Intellectual Property Law

Could the Education Crisis in the US be Killing Creativity, Innovation, and the US Role in Tech?

By Tim Feathers

I ran across three related news stories this week loosely tied to this common theme.  The first is this article in Computerworld which posits that China's relentless focus on science and technology could ultimately lead to it becoming the world leader in technology.  The article gives five reasons why China may be unstoppable in this regard, one being that China is receiving almost all of the U.S.'s technology and succeeding in creating what it calls an "indigenous innovation policy." U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has said that this policy is designed to encourage technology transfer and force U.S. companies to transfer their research operations to China in exchange for access to its markets.

Then there was an article in the Atlantic on What's Wrong With the American University System which persuasively demonstrates what we all suspect – that the US system of tenure and sabbaticals does very little to enhance students education, and shows that more often than not, American students are being neglected by celebrity professors, shortchanged by rising tuitions, and led astray by a disproportionate focus on college football.

Finally was the article from Newsweek, titled "The Creativity Crisis".  This article blames the absence of creativity cultivation in US schools for a steady decline in measured creativity among  US children in kindergarten through the sixth grade. According to the article, creativity can be injected into current curriculum standards without negatively impacting current curriculum goals. Research shows that free play and fantasy world creation are associated with high creativity in young children.  By the fourth grade, researching and studying become an integral part of devising useful solutions, and these fact finding and deep researching tasks are key parts of the creative process, and are tools that can be integrated into existing curriculum standards to help cultivate creativity.

This all reminded me of one of the most outstanding TED presentation by Ken Robinson who entertains and educates in this presentation explaining precisely how our schools kill creativity.  This is absolutely worth 20 minutes of your time.

Perhaps we are reaching a tipping point on the awareness of this issue, and potential impact on the future of Tech and Innovation in the US.

Full post as published by The TechKnowledgy Blog on July 31, 2010 (boomark / email).