starts to challenge parental authority and test its own
powers. This is undoubtedly also a testing time for parents and carers, as a
delicate balance must be struck between setting boundaries and allowing
occasional trespass, between curbing the child’s natural and anti-social
tendency to grandiosity whilst nurturing its growing self-confidence and
independence. The child needs to learn that it is not the centre of the world
but equally to know that it is loved unconditionally. It needs to have the
confidence to try things out for itself but to know that there are limits to its
freedom of action, not least for its own safety. This is the first and most
significant period of separation and individuation from parental authority, and
how well or badly it is handled will profoundly shape the child’s development
and its chances of reaching a healthy adulthood. David Bohm makes an
important distinction between telling a child how to behave and telling it what
sort of person it should be. Exhorting a child to be a good boy or girl, for
example:

implies the effort to impose a mechanical pattern very deeply

in the whole order in which the mind operates. A similar effort
is implied when the child is told what he should think … and
what he should feel….

The second period of separation is, of course, adolescence or, as Kate Figes
has called it in her recent book, the ‘terrible teens’. It is only now that
parents discover if the earlier process has gone well; unresolved issues over
power and powerlessness are finally acted out, often very painfully for all
concerned, sometimes with tragic results: drug abuse, self harm, suicide.
Even if the earlier separation process has gone well, the teenage years can
often be a battleground. Harry Enfield’s comic creation ‘Kevin the teenager’
is based on a stereotype but in every stereotype there is a kernel of
observable truth and every parent must on occasion sympathise with Kevin’s
hapless mother and father, faced with yet another bewildering tirade.

Yet, the ‘teenager from hell’, like the ‘terrible’ two-year old, is not some alien
creature but a version of ourselves as we struggle to make sense of our
world and wrest control over it. The child’s enquiring why?, aimed at
discovering how the world works, becomes the emotional why? of
adolescence, challenging the way the world works, and becomes, if
sustained, the convention-busting why not? of the creative adult.
Recognising the value of this curiosity is vital to an understanding of how
creativity develops. Victor Weisskopf, Professor of Physics at MIT, argues
that:

we must always begin by asking questions, not giving answers.

In this way we contribute to the joy of insight. For science is
the opposite of knowledge. Science is curiosity.

This is a very powerful statement and flies in the face of our conventional
wisdoms about education, which all seem to come down to a belief in the
benefits of accumulating facts: the mere acquisition of knowledge. This kind
of education is, in effect, a closed system rather than a truly educative
process, where (to track ‘education’ to its semantic roots) learning is ‘drawn’
or ‘led’ out of active subjects. Yet, in popular culture as much as at school,
rote learning of facts is highly valued; from University Challenge to The
Weakest Link via Mastermind, the common perception is that knowing the
one correct answer to a factual question is the clearest indication of high
intelligence. However, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues pithily: ‘It is
not always enlivening to be well informed.’

Unofficial education

Phillips contrasts ‘official education’, which socialises children into adopting

norms of thinking and behaviour, with unofficial education. Official education
is based on imitation, not transformation.

To be parents or teachers (or psychoanalysts) rather than

merely autocrats or bullies, we need to distinguish between
vocabularies that are to be imitated – that offer themselves up
as fetishes, or for identification (being like the kind of person
who speaks like this) – and vocabularies that invite
transformation (the difference, say, between a poem and an
instruction manual).

The frustration for many teachers today is that there is less opportunity than
ever before to develop transformative ‘vocabularies’. One teacher, quoted by
Kate Figes, sums up the current drive as ‘[p]rescribed learning rather than
explored’, bemoaning in particular the loss of two years when such exploring
had, at least in theory, been more feasible: the year prior to the GCSE year,
and the first year of A-levels, now dominated by A/S level examinations.
Thus, the space that Figes argues is needed for the ‘extensive discussion,
analysis and experimentation… essential at this age to develop [adolescents’]
powers of critical thinking’, is simply not available at school. Indeed, school
is part of the problem, not the solution.

