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July 18, 2013 , 12 : 09 pm
Everyone can be creative at any age. However, children are more creative because they have not yet learned conventional ways of thinking and are freer to act and think in unusual and exploratory ways.
We behave naturally and instantly during our childhood, but as we grow older and gain experience, our creativity declines. Preserving this natural skill is very important. Children's minds are less cluttered with worries than those of their elders, and that's the reason for their extraordinary creativity. With their open minds, they often develop new activities, and sometimes even change the rules of old games, which often make a lot of sense.
Young children naturally are good at:
1. Exploration: Kids prefer to play with open-ended materials for a longer time, compared to more expensive toys. This allows for creative expression and spontaneous discovery. For example, playing in the sand and freehand drawing.
2. Ideation: The ability that children possess to generate multiple ideas for a single image, object or situation. These ideas are generated out of the box; hence, they differ from each other.
3. Combination: The ability to generate new ideas by making connections between two or more concepts that the child previously saw as separate and unrelated. For eg. look at the words we use. Each word has a different meaning and the combination of different words in different ways makes sentences with different meanings.
4. Daring: Children are creative because they are fearless. They have no good or bad experiences to block their thinking, and so they feel free to experiment.
5. Simplicity: It's the ability of children to see things directly, which helps them easily discover the answer to complex things.
6. Knowledge: Children play to gain knowledge. And when they gain knowledge, they play with it again to create new knowledge. The circle of knowledge becomes bigger and bigger, until that time when they stop playing.
7. Interest: Children cannot be creative unless they have an interest in what they are doing. Having fun while doing something is, for children, enough reason to show interest in that activity.
Children would often answer without a fear of failure – that's the most important quality we lack as grown-ups. We declare ourselves losers even before attempting anything. And, if as adults we have no courage to experiment, how would we encourage our children and our teams to do so? Children's creativity begins declining when they reach middle school. That is the time they start evaluating their ideas with their experiences and develop resistance to thinking as freely as they did in early childhood. Children become self-conscious and anxious about the opinions of others – their elders and their peer group. This anxiety and self-consciousness creates fear, which kills creativity.
Our education system needs a radical change from being a fixed-syllabus-based system to an exploration and experimentation-based one. This will enable the country to reduce their high dependency on an industrial economy and explore the wonderful opportunities in a creative economy.
We don't have to learn how to be creative. It's our natural ability to think about something in a new way, from a different perspective, to come up with unique solutions and ideas. We are creative by birth, and since that software is preloaded in our hard-drive, we just need to reinstate it back in to life. Doing so is not going to be tough at all. Just attempt to think like a child today.
Sukant Ratnakar is a corporate professional and author of the book, "Open The Windows To The World Around You". Email: sukant.otw@gmail.com
July 18, 2013 , 12 : 09 pm
Everyone can be creative at any age. However, children are more creative because they have not yet learned conventional ways of thinking and are freer to act and think in unusual and exploratory ways.
We behave naturally and instantly during our childhood, but as we grow older and gain experience, our creativity declines. Preserving this natural skill is very important. Children's minds are less cluttered with worries than those of their elders, and that's the reason for their extraordinary creativity. With their open minds, they often develop new activities, and sometimes even change the rules of old games, which often make a lot of sense.
Young children naturally are good at:
1. Exploration: Kids prefer to play with open-ended materials for a longer time, compared to more expensive toys. This allows for creative expression and spontaneous discovery. For example, playing in the sand and freehand drawing.
2. Ideation: The ability that children possess to generate multiple ideas for a single image, object or situation. These ideas are generated out of the box; hence, they differ from each other.
3. Combination: The ability to generate new ideas by making connections between two or more concepts that the child previously saw as separate and unrelated. For eg. look at the words we use. Each word has a different meaning and the combination of different words in different ways makes sentences with different meanings.
4. Daring: Children are creative because they are fearless. They have no good or bad experiences to block their thinking, and so they feel free to experiment.
5. Simplicity: It's the ability of children to see things directly, which helps them easily discover the answer to complex things.
6. Knowledge: Children play to gain knowledge. And when they gain knowledge, they play with it again to create new knowledge. The circle of knowledge becomes bigger and bigger, until that time when they stop playing.
7. Interest: Children cannot be creative unless they have an interest in what they are doing. Having fun while doing something is, for children, enough reason to show interest in that activity.
Children would often answer without a fear of failure – that's the most important quality we lack as grown-ups. We declare ourselves losers even before attempting anything. And, if as adults we have no courage to experiment, how would we encourage our children and our teams to do so? Children's creativity begins declining when they reach middle school. That is the time they start evaluating their ideas with their experiences and develop resistance to thinking as freely as they did in early childhood. Children become self-conscious and anxious about the opinions of others – their elders and their peer group. This anxiety and self-consciousness creates fear, which kills creativity.
Our education system needs a radical change from being a fixed-syllabus-based system to an exploration and experimentation-based one. This will enable the country to reduce their high dependency on an industrial economy and explore the wonderful opportunities in a creative economy.
We don't have to learn how to be creative. It's our natural ability to think about something in a new way, from a different perspective, to come up with unique solutions and ideas. We are creative by birth, and since that software is preloaded in our hard-drive, we just need to reinstate it back in to life. Doing so is not going to be tough at all. Just attempt to think like a child today.
Sukant Ratnakar is a corporate professional and author of the book, "Open The Windows To The World Around You". Email: sukant.otw@gmail.com
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