Creating Is The Highest Form of Learning
Why creative people struggle sometimes to create
Human beings, generally speaking, require thought in order to create.
This has been a core component of education theory since the early 1950s, when Dr. Benjamin Bloom and his team of researchers first published their landmark work detailing the six levels of educational comprehension. Teachers around the world have been using this taxonomy (taxonomy = science of classifying knowledge) ever since to inform how they construct and present their lesson plans.
Modern educational psychology has owned the science of learning for decades, but what’s interesting to note about Bloom’s taxonomy is that the pinnacle of learning doesn’t appear to reside within the realm of traditional academia. Teachers, in Bloom’s work, aren’t the ultimate learners, creators are.
To be able to synthesize and process information and create new products, processes or procedures is the summit of the educational mountain.
In order to begin climbing that mountain, you have to learn to create. I’ve been thinking, and reading a lot about creativity lately, and there seems to be a trend that much of what’s being said about creativity views it as a spontaneous, innate ability. Creativity, as a personality trait, is what everybody wants to talk about. I’m going to take a different, more traditional viewpoint, one that I think is backed up by the research done by Dr. Bloom:
Creativity and a creative process are two completely separate things.
Creativity is a personality trait, a predisposition. Ultimately, it’s a lens through which to view the world. The creative mindset can fashion and inspire new ways of thinking and doing.
A creative process, or the act of creating something, on the other hand, is a skill. It’s a learned behavior. As we saw in the taxonomy graph above, creating something is actually the culmination of the entire educational process. Education, learning, thinking and analyzing are all essential parts of creating. Creating requires knowledge, and application. The most naturally creative people must still learn in order to create.
Fundamentally, I think that this is great news for all of us. For the creative personality, it means that education can overcome the sometimes debilitating writer’s block, or creative slump that prevents actual production. For the person not predisposed to think creatively, they can still create and contribute out their own learning and experiences.
Creating is not exclusively the realm of savants, geniuses, and the “chosen few” among us. Anybody can learn to enhance their natural creativity and anybody can become a creator.
A Daily Practice of Creating
As seen above, Bloom’s taxonomy is a pyramid of learning. It is an iterative, layered approach to thought. One of the biggest misunderstandings these days regarding creativity is that it exists in some kind of vacuum, and that creative people just “make things happen” out of thin air somehow. As seen in Bloom’s work, the foundation of creativity is not random chance, or some gift of the universe. It’s education. The more we learn, the better equipped we are to create.
Fundamentally, if we look throughout history, the most creative people (that is, those people who create the most) are those with the deepest learning. Education enhances creative ability, period. Understanding the true relationship between creating and learning will continue to change how society approaches learning and discovery. We shouldn’t be too focused on the “one-in-a-million” creative people among us, who seem to produce and produce endlessly with apparent ease. We must avoid the urge to endlessly (and mindlessly) produce. The creative process must include time for input, as well as output, for learning.