For all the efforts to modernise the formal education sector, it remains
obdurately in the Victorian age. Wave after wave of new technology, from
the tape recorder to the video to the computer, has been either
metaphorically or in reality consigned to the cupboard in the classroom, its
vast potential untapped. If it is used at all, it is usually to promote the same
kind of pedagogy that incensed Dickens to his satires on Victorian education:
the rote slate-scratching of those times ‘upgraded’ to on-screen literacy and
numeracy exercises. Meanwhile, the serried ranks of cowed urchins once
destined overwhelmingly for mines or factories or service below stairs have
become today’s gradable units, processed in similar fashion through a system
regulated by the authority of architecture and expertise, school-defined time
and behaviour, and rigid standardised testing regimes. It is as if a
paradigmatic shift had not occurred in our society, transforming the
economic base from mechanical to more creative processes. When the
school system we have inherited from our heavy-manufacturing forebears is
clearly failing to produce people appropriately skilled for the latest (the
fourth?) industrial revolution, even the most instrumentalist policymakers
need to think far more creatively about what education is and what it is there
for.

School corridors are also echoing with the feet of departing students, some
identified in the mushrooming statistics of the excluded and segregated,
large numbers of others slipping below the radar of our attention, signing on
for registration and bunking off for the rest of the day. Yet, contrary to
tabloid claims, young people have not suddenly lost the plot – or the
potential appetite for learning. They (and many who remain at their desks)
simply know, whether they can articulate it or not, that school is not about to
equip them with what they actually need to survive and thrive in the world.
The truism that school children are now studying for jobs that didn’t exist
when they entered primary school has had to be revised: the fact that new
kinds of work will emerge while they are at secondary school simply reflects
the exponential growth of chip-based technologies and the cultural and
economic transformations they are catalysing. The certificates handed out
by the examination system may be official ‘proof’ of ability but they rarely
relate to the actual skills and creativity that the modern world demands of
young people.

However hard schools and those in them and legislating over them try to
reform, the central problem remains: that these are institutions based on
closed systems of knowledge and authority and thus not easily challenged.
This means, in turn, that they are not usually creative places, because
creativity is a challenging force, capable of undermining accepted knowledge
and offending those who draw their authority from that knowledge. They
seem hardly the best place for the natural creativity of the adolescent to
blossom.

Untapped potential

My thesis is that the decade of adolescence is a time of great untapped

potential for creativity. Drawing on a range of studies, Kate Figes argues
that, contrary to the overwhelmingly negative image we have of adolescence,
it is in fact a time of great passion and creativity:

for adolescents themselves, these years can be as exhilarating,

passionate and highly creative as they are difficult
emotionally…. There is a vigorous, raw energy to the spirit of
youth, forcing human society on to find new ways of doing
things, to embrace new concepts and hear new sounds….

Figes points out that recent research shows that the adolescent mind is still
forming, not yet adult but capable of more abstract thinking than the child,
and argues we are missing a great opportunity by not intervening to
encourage that development in the way we do naturally with younger
children:

All too often, adult society misses opportunities to educate and

guide adolescents when their intellectual skills are at their
most malleable. … If they are not stimulated adequately at this
highly creative time, when the brain is at its most capable of
absorbing new skills specific to adult survival, they may miss
that slot in their development.

The urgency of this cannot be overstated, not simply so that adolescents can
make the healthy transition into adulthood, Figes’ main concern, but because
this is a period when increased mental powers (a 15-year old can process
information almost as swiftly as an adult) are combined with the visionary
imagination of the child. Adolescent idealism is, from one point of view, an
expression of narcissism – why can’t the world be as I want it to be? – but,
from another view, it is a ferment out of which transformative thinking may
occur.

These are the years when everything is, in an almost literal sense, up for
grabs, as the adolescent starts to get to grips with the world-as-it-is and
finds the comforting certainties of childhood inexorably sliding away. It is a
time of intense commitment and ferocious argument, of emotional turmoil
and profound physical change. It is a time, too, when authority itself comes
under intense scrutiny, particularly that of parents, teachers and other
carers. Separation is necessary if the adolescent is to become a fully fledged
and independent adult; challenging set values and received ideas,
particularly of those who are seen to control their lives, is a vital aspect of
this. In questioning authority, adolescents are open – indeed, vulnerable –
to alternative ideologies. Many continue the child’s experimentation ‘to see
what happens’. Adolescents create and shape their own spaces in the
physical world – from their bedroom (a site of much creativity, as Paul Willis
and others have long discussed) to local street corners and abandoned lots –
as well as in their heads. They seek new ways of doing things; opt out of
what was expected of them as children.

