Promoting Creativity

I was recently asked if promoting creativity should be a goal of librarians. Yes, yes, and yes! Sir Ken Robinson's well-circulated TED Talk, Schools Kill Creativity, gets my juices flowing on the subject....

Robinson brings up many points about human creativity and our children's capacity to learn. We are curious creatures who like to learn. Robinson says that, although our intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct, our education system does not support our intelligences. The system's hierarchy - math/languages, humanities, and then the arts is geared towards academia and academia only. Robinson's story about Jillian Lynn, who choreographed Phantom and Cats, emphasizes this. I wonder, how many students have I told to sit down or settle down? As librarians, we should rethink the traditional principles on which we educate our students. When researching a topic, do we encourage thinking outside the box in ways such as self-selected topics and student-generated guided questions? Do we allow our students to conduct a search for the impossible? Do we not only tolerate mistakes, but also guide students in reflective discussions of these mistakes? When thinking about creativity, I am reminded of Kiran Bir Sethi's words - "a shift from 'the teacher told me' to 'I am doing it." (To see Sethi talking about teaching kids to take charge, see her TED Talk at http://bit.ly/VqPTmo)We should not be spoon feeding information to our students - 1. they most likely won't eat or digest it and 2. this is not preparing them for the future. We do not know what specific information our children will need for the future, but we do know that they will need to be creative thinkers.