Young children are excellent problem solvers and naturally creative individuals. They’re typically not afraid of failure and intuitively engage in the kinds of divergent thinking that people who value innovation tend to prize. Unfortunately, by the time they’ve made it through second grade, that creativity and ability to immediately grasp ideas and concepts in an out-of-the-box kind of way diminishes rapidly. This is such a common phenomenon that we tend to view this early creativity as something that kids naturally grow out of in a sort of biological and hardwired kind of way. After all, kids lose their baby teeth and their childish inquisitiveness at about the same time right?<\/p>\n
Wrong. There is nothing innately biological about losing early creative impulses. It comes from an education model that reinforces over and over the concept that for every problem there is one “right” answer. That “non-divergent” thinking is the underlying bedrock that our education system has unwittingly promoted. Our education system has resulted in a weird phenomenon. We completely crush kids’ creativity in the first few years of primary school and continue to suppress it through high school. Then, when they get to college, we try to get them to be creative thinkers again. The latter is often unsuccessful, to the chagrin of English professors everywhere. It’s not altogether unsurprising that kids can’t grasp the notion of metaphors and figurative language. It doesn’t fit the “one right answer” rule.
\n