Little of all this is exploited at school; in most cases, such volatility is

frowned upon. Children are still to be seen, not heard; told what to do, not
asked if they know a better way to do it; disciplined, not invited to question
set knowledge or authority. This is a wasted opportunity, in my view. The
Ignite! project may be one glimmer of hope, in this respect. By seeking
imaginative ways to identify young people of exceptional creative promise, it
cannot help but highlight the general failure of conventional teaching
methods to locate, release and encourage the creativity of young people. If
it succeeds in its quest, the Ignite! Young People’s Fellowship Project might
well give our politicians and tabloid pundits pause.

As Kate Figes points out, no other age group is ‘so consistently

misunderstood, feared, reviled or defined by stereotype’ as the adolescent;
even the word ‘youth’ signals trouble. What struck me about the preamble
to the round-up of ‘the brightest and the best’ in American Esquire was that
it set its creative stars within a wider firmament, with this statement:

Let us not forget that each American generation is great

because it is expected to be, and because it is allowed to be.

One might read this, on one level, as an expression of a kind of patriotism

almost entirely foreign to a contemporary British reader, yet at another and
much deeper level, one might find something to admire and envy in its
sentiments. Why is it so hard to imagine any Prime Minister of this country
voicing such an expectation about our young people? Why is it so hard to
imagine our young people feeling this country even cared?
Part Two A flower can take a hint
My own secondary school was a ‘voluntary-aided’ boys’ grammar school,
founded in 1722 to ‘educate local boys of any age from 9 to 14, in the arts of
writing, arithmetic, mathematics and navigation so they could be apprenticed
to masters of ships sailing in the East Indies’. By the time I joined, a couple
of centuries later, the school had grown from 12 to nearly 500 students,
most there on academic merit but with a sizeable minority of fee-paying
boarders from service families stationed abroad. The culture of the school,
as a result, was faintly comparable to the traditional public school world I
enjoyed reading about in Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter books. When I started
there, most of the teachers – we called them ‘masters’ - wore gowns and
some even sported mortar boards. Discipline was brisk and, in the case of
Latin lessons, riotous, with a gym shoe wielded ad libitum. Another teacher
had the charming habit, which would surely lead to some sort of litigation
now, of hurling chalk at boys he thought insufficiently gripped by his
mathematical monologues. This image – of flying chalk whistling towards an
unsuspecting boy, his dreaming head turned towards a sunlit window - has
stayed with me and was indeed the first to pop, unbidden, into my own head
as I pondered how to approach this article. Why this image, then?

It seems to me to be a more complex moment than simply a frustrated

teacher trying to get a student’s attention, to call him back into the present
tense of mathematics. The image has something to do with the contrast
between teaching and dreaming, between authority and its subjects,
between the classroom and the world of light outside. My focus shifts to the
boy in the brief moments before the chalk connects – imagine the film
slowing down – and to the unreadable expression in his eyes. What does
creativity look like? As John Howkins, author of The Creative Economy,
notes, ‘other people observing creative people at work are often puzzled –
“they don’t look as if they’re working”’. Does the teacher consider as he
grimly watches his chalk fly through the air that this boy may in fact be the
only student in the class paying attention?

In developing Freud’s ideas about ‘dream-work’, Adam Phillips suggests a

possible interpretation of this classroom scenario:

As if, while we go about our official business, an artist inside us

is all the time on the look-out for material to make a dream
with. So… the student finds herself unwittingly drawn to
specific bits of the subject being taught – whatever the
emphasis of the teacher happens to be – which she will then,
more or less secretly (even to herself), transform into
something rather strange. If she did this while she was asleep,
we would call it a dream; if she does it while she is awake, it
will be called a misunderstanding, a delusion or an original
contribution to the subject.
A misunderstanding, a delusion, an original contribution to the subject: we
are considering creativity here – the production of something new and ‘rather
strange’ in the world. Phillips’s central purpose in his book, The Beast in the
Nursery, is to tease out the profound difference between ‘official’ education -
what the maths teacher is trained and paid to impart - and ‘unofficial’, half-
hidden learning. Drawing on Freud’s radical ideas about ‘dream-work’,
Phillips claims that really significant learning does not come about through
teaching at all, but through a process that is only partly, if at all, conscious.
Thus:

people can learn but they can’t be taught; or, at least, they
can’t be taught anything of real significance. And that is partly
because no one – neither student nor teacher – can ever know
beforehand exactly what is of personal significance; that is,
exactly what a person will find significant, select out to dream
with, to remember or forget; to work on.

