Creativity loss at a young age

As human beings we have a few qualities and skills that define us as being human and most are the reason why we are the dominants species on earth some being logic, reasoning, and thinking. Unfortunately though, in the computer age these alone wont help you succeed, robots can already perform many complex task and are now taking jobs away from humans and unfortunately computers can also do algebra, complex problems, and some can artificially reason, think and make decisions based on many different factors. As you can see those qualities soon may not be enough to make us better then computers and keep our jobs as opposed to have cheap working computers take them over.One of the few advantages and places where we surpass computers and cannot be replaced is in creative thought, but surprisingly, we are starting to lose that too.

An experiment was conducted a few years ago, it was to ask adults and children to list all the possible things they could do with a paperclip. As expected most adults would only think of only one use which was to hold paper together. The 3 year olds on the other hand, could come up with 44 different ideas on average on what they could use a paper clip for. Of course many of their ideas were far fetched or near impossible to accomplish, but is that not how new ideas and inventions are given life to? If we were only to think of what has already been done and what is possible to do, then we would not learn new things, but by coming up with many far fetched ideas, some may give birth to growth and knowledge. This experiment was then done with other ages of kids and it was found that the older the kids got, the less ideas they would come up with. The reason they found for this was due to education.
It was found that teachers push one way of doing things on to kids and over time they learn that if its not that proper form then its wrong. For instance, when writing a paragraph or essay kids are taught that each paragraph in the essay needs to have the topic sentence first, a reason to support it, then evidence, and finaly expand on that evidence. Thought that works well there must be other ways to write a paragraph that gets the point across. And its the same with math too, many math teachers (not all) encourage things to be done a certain way, like when solving an equation you have to continuously write the next part underneath, but why cant you do it beside, and many teachers deduct points for bad form. Small things like encouraging kids to approach things one way causes them to not think outside the box. The problem is this will not lead to success because any old computer can do math and any other person can write a sentence.

What separates people from machines and people from each other is our creativity which can only be obtained as with all things, through practice. Now we cant just bash the education system, because we can really blame every problem with our society on how kids are educated when they're young, and after all teachers are just following instructions. It is up to us to shape our kids minds to become more creative thinkers, encourage different ideas, don't shoot bad ideas down, and make them do things that help them think creatively. And that my friends is why you should further explore this blog maybe gets some ideas but get creative with them and add your own spin to it all.

Draw these 9 dots on a paper and try connecting them with only 4 straight lines, don't forget think outside the box. the solution is below if needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqWIfPTM5v8