“Modeling Creativity” was written by John Vogel in conjunction with ParentSounds. Although it is broken into five parts due to length, we recommend reading it as one whole piece. Here are the previous parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
My main goal in this entire series of essays is to encourage adults to continue creating and foster an environment for kids where creativity is allowed to flourish. Right now, both in and out of school, I see much more messaging that effectively extinguishes the creative spark that we hold inside throughout our lives.
At an individual level, I think it’s important to point out that everyone is different (super brilliant insight, I know; you’re welcome). To again reference my TW interview with Amy Belfi, she brings up the example of her daughter wanting to play with Legos but not by following the instructions and instead in open play. Amy comments that for her, she’d rather follow the instructions, and in translating that drive to music, she’d rather learn pieces (everything Chopin ever wrote, specifically).
So, with an eye toward recognizing the individual preferences that may be inherent between these two ends, I think parents and teachers should try to allow children the space to either create or copy in whatever media they seem to gravitate toward. Forcing children to fit into either of these categories against their desires—right now I see children being mostly forced into the “copy” category—can cause their creativity to be, in Brown’s words from earlier, “neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.”
I unexpectedly found a great example of this in author and illustrator Bill Peet’s autobiography. Henry had asked for this book for Christmas after seeing it advertised on the back cover of The Caboose Who Got Loose. Turns out, it is not a kids’ book. He’s actually read most of it, but it is not geared toward a younger audience. The first night he received it, I read him about 20 minutes for his bedtime story, and as soon as he went to sleep, I read the rest of it on my own. It turned out to be a super interesting story of the development of an artist as well as a firsthand account of working directly for Walt Disney, the person. Here’s the relevant part that stuck out to me:
I drew for hours at a time just for the fun of it, and yet I was hoping to find some practical reason to draw for the rest of my life. But when I entered grade school, my drawing habit suddenly became a problem.
There was an art class once a week but that wasn’t nearly enough, and no fun at all. The art teacher decided what we were to draw, and they were never my kind of things.
So I drew on the sly in all my other classes by hiding a tablet in my desk and sneaking a drawing into it now and then. Very often I’d get caught at it and the teacher would snatch my tablet away and warn me to stick to my studies.
Peet was born in 1915, which is right around the beginning of the trend that we’ve been investigating. Referring to Byrne’s quote from the opening essay (with an embedded quote from Mark Katz), “prior to 1900, the aim of music education in America ‘was to teach students how to make music.’” Today’s parents are about five generations downstream of this trend, and our children have been further affected. I would argue that this trend of teaching kids to recreate instead of make, and to become appreciators instead of creators of art, has completely stripped away the familial and social aspect of art that allowed it to be passed down from generation to generation prior to 1900.
To me, an important factor in encouraging adults to continue to be creative in whatever capacity they would like is partially so that they can model and hopefully engage in that behavior with their children. Additionally, giving children the space to have open play with instruments instead of immediately signing them up for lessons could have a positive impact on their desire to continue playing.
In his classic book The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music, researcher and professor John Sloboda says:
In more cases than one might expect, the mere presence of a musical instrument in a home can allow a child the opportunity to learn some idiosyncratic music making—picking out combinations and sequences which sound familiar or interesting. In some cultures, where improvisation dominates, such idiosyncratic beginnings can, under their own momentum, produce an expert performer of some distinction, whose technique and style may be unusual, but effective for the music he chooses to play. In our own culture, where the emphasis is on reproductive performance of significant ‘art’ composition, teachers feel a duty to steer their pupils towards the kind of technical and formal grasp which will eventually enable a culturally acceptable performance of, say, a Mozart sonata, or a Chopin Etude.
To me, one of the saddest things about this educational mindset is that children have already internalized it. There was a scene in a Talking Writing essay that was actually edited out by the author in which her students were asking her what the point of learning art in school is if it wasn’t going to help them obtain a job. I’ve written this entire screed and still can’t figure out how helpful I think it is to teach art in school. However, what I’m starting to realize is that as the emphasis on encouraging creativity and production in the arts lessens, the practice of art at home has also shrunk, and the combination of both of these is a mindset that says the only way we can engage in creativity is if it’s serving a career in some way.
