One of our greatest gifts as human beings is our creative ability. Our capacity to pull an idea out of thin air and turn it into a detailed sculpture, a well-oiled machine or story that moves others to tears is truly incredible.

Without getting into the neurological intricacies of the human brain, I believe that creativity is an innate part of our humanness. If you give anyone a piece of paper and a pen, they can create something. The results for some people will be better than others, but everyone is capable of envisioning an idea and putting it down on paper in some way. Yet even with this remarkable potential capacity, there seems to be something about the structure of our society that is holding us back from achieving that full potential.

At least in the United States, most of the population is not involved in any kind of significant creative activity. While a very small percentage of the population is creating masterful works of art, writing New York Times Bestsellers and inventing innovative, life-changing devices like the iPhone, the rest of us are wasting our potential working jobs that require us to bring to life the innovations of others, but leave very little room for our own creative capacities.

When we think about this scenario, we usually chock the status quo up to a question of talent. The small percentage of the population that is achieving their creative potential is able to do so because they have the talent required to "make it," while the rest of us do not.

Even though the question of "talent" is a common refrain in our society, I find this explanation to be incredibly unsatisfying because it essentially claims that the vast majority of the population, myself included, never had any creative potential to begin with. Yet, anyone who has ever seen a first-grade classroom during art time knows this can't be true because children are incredibly creative. Somehow, by the time we become adults we seem to lose their immense creativity, even though we all had it at one point.

How can it be that we lose our creativity as we grow older? According to a February 2006 talk at a TED conference, a nonprofit dedicated to sharing "Ideas Worth Spreading", given by Sir Ken Robinson, an expert on creativity and an international advisor on education in the arts, the answer is simple: Our education system kills creativity. In his lecture, Robinson explains that all children have talents of some kind, but that those talents, more often than not, get squandered due to our education system. The system values the importance of being right more than it does the importance of innovation. And while Robinson stresses that he does not intend to conflate being wrong with creativity, as he puts it, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

When young children in school are praised for getting the right answer and are marked down and corrected when they get the wrong answer or make a mistake, they not only learn that they should strive for rightness, but they also learn to be afraid of being wrong. Being wrong becomes associated with bad grades, unhappy parents, being embarrassed and perhaps even feeling stupid or inept. As these feelings are continually reinforced throughout our schooling and into college, our fear of wrongness makes us afraid to try anything new or to put forward a different idea that might deviate from the "normal" standards we have been told are right.

Although the school system begins this process of socializing children toward being right, this kind of reinforcement continues in the workplace as well. At most companies, even the smallest employee mistake could mean disciplinary action or losing one's job altogether. With all this insistence on being right, by the time the first-grader with the boundless imagination becomes an adult, her imagination and creativity have been confined by the rigid standards of rightness. She can no longer achieve her creative potential, but she doesn't mind because she has been made to believe that she doesn't have talent.

It's a sad realization that the education system that is meant to foster young minds and help them grow, is in fact sapping the wealth of our human potential. It's even sadder when we realize that a university like Brandeis, which talks so much about innovation, creativity and social change, is just as complicit in this process. The classes at Brandeis that foster the most creative ability-drawing, creative writing, theater and the like are capped at very small numbers and are often competitive to get into. And in our last attempt to economize, we suspended new admissions to our Masters of Fine Arts program in theater, slashed the budget of our theater company productions and eliminated the cultural production program, thus making such creativity-fostering programs available to even fewer students.
As Robinson says in his lecture, the future is incredibly uncertain. We're educating children now for a future world that no one has any idea how it will look. But if we want to be successful and make real change in that future world, the biggest mistake we can make is to educate children out of their creativity. More than ever, we need all of humanity to achieve its creative potential.
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