At this deep, dreaming level of the self, nothing stems the flow of desire.
What is desired or valued and thus learned or developed at this level is
chosen by the dreamer; in Phillips’ words, the self ‘always chooses its
teachers’, and is ‘always deschooling society’. One challenge the Ignite!
project faces, then, is to recognise – as one teacher ruefully admitted after a
creativity seminar held by NESTA – that the teacher (or the parent or the
adult) may actually be impeding creative thinking, that young people learn
‘despite the adults, not because of them’.

The story of the flying chalk might now be a tale of the ultimate frustration of
teaching up against the mysterious and invisible process of learning. In
mathematical terms, we might substitute the simple formula of t + c = e
with the more complex algebra of p – t + d = en. The first represents the
old notion of teacher and chalk equalling education, while the second takes
away the traditional teacher from the pupil and adds dream-time to produce
infinite educational and creative possibilities.

An unknown world

The very young child, discussed earlier, makes its creative discoveries or
‘learns’ not in a classroom or under a teacher’s instruction but by engaging
with a world full of unknowns. The world is not explicit, after all: it doesn’t
explain itself. Whether we are babies or philosophers, we have to come up
with the explanations. How does this happen? Maybe that is still
unanswerable, but happen it does. As the premier poet of Innocence and
Experience, the visionary William Blake saw that our wits are sharpened by
confronting the unknown: ‘What is not too explicit is the fittest for instruction
because it rouses the faculties to act.’
In his fascinating and innovative collection of 39 ‘micro-lectures in proximity
of performance’, Matthew Goulish, founder member of US avant-garde
troupe Goat Island, cites traveller Alexandra David-Neel, who, in 1931,
described Tibetan learning rituals. Desirous of learning the alphabet, a
young person brings gifts to the home of a teacher and sits respectfully
through a three-part ritual. First, the teacher invokes the spirit of science,
then recites the thirty letters of the alphabet. Before the student is
dismissed, the teacher asks the student to repeat with him a series of
apparently nonsense syllables, whose meaning he does not disclose. ‘This
final step’, writes David-Neel, ‘is meant to cause an increase of mental
ability.’

Goulish compares this methodology to our own culture’s approach to

learning: the choosing of a teacher parallels our administrative activity; the
teaching of the thirty letters relates to our objective disciplines; the sense of
a ritual to classroom ‘performance’ and thus to ‘art’. However, the final,
seemingly meaningless formula has no obvious equivalent in our experience:

this aspect of the described learning ritual places the

meaningful in the context of the meaningless. It shows the
teaching of a lesson in the light of the unteachable. It presents
us with the frightening possibility that learning only takes
place in the presence of the unlearnable.

In Adam Phillip’s terms, the recitation of the alphabet would correspond to

his notion of an ‘order’, i.e. something explicitly taught in our ‘official’
education, whereas the challenge of the nonsense syllables is a ‘hint’.
Phillips draws this latter notion from the following passage from a letter
written by John Keats, which he describes as a ‘hymn to intelligent laziness’:

You don’t have to do very much to get things done, as long as

you don’t need to know what you are doing. If you have too
much of a plan you’ve got a real job on your hands. …it is
better to be a flower than a bee: a flower can take a hint.

In linking this to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s complaint about ‘the distraction of too

much’ (‘A word or two can make you think; any more and you could feel
usurped, force-fed, too full’), Phillips implicitly critiques an approach to
creativity based on trying to absorb vast amounts of information. In linking
it to Marion Milner’s experiments with ‘free-drawing’, where Milner discovered
the tendency, indeed overpowering temptation, to resolve a scribble into
something recognisable and ‘easily sharable’ - thus turning a ‘hint’ (the
unknown) into an order (the obvious) - Phillips makes a vital point about the
relationship between the ‘hint’ and the discovery of the ‘new’:

the risk of what’s possible… is turned into an order. Fear of the

unknown is cured through flight into the intelligible. The new…
is pre-empted. The familiar, the unsurprising, restores our
 collusive sanity. …Hints… can be made something of; orders
can only be submitted to or rejected. …it is as though we are
continually giving ourselves orders, trying to live up to coercive
ideals. If we conform, out of fear, with what too quickly makes
sense, our hunger for recognition becomes a self-blinding.

