Ask HN: Why encourage creativity in school given most employers don't reward it?
Isn't this just a way to set up most students for a major disappointment when they join the workforce?
When asked for advice from school students Kurt Vonnegut responded
“ November 5, 2006
Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut”
What evidence is there that most employers don’t reward creativity? Most of my employers have.
There are whole industries devoted to creative endeavors!
In my experience employers place high value on creativity within the constraints of a particular job. People may not like those constraints, but that's a different issue.
There is life around paid work and we may enjoy / need creativity there, for entertainment, to change the world or everything in between.
(though there are many situations where being creative is useful nay instrumental in paid work too)
If anything, children are often very creative and (early) school also acts as a way to shut down some of this creativity, teaching you to (not) behave / think like this or like this. For the better or worse. A big chunk of elementary and high school is about following instructions properly.
I could be wrong, but I'm interpreting the OP as expressing frustration not at the school system, but at a labor market that has no demand for creativity (except in the few remaining good jobs, which have pretty much all been earmarked by the upper classes for their underwhelming kids). That is, I don't see OP as arguing that education should be reduced to job skills, so much as that maybe we shouldn't tolerate the mismatch between an educational system that does nurture (some) creativity and the prison-like employment conditions that 99% of people will face.
Undirected creativity may or may not be rewarded, depending upon current whims or future shifts in problems or needs.
It's easier to teach undirected creativity -- anything goes. It can even be useful, but it's not necessarily useful, because undirected its output may never meet a need.
As the phrasing of your question falsely presupposes that employers don't reward creativity at all, the answer to you personally might be to find a new position or a new employer. Much work that must be done is clearcut and heavily procedural. Many like this sort of work for its definitiveness; others prefer the responsibility of having to apply directed creativity. Both have a place, but neither's existence condemns educational attempts at encouraging creativity as futile.
If you disagree, please reward me for this novel creation:
3092500473526394984186030495683069344885478322759398
Kids need to be educated because knowing a bunch of stuff about the world is the greatest gift we can give them, and it needs to be given while they are still young enough to appreciate it. You can't live a full life without knowing a fair amount about all there is to know, and you can't experience things without having some context.
Knowing only things that are economically useful will still leave you in a place where you wonder how the world works, and wondering why there's a hole in your soul.
I'm not OP, but I think his question is more, "Why does school set people up to be disappointed by the jobs available to them?" Not, "Why does school teach things that aren't necessary on a job site?"
The ambiguous intention behind the question has spawned two separate discussions in this thread, one of which isn't that interesting because I think we all agree (that there's more to life and education than employment).
If I'm right and his stance is the first, I'm sympathetic to it. The system, while training people for jobs better than what will actually exist for them, isolates people from its most broken aspects (workplaces), promising betterment and skill advancement, during the age of peak revolutionary energy. By the time they figure out what employment really is--for most people, an exploitative and unforgivable waste of their time--they are already in their late 20s, and any revolutionary movement has been deprived of their most energetic years.
School sets you up for disappointment because it's the last place where everyone can participate. Everyone is given the same books and the same exams, and there's no limitation on what you're allowed to learn.
In the working world, you get pyramids. Most people who are entry level can do the next level job, but not all will be offered it. There's dozens of people who could be CEO but only one person will get the seat.
Everyone else is disappointed with the hierarchy.
School also sets us up to expect knowledge to be the deciding factor in who gets to do what. It's implicit: pass this course, be allowed to do the next course.
So you get out in the real world, and your manager is the owner's kid. Or some guy who doesn't know how the business works is in charge. Or indeed someone who doesn't recognise good ideas.
This is becoming increasingly less true in some places around the US.
When I was at school (1970s), schools also taught creative skills (drawing, writing, a bit of music). That was definitely not aimed at the job market, and almost nobody expected to become a writer, sculptor, painter or musician. The common expectation was a some kind of manual labor, or an office job, and for the brainy few research/development.
