The Creativity of Children: Why is it Powerful, and What Goes Wrong?

-- By LaurenBaron - 01 Jan 2022

In the comments you left on my last paper, you wrote that “the greatest of social forces is the curiosity of children.” I’ve been thinking this through ever since, deciding whether or not I agree and trying to understand exactly what you mean and why you are willing to attach a superlative to the statement instead of just saying that it is one of the greatest social forces. You also spoke about the curiosity of children in class and when we met in your office. As I understood you then, you meant that such curiosity has the power to create change because relative to adults’ creativity, it is unadulterated (pun intended) by the ingrained patterns of thought and questionable values in which adults have been steeped. If I understand the basic idea correctly, a major question arises for me: how can we rely upon the curiosity of children to drive social change in a positive way if the much of the basis for that power is a lack of understanding regarding what is and is not valued by our society? This is the question I explore in this essay, and assuming I am missing some of the ideas upon which your statement was predicated, I beg your patience in incorporating these ideas into my answers upon my revision.

I have come up with two answers for how the creativity of children is so useful despite children’s lack of social education regarding what society values. First, it is possible that children have an innate understanding of social good which matches yours, likely meaning that the value of the freedom of thought is inherent and recognizable to people unburdened by social conditioning. However, if appreciation for the value of freedom of thought comes naturally, what destroys this by the time people reach adulthood? You have mentioned that “incentives don’t work,” so it doesn’t follow that the promise of an easy life through the perpetuation of capitalism and digital surveillance is enough to “incentivize” people to consciously abandon ideals they have held dear since childhood. If adult creativity is less useful because the nature of that creativity and the values underlying it have changed, then either we are doomed to lose the special creative quality through internal growth, external pressure, or both.

I doubt that internal growth alone, independent of social factors, plays a large part in killing the creativity that promotes freedom of thought. If it did, either getting older would make people stop believing that freedom of thought is important, or getting older would destroy creativity, or both. I believe that creative adults exist (I am one), and I also have plenty of evidence that there are adults which believe in and are working toward realizing the goal of universal freedom of thought (you are one). Perhaps these are anomalies, and losing these qualities is part of growing up for most people. However, I think that it’s more likely that external factors play a significant role, and that in the right milieu, far more people would reach adulthood with intact an intact drive for creativity. If this is the case, then curiosity could be preserved and used for good with the right social conditioning. As for how this happens, I think a combination of value-oriented messages and the technologies people are socialized to use can be catalysts for the death of childhood creativity. Remote learning and overly simplified user interfaces, for example, could hamper children’s creativity both by sending the message that a platform is static and “good enough” and decreasing the diversity in types of possible inputs and outputs (examples: no passing notes, smiling or frowning at the teacher, or considering the different ways an interface might be organized to get ideas across.

The second explanation I have for why the creativity of children might be so useful is that adults’ creativity is intact and could be equally useful, but it is simply not used. Emotionally, this is an easier idea to swallow. It holds the promise of untapped potential, an idea people tend to age out of after they are no longer told that anything is possible. If adults possess all the creative faculties of children but are not using them, perhaps the external factors described as decreasing creativity itself in the previous paragraph in fact only decrease people’s likelihood of using it. These external factors also might not work to decrease the likelihood of using creativity, but instead (or in addition) render people unlikely to use their creativity for social change. This could explain people like the King of the Undead Now Dead, who indubitably possessed powerful creativity and drive to use it, but directed that vector toward negative social change.

Based off of the thinking roughly described above, my own life experiences, what we have discussed this semester, and the technological determinism scholarship I looked over in undergrad, the best answer I can come up with for why the creativity of adults is not the powerful force of children’s creativity is a combination of my two possible explanations. Because creative adults exist and do great and terrible things, I doubt that growing up itself is a death sentence for one’s creativity. Instead, I believe that external forces, particularly the restrictive technologies we are socially encouraged to use, decrease both creativity itself (by narrowing exposure to the types of possible inputs, outputs, and things to think about them) and the drive to use creativity for positive social change (by decreasing access and exposure to the very information which would educate people as to why such access and exposure is necessary). I am having some trouble articulating exactly why I believe this within 1,000 words, but I am curious to hear comments on your explanation for your statement about the creativity of children and see if I understood the reasoning underlying your belief in the power of that creativity.

This was a hasty draft. Writing about not understanding my idea was quicker than finding your own idea and having confidence in it. But you were moving too fast to be sure the idea you weren't understanding was mine. I spoke about the force of children's curiosity, which you morphed into children's creativity, which is not actually the same thing at all.

Humans are a neotenic species. Born early in development, with brains that are unfinished at birth, incapable for years of independent survival, human children are learning machines, whose exploratory interactions with the world around them are biologically necessary to their brains' development. Their curiosity is constitutive: it makes both individuals and the human collective what they are. Teaching our children language, and then on the basis of language everything that allows the inheritance of our acquired characteristics, is the fundamental human activity.

That's my idea. What's yours?

Second Draft: Consumption, Motivation, and Problem Solving in a Free Society