Suppression of creativity and innovation

Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson

Patterns curtail creativity

Nature

Creativity is awareness and skill in action. While the suppression of creativity and innovation is an organizational, institutional (i.e. school) and bureaucratic major objective, it also exists in the form of the rejection by countries of things that threaten their traditional culture from outside. Creative and productively innovative ideas, objects, processes and the like, are termed too Western, too European or too American. Proposed change always challenges feelings of security, therefore one finds the older generations suppressing the challenge of the younger. Similarly the old ideologies expressed in the religious beliefs of humanity create resistance to newer ideas. In addition, authoritarian people feel their security challenged. Innovation is a threat. In one doctrinaire socialist country, some creative people were branded 'dangerous innovators'.

Claim

Only people under 35 are innovative and creative. Over this age, it they ever were original, they lose the spark or they become conformists. By the time they are 45 they are reactionary conservatives.

Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved with the broth.

Counter-claim

No one individual, or one government can hold back change. Suppression in one place simply means it will manifest elsewhere. There is no age limit for creativity, in the individual or in the state. Biographies of creative people give the lie to statements disagreeing with the former, while history demonstrates the latter when it shows how cultures renew themselves.