Working towards transformation

Conforming to official education (and getting the grades) may be a practical

necessity in order to be ‘recognised’, i.e. to function effectively as a citizen
and worker in our culture, but the ‘self-blinding’ this entails may – and
usually does – prevent the emergence of fully creative adults. To encourage
orthodoxy, to validate just one ‘given style of thinking’, Margaret Boden
argues, can ‘render certain thoughts impossible’. The highest form of
creativity, Boden and others argue, is the transformation of conceptual
spaces in the mind; by this, she means going beyond a set thinking style.
Our everyday notion of creativity – that is, coming up with new ideas in a
given field of activity – is about an exploration within existing limits: a new
version of things but not a transformation.

What, then, does this mean for Ignite! in its quest for young people capable
– or potentially capable - of transformative thinking? Somehow, dream-time
has to be fed, but this is hard to legislate for. Certainly, the traditional
classroom approach, complete with (metaphorically) begowned teacher and
flying chalk, is a poor option. Indeed, some genuinely creative people
believe that, to make creativity possible, order and authority has to be
flouted. These troublemakers range from Salvador Dali, who famously
asserted that we should ‘systematically create confusion’ to set creativity
free, to the ideas people at DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency), who, according to Esquire magazine, create the future ‘in
an atmosphere that encourages them to be, in the best way, irresponsible’.

This ‘irresponsibility’ is, in fact, another kind of responsibility: a firm

commitment to pursue a personal vision that may be very much at odds with
accepted thinking. ‘If the fool would persist in his folly,’ writes Blake, ‘he
would become wise.’ Which is encouraging, but the problem, of course, is
that fools make mistakes and making mistakes, as David Bohm points out,
undermines our ingrained sense of the ego as ‘essentially perfect’.
Overcoming this widespread fear of making mistakes, however, is essential if
we are to give ‘primary emphasis to the perception of what is new and
different’.

The risk, of course, is that by persisting in our folly we will be rejected by our
peers. Against this, John Howkins argues that the feeling of actually creating
something ‘does not depend upon other people giving their approval or even
their understanding’. We – and the young people we are concerned with
here – need to find our rewards and our fulfilment in the exertion of our own
creativity rather than in seeking acceptance amongst the authorities of this
world. In other words, like the adolescent growing towards adulthood, the
goal must be full independence. In the phrase popularised by job ads in the
1980s, we must be ‘self-starters’ – as Howkins writes: ‘Someone who wants
a ready-made process, who waits for the whistle, who waits to be told, will
create nothing.’

The young child does not need a whistle or to be told but focuses totally on
the task in hand: on the challenge of walking, of building towers of bricks, of
mastering the fork and spoon. Only that kind of wholehearted interest
translated into adulthood, Bohm maintains, will ‘give the mind the energy
needed to see what is new and different’, especially when what emerges
might seem to threaten what is ‘dear to us’.

The stakes are higher yet. A child at play is a child at work, ‘busy being
born’. To slacken in that work of creativity is to cease to grow or, completing
Bob Dylan’s line, to be ‘busy dying’. Bohm agrees: a healthy mind needs the
exercise of creativity as much as the body demands breath. This gives a
proper sense of urgency with which to view NESTA’s whole quest, not just
this new initiative for young people (though Ignite! may prove to be its most
significant move yet towards nurturing the roots of adult creativity).

The task is challenging. For Bohm, ‘to awaken the creative state of mind… is
one of the most difficult things that could possibly be attempted’. This is
because the journey towards originality and creativity is, in the end, as in the
beginning, a personal one: one, he warns, that cannot be reached through
mechanical exercises or prepared formulae.

