Hi, friend,
Like any dramatic story worth its salt, this one starts in the middle.
That's where we sit today, befuddled by the knowledge that even with more time, money, and thought going toward education than ever before, American children have shown a continuous decline in creativity over the last three decades.
Then to the more recent past. To the push for standardization in the decades before we adopted the
Common Core in 2010.
The Common Core standardized what K–12 students in the United States should know at the end of each grade in both math and English language arts.
Not English literature. But English language arts.
Here was semantic acknowledgement — language — that Aristotle's cleaving of Story from Thought had been made actionable for even the youngest learners.
Story as narrative— as a mode of thinking or planning— all but disappeared from American curricula.
Story itself remained. Kids still read, gobbling up everything from graphic novels to Greek myths. What's changed is how Story is taught.
By focusing on language, the Common Core teaches children to read more like computers than humans. It privileges interpretation, argument, and critical thinking, all logic-based methods that ask children to focus on what is in the present moment.
What's lost is the power of narrative to help children imagine what might be.
We're left facing a full-blown creativity and mental health crisis: children who are continuously becoming less creative and, by extension, more fragile than those who came before.
Knowing, too, that our own education may have occurred somewhere along this storyline.
Happily, we also have a method forward: a way to get out from under this creativity crisis — our what is — by beginning to imagine what might be.
This week's prompt will get you started.