I also had a situation a couple of times very early in my career, where as an intern I proposed some truly novel approaches, and was told that yes, they're potentially very good, but very risky and never tried before, and that I'm only there for X months and won't be around to deal with the consequences if they fail, so they're not going to do it - but I was told that if I was a full-timer, the decision may have been different.
Mayhaps, but if true this is atypical and fortunate. Ninety-nine percent of people get shunted into subordinate labor with no creative meat, in which their job is to support the manager's career and that it all that matters--and this is also true in software, now that the Jira jockeys have taken over and turned it into ticket-shop day labor. Congrats if you've escaped the sprint work, but most people can't.
Are you not involved in designing the solutions and the tickets too? And is that process not creative?
Once, on a job where I was full-time, not an intern, I proposed something new and my boss said, "That's a great idea. Please don't tell anyone. They'll want us to do it."
This was not the best boss I ever had but also not the worst.
--
Why encourage ANYTHING that employers don't reward? I hope this question doesn't really need to be answered.
I mean, if your boss says "people aren't buying our product" or "how can we fit this code into half the space" or "we need something that gets our customers attention" all of those require creativity.
I think OP is looking at it way to narrowly.
So... this is mostly a middle- to upper-middle class perspective, that of people who were bred to take white-collar "creative" jobs that are no longer creative and haven't been for ~40 years, due to consolidation and geographic polarization (e.g., society no longer has demand for cutting-edge advertising firms in Duluth or even Minneapolis).
It basically says, why do something if it doesn't directly equate to value in the market, which is kind of sad.
The answer, simply, is because hopefully the value of life isn't easily boiled down to that....but a bigger answer is because it just isn't true.
If you are an entry level at some kind of stem profession, be it programming or science research or whatever then you typically get the grunt work of data processing and executing boilerplate code building.
Once you move up though that isn't true anymore. You typically have to solve some outlandish problems for people and often times problems that are vaguely described to you and this requires creativity.
Good luck scaling a system built in 2007 to support 5 million clients without just a pinch of creativity.
In school we are taught that everything we will do is for work. In most education system (except few countries) we are never given the opportunity to discover stuff just for the sake of it, or express our passions freely.
Everything we do is graded and our performance is judged in every topics we learn. Creativity is only rewarded at the beginning of our life (<7 years old) then it's about learning skills to have a job.
You can have side projects, side activities, but they are barely looked upon; unless it can become a job (professional: sport, music, etc...).
We also live under economic totalitarianism. The reptilians at Davos decide what work you're allowed to do, where you're allowed to work, what kind of friendship circle you will be able to maintain, and everything else. If the self-appointed "jawb creators" decided to create more jawbs in eastern Wyoming (to build "performance improvement" camps, let's say) then you are expected to "move where the jobs are"--at your expense, of course.
But even more important, to me, is that people who can think broadly are more resilient during crises: wars, emigrations (and in general being thrown into unfamiliar environments), societal upheavals. And as much as I hope not to see those, they are still hovering around. Just my 2c.
We skooled them, right there in that meeting: Students are clients, not products.
But I think it illustrates the pervasive attitude toward education by people who are not educators.
EDIT: American K-12 public schools.
I can't agree. The logical conclusion to this line of thinking is, e.g., that students shouldn't be challenged or made to do anything that they disagree with. This philosophy necessarily requires fundamentalist Christian students being able to opt out of biology and left-leaning students being able to opt out of history and economics.
Students are not the clients. Society is. Which is also why education should be entirely publicly funded.
> The logical conclusion to this line of thinking is, e.g., that students shouldn't be challenged
Said no educator, ever.
> Said no educator, ever.