Our culture’s energy goes mainly into what Adam Phillips calls ‘the ideal of
adaptation’, but there is always the possibility of improvisation, by which he
means ‘the child and the adult’s relative freedom to transform, according to
their unconscious desire, the cultural givens’. Children and young people
have these ‘cultural givens’ imposed upon them, mediated first by their
parents and then by their teachers. We must work hard to enable them to
turn these orders into hints; to challenge the accepted and the obvious; to
defend their imaginative visions; to make new futures through their
curiosity; above all, to answer back, not in rage, but in inventiveness and
innovation.

Richard Ings
January 2004
Postscript
Rick Hall and Richard Ings in conversation

The draft version of The Inventive Answer was posted on the NESTA Ignite!
website and given limited hard copy circulation following its launch at
NESTA’s Annual Event in January 2004. Commissioned at the outset of the
Ignite! pilot programme, the article outlined the kind of broad theoretical
questions suggested by such an ambitious initiative. Subsequently, with the
first round of Ignite! workshops and residential Labs completed and initial
findings beginning to emerge, Richard Ings returned to NESTA to ask Ignite!
Project Leader Rick Hall how far practice had matched – or outstripped -
theory.

RI Did you find any connections between the issues raised in The
Inventive Answer and the actual experience of the workshops
and residential weekends with young people?

RH It was great to read the essay again after having done the Labs, as
there was a great deal that coincided between the two. For example,
we have learned that there is great developmental potential still to be
exploited in the design of subsequent involvement of young people,
particularly the emphasis on giving them time to relax, daydream,
reflect - to let ideas just emerge in a kind of free time as well as in the
rather more intense, rapt moments focusing on the workshop
activities. This was actually a strong learning point for us. It seems to
tie in well with that opening quotation from Adam Phillips, which you
return to at the end, which suggests the combination of comfort and
challenge inherent in the way that young people socialise and learn
and express their individuality and creativity.

The values of risk, of acknowledging the unknown and of embracing

the unexpected that you quote from various sources, from
Wittgenstein to Milner, are very much at the heart of our aspirations
for how the programme should develop in future. In the first round of
Lab experiences with our 10-15 year olds, we laid out a table of
delights for them to taste; the overall menu was designed to offer
them the range of Multiple Intelligences a la Howard Gardner, and to
give us an insight into what might work best with them. That has
been successful, but now I want to take them into a much riskier area
of more focused activity. They may have to opt for an extended idea
development process: solve this technological problem, find a design
solution to this question, make a new toy that satisfies these needs,
create an expressive piece of art, cross this boundary, traverse this
new territory...

RI The essay suggests a more permissive approach to encourage

creative thinking, where there is more time to ‘gaze out of the
 window’ and this seems to have been an ingredient in the
Ignite! sessions. How did your 10-15 year olds react to this?

RH What you identified in the essay was that the openness prevalent in
primary school education disappears into the grid of the secondary
school curriculum, into distinct subject areas and so on. In fact, a
couple of young people said that our approach reminded them of
primary school - but in an affirmative and positive way. The freedom
they discovered in working like this was something they really
appreciated. Two lads on one residential said that school was about
desks and uniforms and a kind of rigidity whereas the Labs were the
opposite; this is both a superficial and a profound point. There is
something fundamentally and intrinsically valuable about the approach
they were being invited to engage in.

RI My essay is implicitly and explicitly critical of the formal

education system. Was there any reaction to this stance and
how far are you yourself setting out to challenge and reform
the school curriculum?

RH Opinions varied - some thought that the essay could have been even
stronger in this respect, while others argued that your position was
overstated or that there was not sufficient evidence to support it.
However, the recent publication of the Tomlinson report has shown us
that the reform of the 14-19 curriculum is very much driven by the
recognition that young people are voting with their feet, are being
turned off and are moving away from the treadmill of working towards
one qualification after another.

As for our own ambitions for Ignite!, we do not want to overstate our
ability or intention to overhaul the entire education system! However,
I do believe that we are creating something distinctive with this
programme. The evidence that we are gathering from it will be very
useful, primarily because it is about creative thought processes, not
just creativity defined by skill in one medium or another, and not
necessarily linked to the ‘gifted and talented’. We have discovered
that these workshops have an intrinsic value and would very much like
to offer them as a resource to schools and teachers to help them
stimulate new learning opportunities. Wouldn’t it be great if there was
a ‘creative thinking hour’ as well as literacy and numeracy hours?

