How many creative people do we need?
10 million? - one in each street or village.
Or 810 million? - one in each family.
How about 8.1 billion? - everyone.
We want to persuade you the last answer is the best one and to ask you to reconsider human creativity.
Why did humans paint on cave walls?
Perhaps they saw a rock that looked like an animal and adding a mark made it more so? Looking back, we can see the links to abstraction and symbolism and maybe even language. We can’t know what sparked that initial creative leap from seeing to depicting, but can we agree that it wasn’t a shortage of art?
What do you see in a sky full of stars?
Do you see suns and galaxies, or nuclear fusion? Or Cassiopaea, more beautiful than Juno, queen of the gods? Why did people tell stories about patterns in the sky?
Can we agree that it wasn’t trying to solve the problems of agricultural productivity or sea navigation? Though these later leaps were enabled by the stories of the stars, first someone asked a new question:
“What do stars mean?”
Creativity is not just problem-solving.
Many animals solve problems and some make tools and pass on strategies to their young. Solving problems improves on existing activities, but only humans make the creative leaps to ask new questions.
It’s in our nature, more like an emotion we feel. The ancients thought of it as a ‘genius’ from the gods that is conducted through humans.
There’s a pattern here to explore. A creative leap to a new question followed by problem-solving development.
Why do children lose creativity at school?
Most schools are still preparing our children for the age of empires and the industrial revolution despite the new age of digital and soon to be, the age of imaginations where creativity will be the only currency. Schools are training our children to compete with robots when they should be nurturing their creativity to explore the unknown. Most academics and futurists agree that schools are hurting the creativity of our children.
We believe, the revolution for change should start at the grassroots, and this is where you, beloved parents, come into picture. It has to start with you and your child or children, at home, and strangely enough it could be when you are brushing your teeth.
What can we do about it?
The aim is is to nurture the connected thinking of your child or children as a supplement to their normal academic curriculum.
We've been taught to visualize inventions and breakthroughs as dramatic creative leaps, made by special people with unique talents. But when you explore, the reality is often many steps made by a variety of determined ordinary people using connected thinking.
Connected thinking means combining an understanding of a problem with an awareness and openness to ideas in different fields. Research shows that many breakthrough ideas happen this way.
We believe the revolution may start when we are brushing our teeth. Using a habit to anchor our playing a game of connecting things.
The first game of connecting things.
The first game of connecting things that you can play with your child, starts with the Animal Sound Game. At teeth brushing time, make an animal sound, like "woof woof", and ask them which animal it is.
Later, at the next level, give your child a word, like sun, and ask them for another word which is connected to it. For example, sky.
After they become comfortable with this, encourage them to give you one which is less obvious. For example, for sun, suggest plant instead of sky, because the plants need the sun to grow.
As your child becomes skilled over many teeth brushing times, then give two words, for example Sun and Plants, and ask for a word that connects them. So, your child may say leaves, perhaps. With this game, your child learns to connect seemingly unconnected concepts.
What is LIVUS?
Once your child has got the habit of connecting ideas that are not obviously connected together, then they are ready to go much further with the LIVUS® game environment from Linkology. This helps develop both their divergent and convergent thinking which are key to growing their creative confidence so they can apply their creative energy to innovate and change the world!