I don't know where you are, but here in the U.S., this is by far the most common education philosophy, and those that push back against it soon find themselves out of work if not the target of violence. Ask the Christakises from Yale or Bret Weinstein of Evergreen.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
In low-income public schools, the problems are systemic and have more to do with society than the quality of teachers (which is not as poor as the right wants people to believe). The teachers are mostly fine; the total environment is broken, as the students live in a society that has already (through no fault of theirs) given up on them. So, there, the school ends up functioning as daycare, but there's pressure due to crowding to pass kids even when they didn't really learn anything. It's administration that pushes teachers to lower standards.
In the middle-income public schools, the problem of relaxed standards probably exists the least. You don't have entitled parents (until college, it's the parents who cause these sorts of problems--the kids find it embarrassing) suing over a B-minus in biology and what it will do to little Timmy's future, but--unlike in a low-income area--you don't have the problem of kids being unable to concetrate on homework because of living in a world that is actively at war with them.
In the prep schools, and also the Ivy League colleges, there are a lot of sue-happy students and parents, and even though these lawsuits have an infinitesimal chance of actually winning, administrators would rather just change a grade, and of course the parents know that most people prefer the path of least resistance. Over time, this leads to people doing it preemptively, and the standard declines. This obviously isn't what educators want, and it's often not happening consciously.
For an example, every Ivy League college has, informally, two economics tracks. There's the "real econ" track in which the students study actual economics--and usually have to take real analysis--and then there's pre-banker econ where the courses barely require any work and grades below a B+ are simply not given. If you want to challenge yourself, you can, and you're going to have to do some serious work if you want to come out in the top 10% at an Ivy... but you don't have to.
One of the things that schools try to push on people is the idea that there is no dumb question and also the idea that all opinions are of equal weight. This kind of thinking is complete an utter Fantasyland.
There are great many dumb questions and generally they come from people who've been taught that they can simply ask a question instead of doing any kind of investigation on their own to acquire knowledge or experience and then using the question to fill in the gaps. Additionally there's a lot of bad opinions that are made because of failure to understand the environment which something is in. Some fresh students that enters the workforce has tons of foolish questions and a lot of opinions born of ignorance and I think the workforce is squashing their creativity. Is very much like when you have children and they turn into teenagers and suddenly believe that they know more than the parents. This idea of your old therefore you don't understand is the height of ignorance that they display.
More students need to be taught that they need to listen to the wisdom around them, before they begin to implement "creativity". This may be something that takes years before they are ready to properly participate with creative solutions depending on how fast they can actually pick up in a stimulate information.
Most employers don't reward or punish creativity itself. They don't care. As long as the boss doesn't look bad in front of his boss, no one cares either way if you're creative. The system, however, is built not to rely on individual excellence (that being rare, and usually coming with personality). You can do fine without creativity; the disruptive elements that almost always come with a creativty personality are never appreciated in the corporate world.
> The real problem is employers do not like this unbridled creativity that is not tempered with experience.
No, that's not it. (I do agree that creativity grows in value with experience, and that experience is undervalued in the technology industry, but that's a separate debate.) It's just that more experienced people know to hide their creativity unless there's a major personal payoff (i.e., a massive promotion or 6+ figure bonus) because otherwise there is only downside. Sometimes, just doing your job too well can cause problems by making others look bad.
I think people way underrate the educational value of advanced math for people that aren't going to need it in their career.
2) My job, software engineering, is inherently creative.
3) Outside my immediate role, I have seen creativity discouraged or even punished (though the bosses always claim that creativity is important) but I have also seem it rewarded. It varies a lot.
4) When I worked in corporate research, they paid bonuses for patentable (and patented) ideas. I exploited that quite a bit and got a lot of satisfaction out of it.
5) One of my great joys in life is using my creativity OUTSIDE WORK. My job is not my life.
6) And even at work, I have seen people who created their own jobs by doing something new and different. This was a win for both the company and the (highly creative) employee.
7) Rethink your question. It's assumptions are too narrow.
Also, creativity can be valued by employers. Most won't care about artistic accomplishment, but strong lateral thinking can make a knowledge worker's output stand out and be uniquely effective.
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.
Training workers has been, and should continue to be, the job of employers.