Creativity and Education: Some Critical Remarks

Asking questions clearly and asking only one question at a time, seem to be elementary precautionary rules. Nowhere have these rules been more wantonly flouted than in contemporary investigation into creativity.' Although these words were spoken more than twenty years ago, they are no less relevant today. Creativity is one of the vaguest and most fashionable terms in pedagogical discourse. As used in recent literature, the word appears to have at least five different meanings in different contexts. 1. The ability to produce something new which did not exist before. Does this meaning render the issue clearer, more understandable, or more significant? Or, as I would suggest, does it perhaps merely exchange one vague and complex term (creativity) for another, no less vague and complex one (novelty) ? We may, in other words, have been given little more than a circular definition. Words like 'unique' and 'original' [and we may well add 'novelty'] simply do not belong in the definiens of 'creative',2 says D. Morgan.