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Sunday, July 17, 2005
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THE CREATIVITY REQUIREMENT UD’s defense of the five-paragraph argumentative essay formula as a foundation for young writers elicited a good deal more than five paragraphs of comments from her readers (see “Make a Paper Doll of It”). It’s interesting, this Sunday morning in ‘thesda, where you can’t see out of your house windows for the humidity and there’s a heat advisory on, to read that all of the letters the New York Times published in response to the original article agree with her. Some of the letters you’d expect. There’s a note from someone at the College Board insisting that “the SAT essay is carefully designed to measure a student’s mastery of many different elements of writing, with prompts to stimulate critical thinking about complex issues.” No doubt this is so, but it doesn’t get at one of Timothy Burke’s points -- you’ve got to train exam readers who recognize valid departures from the 5-paragraph form and don’t punish them as non-standard. Most of the other writers acknowledge that the formula isn’t ideal but “it’s better than nothing.” It‘s “a reasonably good way to develop a little facility handling supporting evidence.” “American society places great emphasis on individual liberty and intellectual creativity, but students can’t be great creative writers if they are not technically competent.” (This is one of the reasons UD advocates the end of the Creative Writing undergraduate major, as well as a more general cutting back on the kudzu-like growth of Creative Writing courses in college. Few students have the technical competence - let alone the literary culture - to spend most of their college time writing personal narratives.) Another letter writer, echoing a point David Foster made in his comments about Stravinsky, writes, “creativity by definition involves playing with conventions…. One cannot be creative without some mastery of the conventional.” “[T]here is little evidence that creative flights, as such, impart clarity, depth, or cogency of thought. The ability to organize and evaluate reasons (logic) was once the centerpiece of a good education. Sadly, it has been displaced by content-centered courses that teach students what to think rather than how to think.” This final comment goes to the great irony of America’s story-telling approach to education and life (television, as many people have pointed out, is an infinitely extended presentation of one little narrative after another): creativity turns out to be mandated content. Instead of allowing students the slow path toward the discovery of thoughts, experiences, and modes of writing that preceded them (call this slow path “education”), teachers rush their students down the self-expressivity superhighway. Students find there what you’d expect: an inchoate, immature, unrealized, uncertain self. They’re young, after all, with little reading and little experience. They don’t know how to organize their thoughts about the world or about themselves. They don’t have much in the way of thoughts about themselves and the world. What they have are feelings. It’s counterproductive to go at the problem of emotional unclarity by playing to feelings. You end up with courses like the one I wrote about a few posts ago -- the one at DeAnza College, which is about orchestrating students’ thoughts and feelings from the outset, rather than allowing them to learn something. “Creativity” designates a certain ideology at this point, just as susceptible to force-feeding as any other ideology. |