In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes on education and creativity. He quotes Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.
While Mr. Friedman focuses on the implication for reforming education, I am first drawn to Mr. Tucker’s perspective on creativity:
"One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other,” said Mr. Tucker. Thus, his report focuses on “how to make that kind of thinking integral to every level of education.”
That means, he adds, revamping an education system designed in the 1900s for people to do “routine work,” and refocusing it on producing people who can imagine things that have never been available before, who can create ingenious marketing and sales campaigns, write books, build furniture, make movies and design software “that will capture people’s imaginations and become indispensable for millions.”
That’s what I’m trying to offer to my MBA students at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business.
Mr. Friedman continues with the national implication for our global competitiveness:
Why should any employer anywhere in the world pay Americans to do
highly skilled work — if other people, just as well educated, are
available in less developed countries for half our wages?… There is only one right answer to that question: In a globally integrated economy, our workers will get paid a premium only if they or their firms offer a uniquely innovative product or service, which demands a skilled and creative labor force to conceive, design, market and manufacture — and a labor force that is constantly able to keep learning. We can’t go on lagging other major economies in every math/science/reading test and every ranking of Internet penetration and think that we’re going to field a work force able to command premium wages. Freedom, without rigor and competence, will take us only so far.
That can’t be done without higher levels of reading, writing, speaking, math, science, literature and the arts. We have no choice, argues Mr. Tucker, because we have entered an era in which “comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to the good life” and in which the constant ability to learn how to learn will be the only security you have.