American ingenuity is this country’s hallmark. So why aren’t we passing it on to our children?
“What we can do — what America does better than anyone else — is spark the creativity and imagination of our people,” said President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last week.
“We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.”
No one understands this better than Denver Museum of Nature and Science volunteer Stewart Woodward, who says it was American ingenuity that got man to the moon.
As lead fuels engineer for the Apollo 11 moon mission, Woodward was in the control room when a hydrogen leak was spotted 200 feet up in the umbilical tower alongside the rocket.
Normally the launch would have been scrubbed, says Woodward. But with Vice President Spiro Agnew in the control room and the eyes of the world watching, word was handed down: “Fix it if you can.”
As astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin Jr. took an elevator 300 feet up into the tower to board the rocket, a crew of four engineers worked 100 feet below them to repair the leak.
“We had a lot emergency procedures,” Woodward said. “But there are an infinite number of things that can go wrong and there’s no way to create an infinite number of procedures.”
Finally, one engineer had an idea not in any manual. The four men used their hard hats to form a bucket brigade, passing water from a shower in a safety station to melt a layer of ice on a safety valve. The valve was tightened and the leak fixed.
The rest, as they say, was history.
“A lot of people think it was high technology and computers that got us to the moon, but it was actually a good old-fashioned bucket brigade,” Woodward said.
That kind of creativity and ingenuity is what sets America apart, from that moon landing over 40 years ago to the 14-foot-tall rescue capsule created by NASA engineers to rescue 33 trapped Chilean miners last year.
It’s also the kind of creativity and ingenuity our children will need to be successful in a changing global economy.
“Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon,” Obama said. “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
For students now starting a four-year technology degree, half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year,” states the video “Did You Know?” by Colorado’s Karl Fisch, director of technology at Arapahoe High School.
Put another way: “We are currently preparing kids for jobs that don’t exist — using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet,” the video states.
In such a quick-changing economy, memorized answers from standardized tests won’t be nearly as helpful as critical thinking skills. Like those Apollo 11 engineers, our kids will need to know what to do when there’s no emergency procedure in place.
One measure of creativity is the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, developed in 1966. The test, updated five times, shows creativity to be a great predictor of future success: Childhood creativity was three times more likely to correlate to lifetime creative accomplishment than IQ, says a recent Newsweek article.
But, sadly, creativity in America is declining. After analyzing Torrance scores of more than 300,000 children and adults, College of William and Mary Professor Hyung Hee Kim says there’s a definite decrease in scores over the last 20 years. The greatest decline: Our K-6 children.
New legislation signed into law this month, the America Competes Reauthorization Act, aims to make creativity and innovation a priority again. The law requires the Obama administration to create a national strategy for economic competitiveness and innovation for the next 10 years.
Here in Colorado, that kind of long-term planning needs to take place in our schools as well.
Colorado Senate Bill 191, which became law in 2010, introduces pay-for-performance for teachers, with at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation based on the academic growth of students. By March 1, the State’s Council for Educator Effectiveness will need to determine the rest of the evaluation criteria.
Too many teachers and parents link creativity to extracurricular music or art. However, creativity includes deep thinking in all disciplines. It means teaching our children not only to answer questions but to question answers.
The problem is that creativity also involves risk-taking — and risk-taking involves failure. Yet, failure is an important lesson, too. How else do we learn what to do when things go wrong?
As we begin implementing SB 191, we need to do so in a way that lets teachers know we value — and reward — strategies that foster creativity in our classrooms.
We’re not going to outdo our competitors on standardized tests, nor should we try. We’re definitely out-populated by countries like China and India.
Yet the creativity they try to emulate from us centers around the power of one. It took one man (and 10,000 tries) to invent a light bulb. It took one college student to create a “face book” to connect 500 million people. And it took one engineer in a hard hat to rescue a mission to the moon.
That’s the part of the creativity equation countries like China still need to resolve. Countries that invest in the creative abilities of their people can expect them to develop into free and critical thinkers, Kim has said.
Yet it was China that recently blacked out news coverage of its own Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, a dissident serving 11 years in prison.
It’s our freedom of expression — from anger and rage to hope and prayer — that still gives us a global edge. We have the ability to question rules, advocate alternatives and find new solutions. Now we just need to make sure our children learn this as well.
“It starts with our children,” says Kim. “Our children start with us.”
Lisa Wirthman has written for USA Today, U.S. News & World Report and Investor’s Business Daily. She lives in Highlands Ranch.