Like all people, I get inundated with algorithmically influenced target marketing, and when I see the advertisements about art, it’s almost always about turning your creativity into a side hustle. I’d be hard pressed to find any media—or educational, for that matter—messaging suggesting that playing music is fun or fulfilling.
I recently interviewed Russell Baker from A Modern Remedy (a TW podcast episode scheduled for later this year), and in preparing for the interview, I unexpectedly found myself openly crying when I heard a section from his New Ways podcast with Think Equal founder Leslee Udwin. Russ asks every interviewee the question, “We are faced with many challenges today, both for people and the planet. In your own words, what’s a modern remedy for these issues?” Udwin’s answer just crushed me:
The modern remedy is to stop seeing education as a conveyor belt between classroom and labor market. The modern remedy that is needed for pretty much everything, from where I sit, is for consciousness to change and for us to understand that we’ve been programmed to see the accumulation of wealth and money as our god. We’ve been programmed to see that as the purpose of existence. That is not the purpose of existence . . . . I learned late in life that money and ambition is not the remedy for an individual human life. The remedy is community, collective thinking . . . . For me, [the modern remedy is] a consciousness shift, it’s a change of mindset, which is ultimately what I’m trying to achieve with every second of every day I live. We need new values, a new primary belief system, and new priorities.
As I went through literature on the neuroscience of music, I noted that a lot of ink is given to the debate about whether or not humans have evolved to make music and if it has any biological purpose. Many of these arguments include some sort of reference to Steven Pinker’s 1997 comment from How the Mind Works that music is “auditory cheesecake,” a pleasant diversion that doesn’t add to survival. This has led to a huge amount of effort trying to prove whether or not music is an evolutionary “spandrel” and to quantify the practical use of music. After reading thousands of words on both sides of the argument, I snapped out of it and thought, “Who gives a fuck? Music is awesome. Everyone knows that.”
The undeniable fact is that music—and all art—improves our lives. Why do we need to jump through hoops to prove a practical use in order to make it a part of everyday life?
Early on in searching for people writing about the kind of intense musical experiences I’d had that prompted this entire reading path, I happened on Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences and thought, “That’s my guy.” I subsequently found a copy of Toward a Psychology of Being in a Little Free Library. Several times in that book, he shouts out On Not Being Able to Paint by Marion Milner as being a great example of the types of books we need more of in the world. Milner’s book about trying to teach herself to paint through methods of improvisation and free thinking was a follow-up to her study of the educational system through the lens of students who were not benefiting from it, entitled The Human Problem in Schools. To me, her focus in the mid-twentieth century aligned perfectly with Udwin’s assertion that we need to “stop seeing education as a conveyor belt between classroom and labor market.”
I’ll end this whole diatribe with her conclusions about art that she gained through psychoanalyzing her own experience with painting:
Having reached some idea of what function the arts might be fulfilling, it was now possible to see more what Cézanne might have meant when he said: ‘Réaliser: tout est là!’ Having seen how it could be that the artist, by embodying the experience of illusion, provides the essential basis for realizing, making real, for feeling as well as for knowing, the external world, it was now possible to look further into the artist’s role to see how it is that he adds to the generally accepted views of external reality; how in fact art creates nature, including human nature. Thus it seemed to follow that the artist is not only one who refuses to deny his inner reality, but also and because of this, is potentially capable of seeing more of the external reality than other people, or at least, more of the particular bit he is interested in.
Looked at in that way, how inadequate the phrase ‘Art for Art’s sake’ became; it was rather ‘Art for life’s sake.’ So also it was now possible to pay more than lip service to the statement that real life is always more full, richer, potentially, than the experience of any art; because I could now add that it is through art that we can come nearer to realizing this fullness and richness. Thus the original doubt as to which was more real, the common sense world or the transfigured one, could now be answered: the transfigured world was the real one, potentially, because the mystery was then in the developing living facts evolving under one’s own nose, not in some far away fairy-land. The mystery was that of the natural not the supernatural, for it held within it its future as well as its past, all its unrealized potentialities, all its ‘becomingness’, whether inside us or out.
{Mic drop}
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