RI What is the likelihood of that, realistically? Do you think that

there are signs that there is ‘a break in the clouds’, as Ken
Robinson claimed in the TES recently?

RH
I do perceive a shift of emphasis in the general education climate – a
groundswell of change, a new wave that I hope Ignite! will be on the
crest of. Ken quoted a QCA report on creativity, an Ofsted report that
referred to the leadership qualities of creative head teachers, and one
or two other initiatives that indicate that Government is at last
recognising the points that he and the NACCCE committee made in All
Our Futures, back in 1999. I think he’s right. The evidence is also
there in the fact that there are at least a dozen seminars and
conferences this summer all about creativity and education – you are
spoilt for choice.

The problem is that there will be time lag before a new generation of
teachers – or, more especially, teacher managers at the head teacher
and adviser level – will come forward, pushing for a more creative
approach. Currently, the emphasis is still on accountability,
assessment, SATs, results, league tables and all the rest. We have
fallen into that classic fallacy of beginning by measuring what is
valuable and ending up valuing what is measurable.

More than half a century ago, this obsession with measurement was
being challenged, as author and ex-head Alison Prince noted in the
TES the other day when she unearthed a 1949 pamphlet called Story
of a School. In it the progressive headmaster of Stewart Street junior
school in Birmingham wrote: ‘It is always impossible to judge the
progress of an individual by tangible results.’

Our emphasis is rather different and much more tailored to the

individual. The observation you quote from Margaret Boden bears
repeating here: ‘Never mind who thought of the idea first: how did
that person manage to come up with it, given that they had never
thought of it before?’ Finding that out and creating the conditions for
such epiphanies will keep us busy into the next phase of Ignite!, as we
move into new regions both geographically – the West Country and
Northern Ireland – and philosophically.
Quotes from residential Labs – to illustrate Postscript text in
the following order:

Q What difference have you seen in the young people’s behaviour over
the weekend?

A It is very strict at school, very rigid – 40 minutes this lesson, 40

minutes that lesson – but here they have more time to do stuff. Here,
it is student rather than teacher led.

Q Have any individuals surprised you?

A Martin is always messing about and fidgeting but here he is so

focused. Some of the ideas he has come up with have just amazed
me.

Q Why do you think you enjoyed the particular task you were given of
putting a car together?

A Because if you were doing it anywhere else, you’d have a sheet of

instructions. Today we were just given the materials to play around
with and to see what we could make of them.

Q Was there anything you’ve done this weekend that you wouldn’t
normally have the chance to do at school?

A Doing things by ourselves – not just copying it all off the computer.

Q How have you found the adults you’ve been working with?

A They don’t shout at you if you do something wrong, like they do at

school. If you make a mistake, it doesn’t really matter. It’s your call.

Q When do you feel most creative?

A Being away from where you normally are. Here you have things put in
front of you and told to make something. That’s when you start
thinking more, using your head.
Q If you had to think of one thing you have learned here that you could
pass on to a friend or a brother or sister, what would it be?

A Don’t always do what’s obvious.

Selected bibliography

Margaret A. Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (London:

Routledge, 2nd edition, 2004)

David Bohm, On Creativity, edited by Lee Nichol (London: Routledge, 1998)

Anna Craft, Can You Teach Creativity?, with Jana Dugal et al. (Nottingham:
Education Now Publishing Co-operative, 1997)

Kate Figes, The Terrible Teens: What Every Parent Should Know (London:
Viking, 2002)

Matthew Goulish, 39 microlectures in proximity of performance (London:

Routledge, 2000)

Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age, in The Kenneth Grahame Book (London:
Methuen & Co Ltd, 1932)

John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas
(London: Penguin, 2001)

Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)

Paul Willis, Moving Culture (London: Gulbenkian Foundation, 1990)

Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics

(London: Rider/Hutchinson, 1979)

‘The Genius Issue’, American Esquire magazine (Vol 140, No 6, December

2003)
Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all those people I interviewed in the course of researching

this article. Fay Young, Katy Jockelson and Tony Sabey were particularly
helpful in guiding and sharpening my exploration of the conditions for
creativity.